No GFWL for Bioshock Infinite


Recommended Posts

Great news. GFWL is an abomination. In fact, ever since the release of the Xbox it seems like Microsoft has been trying to actively sabotage PC gaming.

Ah good, it's a horrid piece of software that needs to die. The only thing keeping me from installing DiRT 2 again.

Yeah. I'm really glad that DiRT Showdown opted to use Steamworks.

Does anyone else think it's weird that Microsoft don't try harder with PC gaming ?

I know they have Xbox but surely both could co-exist. Look at how succesful Steam is for example. Money to be made.

It's embarassing seeing GFWL as it is today and has been for many years.

Whether it's a good thing Microsoft ignore it, I'm not sure. More of the same would be disappointing. There would be a chance to rock the boat with something new but looking at Xbox, no thanks on the PC side.

I just feel there is room to improve, even past Steam and maybe Microsoft is big enough to do it.

Anyway, good news with no GFWL on Bioshock Infinite.

Microsoft didn't ignore PC gaming. GFWL was their attempt to capitalize on PC gaming after the Steam store caught on. Their problem was that the fruit of their labour was so tragically crap that people thought they were trying to sabotage PC gaming.

  • Like 1

They tried paying for online and that went down like a lead balloon. Their attempt was crap but they never improved on it other than bug fixes. Last update was years ago.

Why haven't they done anything in years ?

Has the Xbox team just told them to **** off to their tiny corner in the office or has Windows just drowned them into having no say and power at all.

I imagine it's a bit of both. Microsoft are trying to intergrate things, Xbox into Windows, Avatars and all. GWFL uses the same back end but they, like the Xbox team seem to get thrown about without any direction. Windows stamps on both, they can't get any say other than put some games on the marketplace.

Steam and GFWL getting in the way of you and your games. How about you give me the game without all the social networking non standard ports bullcrap in the background ?

Isn't GfWL dead anyways? It doesn't even display the store anymore much less receive updates.

They moved the PC game listing to xbox.com now. As for GfWL it's been replaced with the Xbox Live service in Windows 8 itself. There are already games you can d/l through the windows store that use it and give you achievements etc. Also games in the works that let you jump between Xbox and PC and keep playing. I don't know the specifics but I don't think a game has to be sold through the store or be a metro game to use it but I haven't read up on it.

As far as MS trying to kill PC gaming, that's just silly. If anything with Vista and the new driver model they've made gaming a bit more stable than it used to be. Toss in the advances in DirectX 10 and 11 and I'd say PC gaming is looking good. Sure they don't directly feed you the games like steam (not yet anyways, we'll see where the windows store goes) but they haven't stopped working on the platform regardless of what people think.

Good. GWFL is friggin awful, I ended up stopping Bioshock 2 MP because of the constant disconnection issues and issues finding servers playing with them. It's a mystery to me that Bioshock 2 was sold on Steam but not integrated with Steam's multiplayer gaming features.

Well the GFWL client crashed whilst I was playing Bioshock 2. It hosed my configuration data and corrupted all of my save files. And even when that didn't happen I got a lot of server drops, and I just found the matchmaking system to be poor (I was constantly being dropped into completely empty servers whilst searching for online games)

Although I don't play Bioshock 2 as much now, I had no more crashes after that one. Although I'd be surprised if many people still play Bioshock 2's multiplayer, it was never that busy to begin with.

Javascript is not enabled or refresh the page to view.

Click here to view the Tweet

Straight from the horses mouth. None of that damn GFWL.

GfWL is itself being replaced by XBLA.

Molehill/not news.

Still, what it comes down to is that the same folks that complained about GfWL really want LAN-based multiplayer - not online multiplayer.

(I've heard the same complaint about *every* PC game with a non-LAN MP component - regardless of who provides the service.)

Specifics please. People just say pain in the but. How? It just brings a menu up when I press the home key that lets me see achievements and do a private chat with another LIVE user.

I know on my old connection (which obviously wasn't great, but it worked) the patch downloads died on large patches and there's no resume, so that ****ed me off. And if I'd moved the folder I had to do some general ****ery to install the patch.

I didn't care, otherwise. It was just there.

It just seemed like they got everything working and forgot to actually make it user friendly.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • Plans. Christ at least editorialise this tripe for what it is or put your own journalistic take on it.
    • If you have a TV in your living room, chances are you can probably just use the Steam Link app and play your huge PC in big picture mode, effectively giving you the Steam Machine experience to see if you'd actually like it. The good news is the Steam Machine can have it's drives upgraded. It has a USB-C 10Gbs port as well, so the 512GB drive could be quickly moved to an external enclosure and repurposed.
    • This machine could very well be a second gaming PC for their living room as a console experience. So we would have to assume their main PC exists as well; With that said, I have 10gb home network with a 2.5gigabit internet connection here so we tend to have more than enough speed to download games. However, we can't make use of the 10gb LAN using Steam's built in transfer tool because it always compresses transfers and that slows the transfer down to well below a standard gigabit port speeds, sometimes as slow as 200-300Mb/s transfers. While that's probably still faster than most internet connections anyway, if they'd fix the LAN transfer issue it'd be upto x5 faster even on a gigabit LAN, than simply dropping a 2.5gbe port on there with hopes of a few people having fast internet connections. There are solutions, work arounds, like using LANCache if you run a NAS... or simply copying the files over manually using a network share.
    • Samsung announces ultra-fast UFS 5.0 storage to supercharge mobile AI by Paul Hill Local AI models tend to run a lot more slowly than cloud services like Claude and Gemini; however, Samsung has just announced that it has developed its UFS 5.0 solution, which increases data transfer to speeds of 10.8GB/s, enabling faster storage and processing in mobile memory that has the potential to provide more optimal local AI experiences. Commenting on this development, Jangseok Choi, head of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics, said: If you’ve tried local AI, you’ll know it can be quite slow, especially if using the larger parameter models. By developing this new solution, Samsung says that storage is evolving from just storing data to a core piece of infrastructure that supports AI computation, too. The Korean company said that UFS 5.0 integrates the latest embedded memory interface standard from JEDEC and achieves up to 10.8 gigabytes per second (GB/s) transfer speeds. Regarding write speeds, Samsung UFS 5.0 can reach 9.5 GB/s. Both the read and write speeds are twice as fast as those of the previous UFS 4.1 standard. Aside from being ideal for local AI, Samsung’s UFS 5.0 is more power efficient by 40% compared to UFS 4.1. Samsung achieved this by implementing innovations such as clock gating and multi-voltage technologies. UFS 5.0 is also ultra-compact at just 7.5mm x 13mm x 0.9mm; that is 16.7% smaller than UFS 4.1. The company said it will be bringing it to multiple devices in the future, including mobile, wearable, and extended reality.
    • A bit like the steamdeck, this probably isn't for you.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Week One Done
      Almohandis earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Rookie
      dorf went up a rank
      Rookie
    • First Post
      mike_rumble earned a badge
      First Post
    • Dedicated
      tuben earned a badge
      Dedicated
    • Week One Done
      mnsgroup earned a badge
      Week One Done
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      496
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      209
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      99
    4. 4
      Michael Scrip
      86
    5. 5
      neufuse
      69
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!