14 years later Resident Evil 5 finally removes Games for Windows Live and restores splitscreen

Out of nowhere Capcom has released an update for the Steam version (opens in new tab) of Resident Evil 5, released in 2009, the main function of which is to strip-out the zombified corpse of Games for Windows Live. The latter was an ill-fated online service that linked PCs into Microsoft’s Live services—launched in 2007 and discontinued in 2014—which mainly served to annoy users with its lack of functionality and compatibility problems. Indeed, a theme in the aftermath of its closure was games one-by-one updating to remove the service.

Well Capcom took their sweet time (this is the first Resi 5 update since 2017) but it’s clear why this was on the to-do list: the presence of GfWL meant an in-built feature of the game had to be disabled. Resident Evil 5 launched as a GfWL title, with split-screen co-op included, but when ported to Steam the GfWL layer caused problems with player data and meant that the option was disabled (though there were workarounds with mods (opens in new tab)).