Rockstar Games provided us with an official reason why 2008’s Grand Theft Auto IV has become unavailable on Valve‘s digital platform.

Currently, you cannot buy Grand Theft Auto IV directly from Steam, but via third-party websites (such as Humble Bundle), you can still pick up a copy of Niko Bellic’s adventures. However, if you already have GTA IV in your Steam library, you can simply access the 11 years old game that got easily surpassed by Grand Theft Auto V (whose Grand Theft Auto Online has become such a success that nor GTA V, neither Red Dead Redemption 2 are getting single-player DLC…).

When we discussed the sudden disappearance from Steam over the weekend, we had two guesses why GTA IV is gone from Steam. Our first pick was copyright (license expires for a song = Rockstar has no rights to use it anymore = the song has to be removed from the game), and the other guess was the outdated, old Games For Windows Live (or GFWL for short) DRM.

The latter is the reason. GFWL was effectively Xbox Live on PC before Xbox Live was officially brought over. The GFWL games need to get codes generated by Microsoft to work, and Rockstar has run out of them – let’s see what they told The Verge:„ GTA IV was created for the Games For Windows Live platform. With Microsoft no longer supporting Games For Windows Live, it is no longer possible to generate the additional keys needed to continue selling the current version of the game. We are looking at other options for distributing GTA IV for PC and will share more information as soon as we can.”

So prepare for Rockstar getting rid of GFWL in Grand Theft Auto IV, only to make the game a Rockstar Games Launcher-exclusive…

Source: WCCFTech

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