No, this isn’t some time capsule news from 2014: Capcom has indeed decided to rip out the service, which has been shut down for nearly a decade, from the PC version of its game in 2023…

Not many people remember Games for Windows Live anymore. It was supposed to be the PC equivalent of Xbox Live, but the service, which launched in 2007, was shut down by Microsoft in 2014. Capcom released Resident Evil 5 in 2009, and following the trend, the Japanese publisher followed suit with GfWL support for Chris and Sheva. Then, Games for Windows Live ceased to exist, and many games still had traces of it (and some never removed Microsoft’s service from their product).

Capcom was in a similar boat for a long time, and one feature was unavailable in Resident Evil 5 for years: split-screen co-op was not available out of the box, as it was tied to Games for Windows Live. After the system shutdown, porting the GfWL layer to Steam caused problems with player data, so if you didn’t mod Capcom’s game, the co-op didn’t work well, even though it made the game itself a lot more fun (there is some excellent dynamics at play if a newbie player teams up with a veteran with unlimited ammo).

Capcom has quietly updated Resident Evil 5 on Steam, kicking Games for Windows Live out of its fourteen-year-old game, which has some humorous and sometimes over-the-top scenes (like Chris and the boulder, or how Wesker says Chris in almost every scene,). Also, some bugs have been fixed, but good luck finding what Capcom changed because you won’t notice what the Japanese modified in the background.

We have to hand it to Capcom, though: they take Denuvo out of their games (Square Enix or SEGA could learn a lesson from this if we’re talking about Japanese publishers…), and now, they’ve touched on a game we wouldn’t have expected. At least we don’t have to mod anymore to play together…

Source: PCGamer