Doublefine, Games for Windows Live & Iron Brigade

Hi Guys,

So I'm late to the Trenched/Iron Brigade Brigade party having picked it up a few months ago and them immediately being bummed when upon installing the game, I was still asked to sign into the defunct Games for windows live service. Still, I "logged in" and began to rather enjoy this lost gem.

Well imagine my surprise when a few days ago, I see a news story that Doublefine freed the game of it's GFWL shackles as well as done a few fixes. I'm stoked. I fire up Steam to boot the game up after the update downloads and I'm thrilled to no longer have to log into that "service" My feeling of joy is immediately replaced with one of sorrow when I realize that...MY SAVE GAME DATA AND PROGRESS ARE ALL GONE!!!!

While it's all well and good that Doublefine regained the rights to Iron Brigade and ditched Games for Windows Live, why is no one talking about how in so doing, they also had to totally wipe player progress data?

Some would say this isn't a big deal as it's an old game that most who have played have finished, but for people who just picked it up recently such as myself and was playing through single player, it's a huge deal! Also, as someone who values my gaming time (As I have a wife and 2 kids and limited time to game), this development has put me off the game (and future doublefine purchases) in a big way. The GWJ crew often talks about a game "respecting your time". If through no fault of my own and with no warning or explanation (I did not delete my GFWL account), my save game data and progress were wiped, what bigger disrespect of time is there in the context of gaming? Regardless of the age of this games age, it has a single player story mode with a plot that you advance. It is not primarily a multiplayer affair (Where one might expect something of this sort).

I don't care about the circumstances, this is simply not acceptable in the sphere of gaming. As a player, should I not at least have the expectation that my game progress will be retained in a single player game?

Solutions you say? A warning of some kind or perhaps more effort on Microsofts part to port over save game data to steam? Or perhaps emailing people who owned the game to work directly with them to preserve their save game data if they wanted via a patch?

I hate that players are left to pay the price for nonsense like this for something (GFWL) that no one wanted anyway! and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Are you sure the files are actually gone and not just in GFWL profile folder that the game no longer is looking at? IIRC, when I first started playing Fallout 3 I did so signed into GFWL, but eventually started using a mod that was incompatible with it. I'm pretty sure I was able to continue with my game by just moving the save file out of the GFWL folder and into the normal Fallout 3 save folder.

I found this thread where people were able to do it with Iron Brigade files. I don't know if the renaming is necessary for you, since that mainly seemed to be from people copying save files from one computer to another.

I'll give it a go and see. Thanks. Although the offical message from doublefine did seem to mention progress loss as an unfortunate side effect.

Similar thing happened with Dead Rising 2, they switched from GFWL to Steam but no saves carry over. There was a sticky in their Steam forums saying they're working on a transfer. Left me scratching my head why they rushed the GFWL transition before a system to transfer saves were place

Because the GFWL transition is more important to keep mp working.

garion333 wrote:

Because the GFWL transition is more important to keep mp working.

That makes some sense but...given the choice between borking MP and borking everyones saved games, I think I'd choose the MP since Dead Rising 2 is predominately played single player. Oh well.

On a related side note, has Microsoft acknowledged the end of GFWL? I thought I read something a little while back that said they're going to retool it.

RooksGambit wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Because the GFWL transition is more important to keep mp working.

That makes some sense but...given the choice between borking MP and borking everyones saved games, I think I'd choose the MP since Dead Rising 2 is predominately played single player. Oh well.

There are a lot of people that won't buy games that use GFWL, so they probably figure people that don't mind it have already played through it. Getting GFWL live out would bring in new players and they wouldn't be bothered by saved games being lost.

garion333 wrote:

Because the GFWL transition is more important to keep mp working.

Not at the expense of losing people single player progress in a game with a dedicated single player mode. Not by a long shot! I could give two rips about MP in Iron Brigade. I'm glad that they got MP working, now where is my save game?!

garion333 wrote:

Because the GFWL transition is more important to keep mp working.

Not at the expense of losing people single player progress in a game with a dedicated single player mode. Not by a long shot! I could give two rips about MP in Iron Brigade. I'm glad that they got MP working, now where is my save game?!

Stengah wrote:
RooksGambit wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Because the GFWL transition is more important to keep mp working.

That makes some sense but...given the choice between borking MP and borking everyones saved games, I think I'd choose the MP since Dead Rising 2 is predominately played single player. Oh well.

There are a lot of people that won't buy games that use GFWL, so they probably figure people that don't mind it have already played through it. Getting GFWL live out would bring in new players and they wouldn't be bothered by saved games being lost.

They should be bothered. Unless I expressly delete my save files or I'm playing some online only, totally server dependent multiplayer title, I expect my progress that I saved to be there next time I start the game up. Anything less is straight up inexcusable!

Can you imagine this scenario. A gamer picks up Iron Brigade a few months ago and gets really into it. Since he has a job, he plays when he can, gets upgrades, stays up late and struggles through harder missions, gets some cool achievements and maybe is a few missions away finishing the game, he logs in and all his progress is gone! wiped! Unrecoverable!

And the worst thing is, it wasn't a bug or a glitch, it was via a meaningful action by the developer to whom money was paid for this product.

If this scenario happened to even one person, it's simply not okay! Like I said. If they gave a warning, something to the effect of "Yay, we are finally going to be able to get rid of GFWL on Iron Brigade, but we will need to wipe all player progress and achievement data. This is going to happen in 1 or 2 weeks so please take the needed precautions or plan your play time accordingly. Thanks"

Instead it was, oh you're back, well, we deleted all your game progress! Have fun with that.

Sentient_d wrote:
Stengah wrote:
RooksGambit wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Because the GFWL transition is more important to keep mp working.

That makes some sense but...given the choice between borking MP and borking everyones saved games, I think I'd choose the MP since Dead Rising 2 is predominately played single player. Oh well.

There are a lot of people that won't buy games that use GFWL, so they probably figure people that don't mind it have already played through it. Getting GFWL live out would bring in new players and they wouldn't be bothered by saved games being lost.

They should be bothered.

I think he meant new players wouldn't be bothered, because they wouldn't have old saves to lose.

Chumpy_McChump wrote:
Sentient_d wrote:
Stengah wrote:
RooksGambit wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Because the GFWL transition is more important to keep mp working.

That makes some sense but...given the choice between borking MP and borking everyones saved games, I think I'd choose the MP since Dead Rising 2 is predominately played single player. Oh well.

There are a lot of people that won't buy games that use GFWL, so they probably figure people that don't mind it have already played through it. Getting GFWL live out would bring in new players and they wouldn't be bothered by saved games being lost.

They should be bothered.

I think he meant new players wouldn't be bothered, because they wouldn't have old saves to lose.

Exactly. The save files aren't actually lost and can be relatively easily recovered, and the number of people that are affected by the change (hadn't finished the single player portion yet) is likely much less than the number of potential new players attracted by the removal of GFWL and the new press surrounding its removal.

Edit - even in Sentient_d's scenario, having your progress wiped out unless you move some files around is a much better thing than having the game stop working entirely whenever Microsoft shuts off the GFWL servers.

RooksGambit wrote:

Similar thing happened with Dead Rising 2, they switched from GFWL to Steam but no saves carry over. There was a sticky in their Steam forums saying they're working on a transfer. Left me scratching my head why they rushed the GFWL transition before a system to transfer saves were place

The Batman Arkham games and BioShock 2 both lost their saves in their transition away from GFWL. My guess is that MS doesn't provide a tool to decouple GFWL's DRM or whatever tendrils it has from the save files for games that use it. If Iron Brigade was the first or only game to have this issue with migration I'd certainly blame Double Fine but it looks like this is a screw up at Microsoft.

(EDIT: No idea what From Software did to transfer their saves for Dark Souls but given users needed to launch the GFWL version and then switch it to Steamworks mode I'm guessing they used some in-house tool to do the migration while the game was still running. The progress outlined on the Steam community doesn't look exactly elegant)

To be honest, I'd rather lose my saves for a game than be in a situation where the game can't even start properly for some users due to GFWL. That's a known problem that's impacted things like GTA4 and Bulletstorm on a regular basis.

And no, we still don't have a sunset date on the service. It's basically in zombie mode where no one wants to touch it but MS doesn't seem to want to pull the plug either.

Sentient_d wrote:

Can you imagine this scenario. A gamer picks up Iron Brigade a few months ago and gets really into it. Since he has a job, he plays when he can, gets upgrades, stays up late and struggles through harder missions, gets some cool achievements and maybe is a few missions away finishing the game, he logs in and all his progress is gone! wiped! Unrecoverable!

This is me, except that I got stuck on a really tough mission in the DLC. From the walkthrough I had on hand, it suggested that the mission was crazy to attempt in single player.

Been trying to transfer the old saves....so far no luck. A bit annoyed, but I still like Double Fine.

Stengah wrote:
Chumpy_McChump wrote:
Sentient_d wrote:
Stengah wrote:
RooksGambit wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Because the GFWL transition is more important to keep mp working.

That makes some sense but...given the choice between borking MP and borking everyones saved games, I think I'd choose the MP since Dead Rising 2 is predominately played single player. Oh well.

There are a lot of people that won't buy games that use GFWL, so they probably figure people that don't mind it have already played through it. Getting GFWL live out would bring in new players and they wouldn't be bothered by saved games being lost.

They should be bothered.

I think he meant new players wouldn't be bothered, because they wouldn't have old saves to lose.

Exactly. The save files aren't actually lost and can be relatively easily recovered, and the number of people that are affected by the change (hadn't finished the single player portion yet) is likely much less than the number of potential new players attracted by the removal of GFWL and the new press surrounding its removal.

Edit - even in Sentient_d's scenario, having your progress wiped out unless you move some files around is a much better thing than having the game stop working entirely whenever Microsoft shuts off the GFWL servers.

Except not everyone is able to recover their saves by "moving some files around". That fix seems to work for some and not for others. Furthermore, unless I missed it, doublefine has not issued any official guide (which they should) on how to go about recovering your lost saves.

Regardless of the circumstances, from a consumer standpoint, I see no scenario were what they did is Okay. Okay great, they are looking out for potential new players, what about providing good customer service to...you know...the people who already PAID for your product? Shouldn't they be looking out for their interests instead of the interests of potential customers?

AUs_TBirD wrote:
Sentient_d wrote:

Can you imagine this scenario. A gamer picks up Iron Brigade a few months ago and gets really into it. Since he has a job, he plays when he can, gets upgrades, stays up late and struggles through harder missions, gets some cool achievements and maybe is a few missions away finishing the game, he logs in and all his progress is gone! wiped! Unrecoverable!

This is me, except that I got stuck on a really tough mission in the DLC. From the walkthrough I had on hand, it suggested that the mission was crazy to attempt in single player.

Been trying to transfer the old saves....so far no luck. A bit annoyed, but I still like Double Fine.

At least you have a good attitude about it. So you lost all your progress too? And the fixes have not worked for you?

Sentient_d wrote:

Except not everyone is able to recover their saves by "moving some files around". That fix seems to work for some and not for others. Furthermore, unless I missed it, doublefine has not issued any official guide (which they should) on how to go about recovering your lost saves.

It looks like no one can, since the thread I linked was from before they got rid of GFWL (serves me right for not checking the dates on the posts).
According to the devs, all saves are gone, and there's no way to get them back.

Spaff[/url]]Dearest Iron Brigade players! Tis with great pleasure we announce that Double Fine recently regained the rights to publish Iron Brigade on PC and as such did an update to add Steam matchmaking, in addition to a few other bug fixes and improvements!

The update was released today for PC To celebrate, the game is currently available for 80% off.

Along with some bug fixes and improvements, this update removes GFWL.

It also also unfortunately means a total wipe of player progress. This is an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of removing GFWL as the save files are signed by the GFWL service, which means we are unable to read that data any longer.

The removal of GFWL has also fixed the stuttering issue which we were previously unable to resolve.

We're sorry about the progress wipe, but we hope you'll all agree that getting the game to work again for online multiplayer is a good thing!

thanks!.

Regardless of the circumstances, from a consumer standpoint, I see no scenario were what they did is Okay. Okay great, they are looking out for potential new players, what about providing good customer service to...you know...the people who already PAID for your product? Shouldn't they be looking out for their interests instead of the interests of potential customers?

Well, they did ensure that you'll be able to keep playing the game when the GFWL servers shut down. They could have just left the game using GFWL and eventually it wouldn't matter that you still had your save file, as you could no longer play the game at all.

We all knew this would happen one day. It's the primary reason most people are against DRM, I'd say.

Stengah wrote:
Sentient_d wrote:

Except not everyone is able to recover their saves by "moving some files around". That fix seems to work for some and not for others. Furthermore, unless I missed it, doublefine has not issued any official guide (which they should) on how to go about recovering your lost saves.

It looks like no one can, since the thread I linked was from before they got rid of GFWL (serves me right for not checking the dates on the posts).
According to the devs, all saves are gone, and there's no way to get them back.

Spaff[/url]]Dearest Iron Brigade players! Tis with great pleasure we announce that Double Fine recently regained the rights to publish Iron Brigade on PC and as such did an update to add Steam matchmaking, in addition to a few other bug fixes and improvements!

The update was released today for PC To celebrate, the game is currently available for 80% off.

Along with some bug fixes and improvements, this update removes GFWL.

It also also unfortunately means a total wipe of player progress. This is an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of removing GFWL as the save files are signed by the GFWL service, which means we are unable to read that data any longer.

The removal of GFWL has also fixed the stuttering issue which we were previously unable to resolve.

We're sorry about the progress wipe, but we hope you'll all agree that getting the game to work again for online multiplayer is a good thing!

thanks!.

Regardless of the circumstances, from a consumer standpoint, I see no scenario were what they did is Okay. Okay great, they are looking out for potential new players, what about providing good customer service to...you know...the people who already PAID for your product? Shouldn't they be looking out for their interests instead of the interests of potential customers?

Well, they did ensure that you'll be able to keep playing the game when the GFWL servers shut down. They could have just left the game using GFWL and eventually it wouldn't matter that you still had your save file, as you could no longer play the game at all.

Again, a warning or notice of some kind would have been nice. Deleting your users progress with no warning or notification seems like a terrible thing to do regardless of reason. It's not my job to figure out how to make it easy for them. It was my job to buy and enjoy their game. It's their job to make sure the game I paid for functions, and to not permanently delete all my user data and progress with no warning. I simply can't give them a pass on this.

If this was a glitch, it would suck but it's forgivable. The fact that it was a calculated move is supremely irksome to me. I would have rather they said that GFWL is shutting down in a week so we are removing it from Iron Brigade and also unfortunately your progress will be wiped, but that wasn't the case here.

I see where you're coming from but do you think that this could not have been handled more elegantly?

LobsterMobster wrote:

We all knew this would happen one day. It's the primary reason most people are against DRM, I'd say.

Agree 100%

Sentient_d wrote:
Stengah wrote:
Sentient_d wrote:

Except not everyone is able to recover their saves by "moving some files around". That fix seems to work for some and not for others. Furthermore, unless I missed it, doublefine has not issued any official guide (which they should) on how to go about recovering your lost saves.

It looks like no one can, since the thread I linked was from before they got rid of GFWL (serves me right for not checking the dates on the posts).
According to the devs, all saves are gone, and there's no way to get them back.

Spaff[/url]]Dearest Iron Brigade players! Tis with great pleasure we announce that Double Fine recently regained the rights to publish Iron Brigade on PC and as such did an update to add Steam matchmaking, in addition to a few other bug fixes and improvements!

The update was released today for PC To celebrate, the game is currently available for 80% off.

Along with some bug fixes and improvements, this update removes GFWL.

It also also unfortunately means a total wipe of player progress. This is an unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of removing GFWL as the save files are signed by the GFWL service, which means we are unable to read that data any longer.

The removal of GFWL has also fixed the stuttering issue which we were previously unable to resolve.

We're sorry about the progress wipe, but we hope you'll all agree that getting the game to work again for online multiplayer is a good thing!

thanks!.

Regardless of the circumstances, from a consumer standpoint, I see no scenario were what they did is Okay. Okay great, they are looking out for potential new players, what about providing good customer service to...you know...the people who already PAID for your product? Shouldn't they be looking out for their interests instead of the interests of potential customers?

Well, they did ensure that you'll be able to keep playing the game when the GFWL servers shut down. They could have just left the game using GFWL and eventually it wouldn't matter that you still had your save file, as you could no longer play the game at all.

Again, a warning or notice of some kind would have been nice. Deleting your users progress with no warning or notification seems like a terrible thing to do regardless of reason. It's not my job to figure out how to make it easy for them. It was my job to buy and enjoy their game. It's their job to make sure the game I paid for functions, and to not permanently delete all my user data and progress with no warning. I simply can't give them a pass on this.

If this was a glitch, it would suck but it's forgivable. The fact that it was a calculated move is supremely irksome to me. I would have rather they said that GFWL is shutting down in a week so we are removing it from Iron Brigade and also unfortunately your progress will be wiped, but that wasn't the case here.

I see where you're coming from but do you think that this could not have been handled more elegantly?

Would a week's warning have really done much? You'd still have lost all your progress, no way around that without Microsoft helping to figure out how to decouple the save games from GFWL, which was never going to happen. How Long to Beat puts the main story at 6 1/2 hours, so it's not like it'd take very long to catch up to where you were if all you cared about was the single player story. I know it sucks, but there's likely to be only a handful of people in your situation, and you're likely severely outnumbered by the existing players that wanted multiplayer fixed.

History of the number of players playing Iron Brigade on Steam since August 2012

When your game has at most approximately 3 players on average playing at any time for the last year... is it really necessary to tell people they're going to lose progress? I'm kinda thinking Double Fine looked at the usage data, determined that most people weren't going to care, and just pushed on ahead.

Sentient_d wrote:

At least you have a good attitude about it. So you lost all your progress too? And the fixes have not worked for you?

I haven't tried any more since then, but the 40ish minutes I spent trying to get the old saves to work were fruitless. Had I been actively playing it and not on an 10 month break, I think I'd have been a bit more upset.

I agree that a warning would have been nice (2 weeks perhaps?), but realistically, how many people would have seen it? Perhaps a pop-up on Steam "There's a new patch that removes GFWL, but all progress (may) be lost. GFWL will eventually shut down making your game no longer work without the patch. Download: now? remind me later?"

shoptroll wrote:

History of the number of players playing Iron Brigade on Steam since August 2012

When your game has at most approximately 3 players on average playing at any time for the last year... is it really necessary to tell people they're going to lose progress? I'm kinda thinking Double Fine looked at the usage data, determined that most people weren't going to care, and just pushed on ahead.

And suddenly a ton more people were playing (and buying) the game, so I imagine they feel they made the right choice here, overall.

Guys, I'm not dense. I agree they made the right choice for them. It's a business decision. I understand that. In the long run, it probably won't affect them at all, but I do know that it has personally affected my likelihood that I will never buy another Doublefine title again. That's all I can do is vote with my wallet even though I'm just one person. Doublefine has demonstrated to me that by doing this, my time/progress as a paying customer is not valued by them. I'm not saying their evil or that I hate them. Not at all. I am saying that I cannot trust that they won't pull something similar with a future title since they have shown the ability to it now. That trust has been broken in my case.

In my opinion it doesn't matter if only 3 people or 3 thousand people are playing. If people have paid money for your product, their user experience should matter. A warning is the difference between dumping a bunch more hours into the game to finish before the wipe, or deciding to wait till the wipe happens because you're not too far in and don't want to lose your progress.

It would have been simple to do and the end result would have been achieved regardless. I guess I have nothing more to say on this topic. Thanks for engaging in this discussion with me.

Sentient_d wrote:

Guys, I'm not dense. I agree they made the right choice for them. It's a business decision. I understand that. In the long run, it probably won't affect them at all, but I do know that it has personally affected my likelihood that I will never buy another Doublefine title again. That's all I can do is vote with my wallet even though I'm just one person. Doublefine has demonstrated to me that by doing this, my time/progress as a paying customer is not valued by them. I'm not saying their evil or that I hate them. Not at all. I am saying that I cannot trust that they won't pull something similar with a future title since they have shown the ability to it now. That trust has been broken in my case.

In my opinion it doesn't matter if only 3 people or 3 thousand people are playing. If people have paid money for your product, their user experience should matter. A warning is the difference between dumping a bunch more hours into the game to finish before the wipe, or deciding to wait till the wipe happens because you're not too far in and don't want to lose your progress.

It would have been simple to do and the end result would have been achieved regardless. I guess I have nothing more to say on this topic. Thanks for engaging in this discussion with me.

The thing is they did do this for their users, they just did it for the ones that wanted multiplayer fixed and were worried that the game was going to be abandoned to die with GFWL, of which there were many more of. If they didn't care about their players, they could easily have left the game in Microsoft's hand and let it die with GFWL.
You're putting your personal user experience ahead of the user experience of the much larger number of people playing multiplayer. I don't know how their agreement worked out, but considering that they made the change as soon as they announced that they had regained the rights to the game from Microsoft, it's possible that removing GFWL could have been part of the agreement (i.e: so long as GFWL remained in the version being sold on Steam, DF would have to give MS a cut). And again, even if it weren't, so few players were affected that delaying the switch wouldn't make sense. It'd be telling most of their current players and any potential new ones to not even bother with the game for a week or two, because there's maybe a dozen people that need to finish the single player campaign and would be slightly inconvenienced if they had to replay even 1 of the 6 hours it takes to beat it, and maybe one of them will happen to see this warning in time.
Your mistrust in DF is misplaced. It ought to be aimed at Microsoft's GFWL and any other DRM schemes that control access to save files. It's been known that GFWL was going to be discontinued (eventually) since mid 2013, and it's been known that removing GFWL can wipe out saves since the Arkham Batman games did it in late 2013.

Stengah wrote:
Sentient_d wrote:

Guys, I'm not dense. I agree they made the right choice for them. It's a business decision. I understand that. In the long run, it probably won't affect them at all, but I do know that it has personally affected my likelihood that I will never buy another Doublefine title again. That's all I can do is vote with my wallet even though I'm just one person. Doublefine has demonstrated to me that by doing this, my time/progress as a paying customer is not valued by them. I'm not saying their evil or that I hate them. Not at all. I am saying that I cannot trust that they won't pull something similar with a future title since they have shown the ability to it now. That trust has been broken in my case.

In my opinion it doesn't matter if only 3 people or 3 thousand people are playing. If people have paid money for your product, their user experience should matter. A warning is the difference between dumping a bunch more hours into the game to finish before the wipe, or deciding to wait till the wipe happens because you're not too far in and don't want to lose your progress.

It would have been simple to do and the end result would have been achieved regardless. I guess I have nothing more to say on this topic. Thanks for engaging in this discussion with me.

The thing is they did do this for their users, they just did it for the ones that wanted multiplayer fixed and were worried that the game was going to be abandoned to die with GFWL, of which there were many more of. If they didn't care about their players, they could easily have left the game in Microsoft's hand and let it die with GFWL.
You're putting your personal user experience ahead of the user experience of the much larger number of people playing multiplayer. I don't know how their agreement worked out, but considering that they made the change as soon as they announced that they had regained the rights to the game from Microsoft, it's possible that removing GFWL could have been part of the agreement (i.e: so long as GFWL remained in the version being sold on Steam, DF would have to give MS a cut). And again, even if it weren't, so few players were affected that delaying the switch wouldn't make sense. It'd be telling most of their current players and any potential new ones to not even bother with the game for a week or two, because there's maybe a dozen people that need to finish the single player campaign and would be slightly inconvenienced if they had to replay even 1 of the 6 hours it takes to beat it, and maybe one of them will happen to see this warning in time.
Your mistrust in DF is misplaced. It ought to be aimed at Microsoft's GFWL and any other DRM schemes that control access to save files. It's been known that GFWL was going to be discontinued (eventually) since mid 2013, and it's been known that removing GFWL can wipe out saves since the Arkham Batman games did it in late 2013.

I have plenty of ire for GFWL and intrusive DRM, but I also call out notice when I feel the consumer who bought a game in good faith, is getting the shaft. It was bad with the Arkham games, it was bad with Bioshock 2, it's bad now. All in all, I am glad that GFWL is gone, that in itself is a net positive.

Let's hope that deletion of player progress and data doesn't become something we just get accustomed to in the future.

Sentient_d wrote:

I have plenty of ire for GFWL and intrusive DRM, but I also call out notice when I feel the consumer who bought a game in good faith, is getting the shaft. It was bad with the Arkham games, it was bad with Bioshock 2, it's bad now. All in all, I am glad that GFWL is gone, that in itself is a net positive.

Let's hope that deletion of player progress and data doesn't become something we just get accustomed to in the future.

The consumer just had the expiration date of their game removed. The loss of a save game is far preferable to the loss of the game entirely.

Stengah wrote:
Sentient_d wrote:

I have plenty of ire for GFWL and intrusive DRM, but I also call out notice when I feel the consumer who bought a game in good faith, is getting the shaft. It was bad with the Arkham games, it was bad with Bioshock 2, it's bad now. All in all, I am glad that GFWL is gone, that in itself is a net positive.

Let's hope that deletion of player progress and data doesn't become something we just get accustomed to in the future.

The consumer just had the expiration date of their game removed. The loss of a save game is far preferable to the loss of the game entirely.

The "expiration date" is an assumption on your part. The divorcing of GFWL from Iron Brigade could have been done when the service was really shut down for good instead of the shambling state it's in now. Also, the fact that some have been able to recover save data and their game progress from other titles this has happened to means that it is entirely possible that Doublefine could have divorced their rather good game from this rather poor service without compromising user save games, achievements and progress with a little bit more planning and forethought instead of taking the path of least resisitance. They probably just didn't care too or it wasn't financially beneficial for them.

So while Microsoft gets the bulk of the blame for this, Doublefine does not get a free pass from me regardless of their rationale or the end result. If you want to give them a pass, that's fine. We are not in agreement on this. I see your point, I think it has valid aspects, but I disagree with some of the outcomes.

Stengah wrote:

The loss of a save game is far preferable to the loss of the game entirely.

This keeps getting repeated throughout the thread but the thing is, GFWL is still around, the games are still playable and no firm cancellation/end has been officially announced. What they've done is give existing players the shaft.

Don't get me wrong though, if there were an official end date imminent, I would completely agree with this sentiment. They have to do something. BUT, right now, they're moving from a crappy service to a much better service at the expense of existing players.

IMHO, they should spend more time on a way to transfer saves THEN switch everything over. It is clearly possible as other games have done it.

RooksGambit wrote:
Stengah wrote:

The loss of a save game is far preferable to the loss of the game entirely.

This keeps getting repeated throughout the thread but the thing is, GFWL is still around, the games are still playable and no firm cancellation/end has been officially announced. What they've done is give existing players the shaft.

Don't get me wrong though, if there were an official end date imminent, I would completely agree with this sentiment. They have to do something. BUT, right now, they're moving from a crappy service to a much better service at the expense of a tiny number of existing players.

IMHO, they should spend more time on a way to transfer saves THEN switch everything over. It is clearly possible as other games have done it.

Add the bolded and I'll agree, but they were in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. They could either keep GFWL in and leave the massive performance issues it caused for multiplayer in, thus upsetting the much larger number of existing players and have any new players attracted from the press about DF getting the rights to the game back, or do what they did and fix multiplayer, thus upsetting the handful of people that hadn't finished the single-player campaign yet. I just don't see how one can look at the numbers and think this was a case of the developer not valuing their customers.

The other games that did migrate saves also had a lot more active players, and came from companies with a lot more money and manpower than DoubleFine.
Dark Souls had an hourly average of over 1,300 players before it ditched GFWL.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II averaged over 700 players hourly before it switched.
Red Faction: Guerrilla averaged over 1,500 players hourly before it switched.
Now go look at the link shoptroll posted, and (outside of a small bump from a Fall 2014 sale) Iron Brigade hasn't averaged even 100 concurrent players since its first month(August 2012), and for more than the past year has only averaged more than 15 concurrent players during holiday sales. Based on the DF forum for Iron Brigade, the large majority of the feedback was that they wanted the multiplayer fixed and GFWL gone, ASAP.

RooksGambit wrote:
Stengah wrote:

The loss of a save game is far preferable to the loss of the game entirely.

This keeps getting repeated throughout the thread but the thing is, GFWL is still around, the games are still playable and no firm cancellation/end has been officially announced. What they've done is give existing players the shaft.

Don't get me wrong though, if there were an official end date imminent, I would completely agree with this sentiment. They have to do something. BUT, right now, they're moving from a crappy service to a much better service at the expense of existing players.

IMHO, they should spend more time on a way to transfer saves THEN switch everything over. It is clearly possible as other games have done it.

THANKS! This is pretty much all I'm saying. It's not uncharted territory. I really wonder how much it would have cost them to implement a save game transfer system especially since they already have a road map to follow. Oh well, what's done is done.