GTA IV Petition Asks Rockstar To Remove GFWL... Good Luck

Grand Theft Auto IV sold like crazy across consoles and PC, but the game had its standout moments on PC and PC alone. Modders got a hold of the game and unleashed some of the most amazing mods to ever land on a game. But a lot of that could be lost when GFWL shuts down later this year, so a few select gamers are going out of their way to try to stop that from happening.

Now some of the mods for GTA IV included The Incredible Hulk, Tron, Iron Man, Batman, Superman, police patrol mods, a mod for 128 players in multiplayer and even a GTA V character switching mod that perfectly replicates the ability to switch between three completely different people at any time.

One of the most inventive mods had to be the Back to the Future mod, where players could travel in time using the Dolorean. Inventive is an understatement.

All these mods would be lost in time, like tears in the rain (cue Vangelis)...

But not if you can help it!

Proactive redditors over on the /r/PCGaming thread are showing a lot of love for a petition on Change.org, begging Rockstar to officially remove the GFWL DRM from Grand Theft Auto IV and the accompanying Episodes from Liberty City DLC.

The description simply reads...

“In July of this year (2014) Games For Windows Live will be shutdown. After this change PC players will not be able to play multiplayer. So we are asking you to migrate Grand Theft Auto 4 and EFLC to Steamworks.”

Pfft, good luck with that.

Rockstar has been notoriously averse to supporting PC after seventh gen started. It's highly unlikely that they will invest any resources at all into removing the GFWL DRM.

Some users on the Reddit thread are hinting that Rockstar has already released a DRM-free executable, but I wasn't able to spot anything on the download support page other than the official patch. They also don't mention anything about an independent executable on their GFWL support page.

The likelihood is that the Redditor was surfing through GameCopyWorld and thought that the executable was released by Rockstar, maybe?

Anyway, just short of getting a cracked version of the game from your grey-area website, you're stuck with Games For Windows Live, which is shutting down in just a few months.

Well, hopefully the PC version of GTA V will be released by the time GFWL is ready to bite the dust, otherwise it will be a massive “Screw You!” to the PC gaming community from Rockstar if GTA IV dies at the hands of GFWL and there is no timely port of GTA V for PC. Come on Rockstar, don't screw over games with DRM the way Microsoft tried to ram-rod us with the Xbox One's DRM last year!

IV:SA³ "World Enhancement" Launch Trailer - Mod DB

Will Usher

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.