Dawn of War and Street Fighter are losing GFWL and gaining a future

Relic and Capcom have announced their plans to migrate PC games from Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live service to Steam. With the imminent shutdown of GameSpy and the rumored July closure of GFWL, developers and publishers have had to scramble to set up replacement matchmaking strategies or just let games multiplayer features die.

Relic is in the process of moving Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and its three expansions from GameSpy to Steam and the same backend matchmaking system as their most recent RTS title, Company of Heroes 2. Dawn of War II is also moving to Steam to avoid the shutdown of GFWL, and its standalone expansion Chaos Rising (which already uses Steam) will get an update to provide consistent backend systems. Philippe Boulle, lead designer of the Dawn of War franchise, cautions players to expect some technical difficulties in the short term as the kinks are worked out.

Capcom also has plans replace Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition’s GFWL matchmaking with Steam’s service. Players will be able to update their game by adding the original GFWL product activation code into Steam on May 30th and get a new 100% GFWL-free version of the game. Unfortunately, any DLC purchased through GFWL will not transfer to the new Steam version.