How-to Install Games for Windows Live

If you just installed Resident Evil 5 and your game isn't starting it's most likely because you don't have GFWL installed. You can download it here on PCGamingWiki[community.pcgamingwiki.com].

Once you download the .zip file, you can extract all of the files and it should look like this:

The main problem with getting RE5 to run is that the G4WL installer that's included with the game (redist/gfwlivesetup.exe) will not work.

When you first install the game, or more often than not every time you launch the game, the BH5AE_install.vdf (source[gist.github.com]) | depot[steamdb.info]) file will try and run the default gfwlivesetup.exe installer.

In case you're not familiar with what a .vdf file is, it's a Valve Data File. You will also see these referred to as "Valve's KeyValue format". If you want to read more about the install scripts you can read this Steamworks documentation on "Creating and using InstallScripts".

Here's the relevant part of Resident Evil 5's install script (BH5AE_install.vdf):

The short answer is that you need an offline version of the Games for Windows Live installer. You can download this from PCGamingWiki here:

Microsoft Games for Windows - LIVE 3.5.95.0[community.pcgamingwiki.com]

• gfwlclient.msi
  
• gfwlivesetup.exe
  
• wllogin_32.msi (skipped automatically on Windows 8 and later)
  
• wllogin_64.msi (skipped automatically on Windows 8 and later)
  
• xliveredist.msi

Go ahead and run gfwlsetup.exe. Don't be alarmed when you see that it still failed. First, we again need to view the log files and see what happened. This time, we're going to look at setupexe.log (instead of xliveinstall.log). If everything was done correctly, we should see that it was able to find the GFWL redists.

Q: Why did you go through all the trouble documenting all this?

Because some people are hesitant to download files aren't comfortable messing around with things that honestly should just work. Unfortunately, since CAPCOM half-assed this (and everything they do), you have to do some manual steps to get the game working.

I also see people saying to download just one .dll file and put it in the game directory and things like that with no explanation of why or what it does and as a developer I figured I'd walk through identifying the problem, the actual solution, and then verifying it in case anyone chooses to do that. If you follow this guide, you won't need to download random files again if you one day choose to reinstall RE5 since this isn't just a "quick fix" it's the actual solution.

Q: Why can't I download the files from Microsoft?

If you could, then this wouldn't be an issue. Microsoft removes things they don't want to support anymore. Another example of this is Zune. Normally, removing things would force the game's developers that were using it to update their product. CAPCOM however is not a normal developer. If they really cared about their fans they wouldn't just continue to fix and improve RE5 as a new release and they'd go back and apply those fixes for their existing customers too.

Q: So why hasn't CAPCOM fixed it?

CAPCOM has no interest in fixing something if they're not financially forced to do. The money they would lose from people just refunding the purchase is less than the development cost of actually fixing it, especially when there's a community patch that does what they should have done and plenty of guides available, like this one.

Q: My game still doesn't work?

This is just one of the many problems included with Resident Evil 5. If you need help troubleshooting, feel free to shoot me a message here or on Discord (Gundwn#6651).