GFWL Games: Will they be playable?

Any GFWL game that does not patch it out will be pretty much unplayable. Only way to play it is to Pirate it or do a crack.

If offline mode isn't supported it will be unplayable or requires activation ("zeroday pircay protection").

This of course may change if Microsoft releases patch for GFWL that fakes online-mode for games.

Joystiq recently did an article about it that lists which developers have said they'd update, which have said they won't and e-mailed the rest who haven't said anything.

Here is the link.

Keep in mind it's not 100%. They have both Operation Flashpoint games listed although only Red River uses GFWL. Not all GFWL games have SSA or ZDPP like madjoki mentions so they could have mistakenly listed a few games that don't as well, I haven't thoroughly gone over the list to check.

i played batman arkum city without flaw

On some of the GFWL titles, I believe reading that during installation, you can "sign in offline".

Apparently it creates an "offline profile" for single player modes. It is mainly for save games and such.

I think it works for GTA IV, but not sure all the titles you can do this in.

Here's a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulVRWweWbp0

Well I fear the most for Resident evil 5 and Gears of War for Windows, those 2 are the only games I play trough GFWL.

As far as i know, from all the GFWL games i own, you can play and save your progress normally using your offline profile.
I don't know how the windows live game activation works and if it's nescesary, but i recently activated a gift copy of Ace Combat,
signed in directly to my offline profile on first launch, and the game didn't ask for activation code.

So i assume you can play all your games using an offline GFWL profile.

Your question is not straightforward to answer because GFWL itself does not dictate how dependent a game using it will be on the GFWL service. GFWL offers an assortment of "features" which devs/publishers might choose to use or ignore as they see fit, and also decide how the game reacts when GFWL is not available. Some games work support offline profile - those ones don't need to connect to GFWL ever. Also, multiplayer or online functionality may work fine with or without the GFWL service, or it may depend on it entirely. You can't really say except on a case-by-case basis. Unfortunately I don't know anything about the particular games that you have listed.

If you have one of these older gfwl titles that isn't patched and becomes otherwise unplayable, you can still play them offline the same way pirates have been since the games came out.

I'm just worried that Steam won't let me upgrade my retail disc SSF4AE to Ultra once GFWL is gone since I don't have a Steam key for it, only a GFWL one (that's all the retail disc comes with).