You double-click the icon. The game boots. That’s it. You no longer have to create an offline profile or watch the GFWL popup stutter your framerate. It is a direct, frictionless launch.
Absolutely. If you see DiRT 2 on sale for Steam (keys are often sold by third-party resellers, though it's delisted in some regions), grab it. The physics of the Mitsubishi Evo X, the atmosphere of the Malaysian rain, and the ghost of McRae’s voice lines deserve to be played without wrestling with 2009 DRM. Colin McRae DiRT 2 -v.1.1- -Steam- Without GFWL
With GFWL gone, the memory leaks that plagued the game are fixed. You can run this at 4K (with a little ini tweaking) on a modern RTX or Radeon card and hold a solid 60+ FPS. No more random desktop crashes at the start of the Utah race. You double-click the icon
Almost. The v1.1 patch removes multiplayer matchmaking since that relied on GFWL. You can’t just queue into a random "Gatecrasher" lobby anymore. However, LAN play remains intact, meaning you can use third-party tools like Radmin VPN or ZeroTier to play with friends. You no longer have to create an offline
Revisiting a Legend: How the v1.1 Steam Update Saved Colin McRae: DiRT 2 from Obscurity