After the fallout of the THQ bankruptcy, several studios were bought and IPs were sold in the companies liquidation. The Red Faction franchises was one IP that unfortunately was taken away from its developer Volition and transferred to Nordic Games. The process left many fans wondering if the games would ever be further supported, especially given the reliance on Microsoft's dying Games for Windowns Live service.

Today you can worry no more, as Red Faction: Guerrilla is getting saved from its GFWL shackles.

Posting on the Steam forums, Nordic Games developer Reinhard Pollice announced that they have now opened a public beta on Steam for Red Faction: Guerrilla's transfer to Steamworks. The announcement includes that multiplayer matchmaking, leaderboards, voice chat and achievements will all be available on Steam and the game will even migrate your save over from GFWL, a nice touch that previous games that removed GFWL like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City did not provide.

As someone who had some difficulties with GFWL and Red Faction: Guerrilla when I played through it as part of an attempt to clear out a hefty chunk of my backlog last winter, seeing it finally removed is a pleasant occurrence. The ability to destroy tons of its environment was a complete joy while it worked, and I only ever uninstalled it because of my problems with DRM. For those of you who want to check it out, below are the following instructions provided by Pollice to access the public beta and join the GFWL free rebellion.

To access the beta please do the following:

Follow this guide http://ds.nordicgames.at/SteamBetaBranchGuide.jpg

Under Step 1 select of course the Red Faction Guerilla App

Password for step 4 is: nordicrfgbeta

The branch for Step 6 is named publicbeta