Is it possible to circumvent the port-forwarding requirements for GFWL?

Question

We're trying to play Dead Rising 2 on the same LAN, only to learn that Games for Windows Live expects you to forward 4 ports from your firewall to the PC. Obviously this isn't going to work in our situation. Has anyone found a good solution?

Answer 1

After a couple hours of additional net-scouring, we tried a lot of suggestions, and when it finally worked, of course we'd changed a few things. So, in our case the solution was one or all of the following:

• Move the GFWL-required ports from port-forwarding (on the router) to port-triggering
• Disable all non-related (virtual) NIC adapters (in our case, they were for VMWare & VirtualBox)
• Make sure the firewall exception for DR2 is present in Windows Firewall

My money is on the port-triggering.

Answer 2

You'll have to change registry values: Games fow Windows Live Support

Look all the way down at the bottom at the Port Override section. Exact instruction are as follows:

1. Open your registry in the Windows registry editor.
2. Navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Software\Microsoft\XLive
3. Add a new DWORD value. Enter LivePortOverride as the name and the new port number as the value. This value must be greater than 5000 and less than 65535.