Here's a quickie for all of you who are obsessed with DRM (and rightfully so): Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II is going to use Steamworks as its game authentication of choice.
At the price of having to run Steam to play Dawn of War II -- which isn't really a bad thing, in comparison to other forms of DRM -- you'll get a slew of benefits.
"Gamers who purchase the game and register with Steam can install the game on as many PCs as they want, can play online or offline and no CD is required to play. Best of all, if the player ever loses the CD, the game can be downloaded for free from Steam," says lead designer Jonny Ebbert.
I find it funny that Relic went with Steamworks and Games for Windows LIVE. Sort of a strange combination, don't you think?
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Contest:
10:20 AM on 02.06.2009
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Sounds great to me. Frankly I'm sick of having to use no-CD cracks on all the games I've purchased legally so as to not be hassled about inserting the disk all the time.
The whole fight against DRM isn't just because of the DRM but also because at least here in the U.S. we're covered by the right of First Sale, which legally allows us to sell any media that we own as long as we don't retain copies. Steam is still DRM. If this game is locked into our Steam account, say goodbye to First Sale rights.
My co-workers and I are behind a firewall, and we're going to want to play on a lan at lunchtimes. In order to do so, we're going to have to either take our computers home to install steam and dow2, or establish an extremely dodgy vpn link to outside of the network to do so. Every time there's an update, we'll have to do the same thing.
After that we'll probably find out that you need to be signed in to G4WL to play on a LAN as well.
I'm pretty annoyed with the number of versions this game has, now. There's the regular retail version, available in stores and on Steam. Then there are four store-exclusive special editions, each with *separate* exclusive content, mostly (but not all) for the same price as the store in question is selling the regular version. On top of that, today we find out that for a tenner (UK) more you can buy the game from the THQ store, which lets you pre-download the game (also available when bought from Steam, but not until next week) and comes with even more exclusive content than the versions which are exclusive to other retailers.
So not only are we forced to choose which content pack we want, but on top of that people who bought early are going to be the last to play (they'll have to wait for their delivery, or pick up their copy, instead of just having their predownloaded copy activate) *and* they didn't get the full range of content to examine when making their choice.
/rant.
Johnny Ebert doesnt know what the fuck he's talking about:
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3160-AGCB-2555
All hail Valve, Valve are our masters, schlup schlupp schlupppp...
(Not that I'm bitter about my preorder...)
(Not that I'm bitter about my preorder...)
Traditionally, aren't Steam games some of the least cracked? I mean... why bother? Steam isn't really worth the trouble of going around.
GFWL on the other hand...
Very few games absolutely require Steam to run. Given Relic's apparent deal with Steamworks, I imagine that DoW will be checking for "steam.dll" before running (and will thus require the Steam client on), but given its functionality I'm willing to concede that.
GfW Live, however....I'm not so sure. GfWL tries to hide its exclusive content in hidden windows folders and does everything it can to make you think you need it to make anything work, while still providing only a fraction of Steam's usefulness. I'm hoping we can still select DoW servers and set up matches through Steam rather than being forced to log into GfWL, but as I hear it DoW2 will be using Live as its primary matchmaking pipeline...
Oh well, at least it's integrated, which hopefully will mean it takes up less resources than a regular background client...
can someone explain the benefits of this arrangement since i have deduced none thus far?
They're probably waiting to see how well the PC version sells before they commit to a console version. That, or THQ's staff just got really stoned one day, I don't know.
Hoppin' on the Steam love train right here. Windows live isn't that bad either, just that they don't really do distribution, they're more for the networking, am I right? I've never really liked it to begin with, but whatevz.
can someone explain the benefits of this arrangement since i have deduced none thus far?"
perhaps the later dlc will be sold through GFWL only, and thus be profile specific. maybe having the two work together combats piracy a bit more.
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