dunedain

It has a lot to do with it. But every big release they buy huge stocks of said game and only reimburse when they can. It works great as long as publishers play along. GAME pissed a lot of people by selling so much used games and even ordering their employees to encourage customers to buy used rather than brandnew games.

Illegal as breaking the ToS you accept when installing a game. The used game market was always more harmful to the industry than piracy. People who buy used games actually show intent to spend money on the media, while pirates don't. Kind of the way GAME went bankrupt by pissing off a lot of publishers who then refused to sell them games on debt. Because of the way they always pushed forward used console games rather than full price retail games. Which meants more $$ for GAME and a lot less $$ for publishers.

I know that, I browse steamunpowered as well... Correct me if I wrong but it was just a case of jurisprudence in Germany when some guy gained the right to resell his license for some program. I'm just saying that this would be an unreasonable law that will most likely deeply hurt the industry if voted/applied. You have more chances to see it abrogated than every online digital retailers going bankrupt. No, according to me you guys are blinded by your hatred of Steam and willingfully occult the fact it's been the case on PC far before Steam was created. Those ToS also apply to every single digital retailer out there, not just Steam. Reselling games was always illegal, and could hardly be done on PC for any game people played online. If you found people gullible enough or who trusted you enough to buy used games they intended to play online, well good for you... If your really want so bad to resell ArmaIII, while not anyless illegal, it's actually going to be easier as your ArmaIII key will be linked to one Steam account of your choosing. Meaning people will know for certain you won't be using the serial key for yourself after you sold the account. To illustrate my argumentation, it clearly says right before the back cover of the booklet you'll find in your OFP box that, and this is a rough translation from French, "This program has been granted to your as a license, it was not sold to you. This agreement doesn't give you any title or property right over the program or the copy of the program which has been provided to you". I bought that game almost 12 years ago, and it wasn't anything special even back then.

The offline mode has been fixed a while ago. Pricing sucks for us Europeans in the Euro zone, true. However there is no such thing as currency converter, it's just publishers and/or Steam who set different prices depending on the zone you live in. Good thing ArmaIII will be steamworks then. I'll just pre-order the boxed version on amazon.co.uk and redeem the code on Steam. As for the ToS, especially regarding "used" games, it won't ever be changed. Unlike retail games, your digital products doesn't suffer from erosion after a while. My bought in 2001 CD of OFP broke when I tried to get it out of its box about 6 years ago. My DVD driver fails to read my old H&D2 CDs half of the time, same for R6RS. Meanwhile my 10 years old version of Half-Life on Steam will always work flawlessly. It would be suicidal for any digital retailer to allow its users to freely dispose of their games, on top of that many titles even on Steam have other built-in DRMs requiring an online activation which makes it impossible for most games to be reselled anyway. Which is why I support Steamworks personnaly, it's only one relatively light DRM, instead of several like for instance GTAIV which has 4 drms "Steam, Securom, GWL, Social Club" when you buy it on Steam. Steamworks actually makes it much easier for your to resell your games, even if it's illegal. If you're talking of the fact mainlanders cannot buy games from the UK Steamstore, then my bad I totally agree and they should change it. Only possible if UK citizens aren't suicidal enough to opt out of the EU and the single market though... It's also worth mentioning that the used PC game market was dead long ago before Steam, when publishers began to put CD keys with online validation on their games.

I remember those boycott movements for L4D2 and MW2, people bitched and moaned for months for actually legit reasons though. In the end, when those games came out, you could see on the Steam boycott groups the vast majority of them playing their respective boycotted game day one. So much for maturity and principles... So yeah, I do believe a lot of people react in a very childish way to this news and will eventually buy the game regardless. You're free to do whatever you want with your hard-earned money, nobody is denying that. The drama thingy about you most faithful fans feeling betrayed or spat in the face is pointless though.

The original message was meant to wipman who went on a xenophobic rant about steam users being "morons of all kind, silly people, pro-cheaters, stupid kinds and every subnormal in this world that would send you "friend requests" just because you've a "cool name", "pimp avatar" or a certain history behind".

What I am saying is its sole purpose is for EA to avoid using Steam and loosing 30% of their profits for a part of their sales. Their actions only shows they don't want to invest and try to be a serious competitor to Steam. How is that helping in any way? It sure isn't any good for us... I don't have a source to illustrate but it appears to be the logical thing to me. As there wouldn't be any interest for publishers to use Steamworks if it meant loosing part of their profits to Steam regardless if the game was bought on retail, any digital store or even their own store. It make sense to me it's Steam which provides their clients with keys which they sell to the different digital retailers. But I could be wrong. it's not perfect, but at least allows games without much coverage or hype to appear on the Steam store and make decent sales.

Monopoly of what exactly? Competition has never been that high between all the digital retailers... If they have the monopoly as a DRM provider, it doesn't concern us but publishers. If they have the monopoly as a game related service provider, it won't change anything for us either as games are made for windows, not specifically Steam. They can't have complete control like Microsoft has with their Xbox. Valve has not a lot of options here, but to play nice with publishers and make Steam the best possible shopwindow for their store. It's important to understand that they can't force publishers or indies to use Steam, only encourage them. So yeah I'm just glad Steam hasn't hundreds of shareholders whose goal is to get as much dividends as possible even if it means hurting their company in the long term. Origin only exists because EA wants to maximise its profits. Valve takes 30% of what goes through their store and a few years back they began asking publishers/developers to sell their DLCs on Steam as well. I guess EA thought it would be more profitable for them to make a botched clone of 2007 Steam than releasing full games on Steam. There is no real competion between the two. EA is not even trying... I only use Origin to play BF3 from time to time, and this thing is still awfully glitchy and barely evolved in two years... They aren't even trying to compete in term of pricing, I bought BF3 on amazon for 6€ and all it's DLCs for 15€. Meanwhile on the Origin store it is still 35€ even with a 40% discount. So much for healthy competition. Which shows competition works. If sells drop on Steam, then they'll adjust their own pricing. As far as I know they don't. it's the publishers or indies, who provide the keys. If the game is steam redeemable or steamworks, they aren't going to buy their own game. That's why they created Greenlight, so a game without a publisher backing it can get to the store thanks to community vote.

It was the natural turn for the PC gaming market with the widespread of high-speed internet. Valve jumped on the boat early and greatly benefited from it. It would have happened anyway. I'm just glad it isn't a public company ruled by greedy shareholders such as Ubi, Activision or EA at the head of Steam.

It's a valid point ^Th0mas^. However if you think you may want to give it away or just share your account in the future you can just create a Steam account dedicated to Arma3. Even without Steam you couldn't sell it to people who don't trust you 100%, as it is easy to just sell a game and keep the key to play online. With Steam you can still sell the account which has Arma3 linked to it, knowing you'ld be violating Steam ToS.

You're seeing things the wrong way mate. Competition has never been that high between digital retailers, and never games were that cheap on PC. Being redeemable on Steam or using steamworks doesn't mean the game has to be bought on the Steam store. Actually I buy most of my games from other shops "amazon.com/GMG" and then use the key on Steam. It's more convenient that way for many people including myself. By what logic is this killing competition exactly? If competition is lacking it's only in the way that there are no serious challenger to Steamworks, only equivalent is Origin and it sucks ass. EA can't even make an ingame chat UI that doesn't freeze your computer for 10s when you try to resize it.

What exactly stops you from setting your Steam profile to private and only use the features you really need?

That's called elitism. Nothing new here, it reminds me of those heated debates over Project Reality, even before PR Arma2 was announced, which always had a much more mature, open minded and a lot less xenophobic community than we have here.

Like what? Not being able to resell your games? Buying a used PC game you intend to play online has always been tricky as the previous owner could always burn the disk and copy the serial key for himself. That's something in 13 years of PC gaming I have never did... So much for more restrictions now than when there were. It's not like Steam asks you to play with your CD in the drive, to always be online or even restricts the number of installations. I don't see the need to run Steam at least once online a major issue either. It's not like we are still in the early 00's when internet was still kind of a luxury for many of us.

Be happy then. You won't ever be forced to use the Workshop if you don't want to, Armaholic&co will still be needed. Just like Skyrim has both its Nexus and Workshop.

I know that. The point I tried to make is that only a few hate Steam's guts like that, and you'll most likely found these individuals around here because they don't play many different games. Hence the obvious bias in that poll. Most people in this community, but not necessarily on these forums, don't mind Steam as they use it on daily basis. It shouldn't be such a big deal, as Steam is by far the least problematic DRM out there... Moreover Steamworks isn't just a DRM, it offers services that will makes things easier for many people, including BIS.

They probably sold way more ArmaII copies on the Steamstore than they ever did through every other digital or retail shops combined. Even though that poll tended to be hostile regarding Steamworks, it's only a couple hundreds votes against it and cannot be representative of the community as a whole as you'll find way more steamsceptic fellas around here than anywhere else. You're totally overreacting, it's becoming ridiculous...

Arma III will be avaible on retail and numerous digital shops. Steamworks means that you will need Steam installed and running to start and update the game, that's all. It will be just like Skyrim, Shogun2 TotalWar, Killing Floor, Red Orchestra 2, Serious Sam 3 ect... It's like you guys have been living in a cave past 6 years. You're entitled to your own opinions. Still it would be good for many of you guys to actually do some research before making a scandal over such trivial matters. As a big fan since summer 2001, I'm very happy BIS decided to use Steamworks as I do believe this move will benefit both the community and BIS.

This looks great. Can't wait... :)

@nuxil What does "us" mean? The tiny Arma2 minority which regularly browses these forums?

You can set Steam so it doesn't update your games automatically.

Well games are usually more expensive in Australia right? Both my pre orders for Armed Assault and ArmA2 were around 40€.

This. Maybe they'll invite people who preorder the game to try the alpha. That would be nice...

They are probably just incorporating and testing Steamworks functionalities.

French minister of Defence Jean Yves Le Drian reported to the press that hundreds of islamists were killed after three weeks of fighting. It's hardly no shot fired. source Moreover there are rumors that Qatar, which has been known for funding and providing weapons weapons to jihadist organizations such as AQMI, MUJAO and Ansar Dine for quite a while already, sent two planes to the north of Mali to help evacuate some of the remaining islamic forces. I find it hard to see Mali become another Afghanistan as the population there speak a western language "French", are much more open to western culture than Afghans and hate jihadist's guts. Especially after seeing them destroying Timbuktu's holy shrines as well as thousands of ancient manuscripts. There are chances the Berber/Arab minority from the North could be slaughtered after French departure. Good riddance, it's been the other way around for long enough.