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The Witcher 3 and Projekt Red's DRM-Free Stand
An anonymous reader writes "This article goes into the making of upcoming fantasy title The Witcher 3. The studio, CD Projekt Red, reveals that, unusually, it'll be releasing the game as a DRM-free download. 'We believe that DRM does more harm to legit gamers than good for the gaming industry, that's why the game will also be completely DRM-free,' says the game's level designer, Miles Tost. The game will build on the strengths of The Witcher 2 while attempting to broaden its scope. 'We want to combine the strong pull of closed-world RPGs story-wise, with a world where you can go anywhere and do anything you want.'"
Actually, scratch that. This is a better link to the source:
http://www.redbull.com/en/game...
Just don't post the link in the first place !
So far as I can tell, DRM-free means "no DRM".
FWIW, I actually find Steam really annoying. I usually use a couple of computers at once, and I sometimes have a slow-paced game on one and want to play something faster on another while, say, waiting for turns to process or something. I can do this with even the most draconian DRM schemes, but not with Steam. Yes, I'm aware of Offline Mode. Valve Support has told me that it is in fact prohibited to use Offline Mode to run another copy of Steam, even if I'm using it to play a different game.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
. Well, you said you don't actively like Steam DRM, but continuing to use Steam only ensures that it'll never change.
He likes stuff like disc based securom drm even less.
If he refuses to use everything he doesn't like, he won't play very many games at all.
but continuing to use Steam only ensures that it'll never change
Steam has added family accounts, and now family library sharing features. These don't solve the problem yet, but they are baby steps forwards towards solving some the biggest complaints most people have about steam's drm.
Valve tries to push Steam as the friendly DRM, luvvable and plushy and not that evil kind that the competition uses.
Check out gog.com instead, and get some of the same games as Steam but DRM free and cheaper than Steam sales.
If a Steam game is DRM-free, you can still load the executable directly without Steam running at all,
Its not quite as simple as that. If the game supports steam achievements, workshop, trading cards, cloud saves, etc then its not necessarily steam "DRM" that is causing a reliance on being logged into steam.
There are lots of genuinely drm free games that 'like' being tied to steam... not for the drm, but for the other steam features.
There is no requirement for DRM on Steam. It's a distribution platform first and formaost, and there are DRM-free games on Steam. Steam also has DRM that publishers can use (and which really isn't that bad or intrusive). Steam also distributes games with all the worst DRM: horrible, horrible stuff.
Contrast this with Good Old Games, owned by the very same CD Projekt Red. There you get a promise of "no DRM of any kind ever". They distribute many games which originally had DRM in some cracked (but licensed) form, so stuff like "look up this word in the manual" is bypassed. They're just as good as Steam at patch management.
Steam is tolerable. It's good points outweigh its problems. But GOG is great. It's made of win and awesome. It's like the best pirate BBS from back in the day, where every game worked better thanks to the cracks, except it's all legal and licensed, and reasonably priced. Naturally, they're having a hard time attracting publishers, but the financial success of the Witcher titles might get some notice.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Try reading the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski. They really 'transcend the genre' - much like Patrick O'Brian's Master & Commander series. If Sapowski was writing in English he'd be a far bigger deal than George R.R. Martin or any of the other current fantasy hacks.
Waiting for turns to process?
Are you playing on a PDP-11?
So what you're saying is you know very well it's technically possible to do what you want on Steam, but because some customer service rep tells you they don't want you to, you find the whole platform "really annoying".
Bah.
When a platform comes along that gives developers a sense of security and reason to invest in games and gives users the ability to install their games on more than one machine and when that machine goes belly up, to install them automatically on another machine (something you can't do on the old "X number of serial number uses is the limit" games), I would say it's pretty much a win-win.
Valve has done a pretty good job of being really friendly to gamers. They create a whole ecosystem of games and forums and support and communication to the dev community that never existed before, but you find it "really annoying" because you can't play some turn-based abomination that takes long enough between turns that you can go over to a second machine and play another game without the psychic pain of knowing Bob @ Phone Support said you shouldn't even though you could do it if you wanted.
Did I mention, "Bah"?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Did retail copies bought in Poland have SecuROM, or any DRM at all? Those are the only copies that were published by CD-Projekt. In North America Atari had publishing rights (later, Warner Bros. took over), Europe and Australia had Bandai Namco, and Japan had CyberFront. It was the other publishers, not CD-Projekt, who added DRM to retail copies. CD-Projekt responded by arranging it so that if you bought The Witcher 2 from anywhere then you could go here and get the game DRM-free from GOG at no additional cost.
So I think The Witcher 2 is an excellent example of the lengths they'd go to against DRM.
They did release it DRM free if you bought it from them. If you bought it via another publisher then you got some extra crap and had to go back to them to get the DRM-free version. How about next time giving money directly to the company that sells DRM-free games, instead of to a company whose only contribution was to add some DRM crap and put it in a box?
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I bought the game from GoG, but loved to hear about that when it happened. CD-Projekt are true bros and one of the studios I really want to support.
I was about to say that I'd buy their games even if they weren't as good as they are, but you could actually do quite a bit worse than Witcher 2 and still have a game worth playing.
Yeah, but that's a console, which by its very nature is a less preferable method of gaming
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So tell me, what PC games were you playing from 1972 to 1977? Let me guess, you were'nt, unless of course you were some university lab playing Hunt the Wumpus or something, but odds are you weren't playing electronic games at home.
Now take a look at the price for
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or the Launch price of the original IBM PC:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Look at that price, that was $1500, 1981 dollars, for a machine with 16 of RAM and no floppies. OS and Monitor extra of course.
In 1981 you could get an Atari 2600 for $199, so far far more people bought 2600's to play Combat, Space Invaders and Missile Command than bought IBM PC's to play Adventure. Sure there were always a few "rich kids" with tech aficiando dads who bought them such machines or Trash 80's or Apples or C64's. But they were HUGELY outnumbered by 2600's.
today, I can walk to my local store and get a PS4 for $399.
That $399 will get you something like this PC:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Acer...
Now you're going to say, "I can build a better rig for $600. $600 is $200 more than $399. That extran $200 will get you at minimum 3 games, or 2 games and an extra controller, or a year of PS+ and 2 games, or a lot of indie titles.
And before you say "free Team Fortress" or "free MOBA", I'm going to laugh at you for spending $600 or more on a game machine...only to then not spend money on any games. That is why I often think of PC gamers as cheapskates. Or more accurately, Filthy PC Gamer Bourgeosie Philistines would rather throw money on hardware for e-peen points on benchmarks, than actually buy games.
meant mainly for children and the developmentally disabled.
I don't know where you are, but that's most certainly not the case in the Anglophone countries or Japan, especially since the PSone days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You think publishers were selling copies of C&C, X-Com, and Panzer General to "Children and the developmentally disabled"? Who do you think they were selling, Azure Dreams, Castlevania: Symphony of the NIght, or Colony Wars to?
Adults. They knew the market had grown up alongside games and was still playing.
There may well be other features of console gaming that once presented some advantage. I can't think of any, but theoretically it's possible that they exist
It just works. No muss, no fuss. Spend a little on hardware and then focus on buying games. Lot
I wasted 10 hours of my time downloading this game and the iso image didn't even have the crack!!! steer clear of the torrents until skidrow has a release.