No idea, but lets not miss the elephant in the room that is ultimately behind all this, which is the actual… you know… game pirates?
You don’t blame tragedies of the commons on people, you blame them on human nature.
This will be the first Stalker game I don’t buy.
Guess I won’t be buying Stalker 2.
HA HA HA. You so funny.
I could talk about Mass Effect, if you prefer.
Crap! I was hoping for some news on the game, not DRM. Still a purchase for me. This has been one of my favorite franchises.
I’m in the camp that will be buying it anyway.
Not this shit again.
The game pirates did not sit Ubisoft executives down at gunpoint and force them to order their terrible DRM. Or Blizzard. And they aren’t making the Stalker devs do it either. The pirates are the excuse cited by these people, certainly, but those executives are fully in charge of their own decision-making.
That said, I have heard some reports that this is old news, from a couple of years ago, and things may have changed since then. It’s also possible that Stalker 2 will have different DRM in eastern Europe than it does in other areas. Certainly, several Russian games have used nasty DRM like Starforce or TAGES in Russia and then scaled down affairs in the English release. (And yes, I know Stalker is from Ukraine.) The piracy he talks about in the interview was not the piracy of BitTorrent and newsgroups, but rather the piracy of criminal organizations producing and selling illegitimate copies in storefronts in Russia and other nearby countries. I hope one of these things is true (or that they reconsider before release, if they haven’t already). I love the shit out of Stalker but I am not willing to purchase any game with this type of DRM.
Paying customers, not pirates, are the only group inconvenienced by DRM. This game will be cracked and torrented like every other game created by man, with only legitimate customers being left out in the cold. It makes no sense to punish people who pay for games for the sins of people who don’t pay for games.
The worst part for me is that even if I do force myself to put up with this treatment … it won’t work. I had a taste of how well this system works for smaller companies or lesser known games with Silent Hunter V, and that shit is just broken (I just tested last night to see if after all this time things were smoothed out. The answer is emphatically no).
So that sucks. First Stalker game I won’t be buying as well, and I think I may even have bought the first one twice.
I’ve given multiple copies of the first Stalker to friends because it is just that great.
So much for another game where I haul a corpse all over the map as infinite storage.
I think the worst part of this entire story is that it’s literally the only thing we know about STALKER 2 now.
I mean, seriously? How fucking stupid can GSC be?
“We’re releasing a sequel to one of your favorite games, we’re not going to tell you anything about it yet, but just a head’s up that we’re going to fuck over you legitimate customers in a misguided attempt to stop pirates who will eventually get a better experience than you have”
Yeah, this was a brain-dead PR move.
DRM is not about stopping people from cracking the game forever, it’s about stopping them from cracking the game during the peak sales time.
The Internet connection DRM methods have, thus far, proven to be the best at this.
Apparently GSC has tweeted that the always-online DRM was “a possibility, not a choice” and that they were still looking for a solution that would work for both them and their customers.
My point still stands: this type of DRM is eventually cracked, and pirates enjoy the game for free, whereas paying customers continue to suffer. Notice how many complaints there were for games that used this system during the “peak sales time” (i.e. AC: Brotherhood)?
According to RPS they seem to be starting to backpedal from this:
Following yesterday’s DRM-alarm going off, GSC have now said that using an always-on solution is for them “a possibility, not a choice.”
Nice save.