Deep Silver, they of the upcoming Risen 2 and Dead Island games, announced that the company will use Steamworks for its copy protection for Risen 2. This is slightly (Ok, more than slightly) less annoying than what UbiSoft is doing. (See below)
This means that when you install Risen 2 on the PC, whether you buy it from Steam or not it’s going to be activated via Steam, and thus permanently tying the game to that Steam account.
After that you won’t need to be online or even have the DVD in the tray. But you will not be able to “untie” the game from your account so if you want to loan/resell the PC game, even a retail copy — not gonna happen.
Here’s the details according to the Risen Forums:
(Thanks Shack)
Hello Risen Fans,
I’d like to give you an update on copy protection for Risen 2. We know that this topic is important for you which is why we want to be as transparent as possible. As mentioned before on several occasions, we regularly evaluate copy protection systems on the market for our product portfolio. In our role as publisher for entertainment software, a set of basic requirements has to be met by the technology we deploy:
Security: The copy protection scheme in question has to be very secure for the customer as well as the publisher.
Compatibility: The technology has to be compatible with all hardware components out there.
Comfort: The protection has to add value to the player aside to its protective behaviour.
Support: The technology has to provide us the means to help customers if the product is not behaving in the expected manner.
Reliability: The scheme has to be proven stable over multiple years and many products.
We diligently reviewed many solutions in the last couple of years and in the case of Risen 2 we decided to use the Steam-Platform from Valve on a worldwide basis.The reasons we decided to go with Steam are:
Steam offers an automated update system which allows all customers to play the latest version of Risen 2 since all patches will be delivered automatically to their PC. Steam has been running stable on millions of PCs out there, so it provides the reliability we need. The digital copy of Risen 2 will also not require two different copy protections on Steam (compared to Risen 1).
Risen 2 will be playable without a DVD in the drive if the product has been added to a Steam account (Steam accounts are free) and will be available for download on other PCs if you’re on the move and still want to play Risen 2. The Steam account itself has been further fortified by the optional Steam Guard system which adds another layer of security. Steam also offers a big array of community features: chats, game groups, achievements and the player can even upload up to 1000 screenshots to share his/her experience in the world of Risen 2. All those features convinced us that Steam offers the right package of features, reliability and security for us.
Naturally we also wanted to keep the restrictions, which are part of any copy protection, as unobtrusive as possible. You will only be required to be online once – to link your game to your Steam account and afterwards you will be able to play offline and without DVD in the drive. You will also be able to install Risen 2 from your Steam account on as many systems you like.
Even though the press bumph is as ever the triumph of corporatetalk over common sense, Steam is pretty much ubiquitous to PC gaming, and it’s not like this is the first time games have been placed on Steam in this manner (Dawn of War 2 and Brink strike me as obvious examples).
Not being able to resell the box is really a non issue considering steam doesn’t exactly permit second hand resales (at this point, who knows if they’ll consider something like that in the future).
At least they’re being honest and demonstrating -why- they’ve chosen the route they’ve taken, and well, it could be worse. It’s Steam. Not Ubisoft’s vile cretinous piece of… *ahem*
When was the last time you could trade in your used PC games, anyway?
I doubt there is one store in my town that will take a used PC game.
Just sayin’
eBay.
23925 671749Great artical, I unfortunately had some problems printing this artcle out, The print formating looks a little screwed over, something you might want to look into. 924573