Tanker, I like your candor and I assure you, I'm a fan of Arma. I just counted 9 different shortcuts for Arma on my desktop for different mods and versions. One of them is actually the original OFP with VTE mod on it...still a great game. Take a look at the post from the founder of Armaholic, it covers the Nexxus site too:

I also appreciate your invite for playing together but my internet is spotty at best and this is where steam really blows. Arma is an awesome sim for offline play and Steams non-functioning offline mode...and it's refusal to honor the "do not keep this game updated" BS is where it's gonna hurt. I have been burned plenty by these 2 things...and the pro-steam folks are quick to point out that it's set up that way. Guess what...I don't need Steam to tell me what version of Arma to run for online matches because I don't play online matches. Not thrilled with steam dicating what mods I can use that are approved by the steam workshop either.

The point to all this? It doesn't matter...if BIS wants to sell their soul...their choice. I just see another "Dragon Rising" failure in the making which is not good for any true Arma player.

If Armaholic/SIX/other third party ArmA sites/tools provide a superior service to the user, then they will continue to exist. If they can't provide a superior service when compared to Steam... well... does anyone ever want an inferior service?

I would be deeply shocked and quite frankly outraged if BIS somehow limited mod installation to coming ONLY from Steam Workshop, which assumes that they will even support that -- Skyrim didn't at launch, after all.

Therefore, while I appreciate everything third party sites do, they are simply going to have compete on their own merits.

And the problems with Dragon Rising were far deeper than a distribution method could ever be...

If Steam was so great - why do products have to be exclusive for it? Just sayin' my two cents.

Armaholic is not saying Arma modding will die. It's complaining that IT will die because it won't be needed. Right now it's the go-to place, but what about the other Arma sites? Oh right, there aren't any, because Armaholic has it all. So no one else can get in. They don't seem to worry about that, do they?
Skyrim got official modding support on Steam, and the 3rd party site lost traffic. The mods didn't die down. They're all over the place, just now they're all located on the workshop. The 3rd party site feels slighted and is trying to make it look like their fall from the #1 spot is a big negative.

That's a BIG difference.

As for why Steam exclusive, there are currently 2 big reasons: Steam Workshop and achievements. Simply put, a game must use Steamworks to use them, and if it uses Steamworks it is Steam exclusive. To work without Steam, you can't have them. Also, Steamworks serves as DRM for those games that use it, so there's no extra Securom or Tages or other crap.

Now YOU may not care about achievements, and you may have no trouble with manually modding Arma (although I would say that would put you in the minority...the issues we have every week with Arma 2 and one user or another having a mod non-functional or missing an update or whatever is a MAJOR PITA and proves Arma modding is NOT simple), but with Steam Workshop enabled our sticky could just say "DL and enable these mods in the workshop" perhaps with "load in this order" addendum and everyone would be working fine...and there are a large number of users out there I would call "achievement whores" who strain to get every one in every game they have, even when it doesn't actually get you anything, that will love Arma having them, although my guess is few of them are here on SimHQ. I don't know that Arma 3 will even have them, although briefly Arma 2 did years back, a test batch of a few that soon went away. Don't know that story.

So again, the point is not "making it Steam-only will make it better for everyone". The point is "it will be better for the majority...not least because it will come out this year". The single form of distribution simplifies their support headaches by a large degree, making it cheaper for them.
If you're not in the majority, well that sucks doesn't it? No one wants to be the minority. Sometimes you have the ability to change that circumstance, sometimes you don't. Yet can you honestly argue that the minority must be catered to by a business at the expense of the majority?



The Jedi Master

Jedi, who is this majority you speak of? Maruk, the CEO of BIS ran a poll asking this very question...and he asked it on the BI forums...not Armaholic:




Here are the results from his poll:


Yes, make Arma 2 and/or future BI games Steam only and Steamworks enabled 19.45%

I am not sure, it depends 12.60%

No, please not Steam because... 67.95%



So there you have it...the overwhelming majority spoke, and were promptly shown the middle finger. This majority that prefers Steam clearly only exists in your pro-Steam biased imagination. A similar poll was put up on Armaholic... with the exact same results. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be on Steam....just not exclusive that forces the MAJORITY to a minorities preference.

As far as modding, the mod folder way of Arma is one of the easiest to do and if you can't handle it you probably should be playing BF3 or COD anyway. Arma has always been a military simulator more than a game...and if they alienate their core customers in favor of a more mainstream way of thinking...they deserve to fail IMO.

Look at the forums for any video game and you'll find that it's not the satisfied users who go there. They also mentioned in the announcement that the majority of their sales come through Steam already, even when boxed copies/Amazon/Sprocket/etc. are available.

That speaks louder than a forum poll.


Also if you have worked with mods at a serious level in a multiplayer/dedicated server environemnt you'll find that it isn't that the mod folder method is particularly difficult, but rather that mods that do not correctly define their dependencies in their config.cpp can and will cause errors for some users, but not others, based on their load order. Users can be running mismatched versions of mods. Further, until patch 1.62 (or maybe 1.61) the Expansions menu in the game didn't work for loading mods, which meant that users either had to get a third-party launcher tool or add command-line switches.

That kind of user interface won't fly in this day and age for any game that wants to grow beyond the sim community, which ArmA already has -- see DayZ, which made ArmA a relevant franchise again.

Nor will an elitist attitude which suggests that only those capable of dealing with poorly designed third-party GUIs and updaters are 'worthy' of playing ArmA with mods rather than more 'casual' games. That way of thinking kills games.

Let me see if I have this straight... your theory is that the 10's of thousands of registered members registered at the BIS and Armaholic forums are only filled with unsatisfied users? LMAO! Umm...cant' be bothered to read the rest of your post when you lead statement is so preposterous your credibility and motives are somewhat suspect. It was good for a chuckle though!

true, but the non satisfied users tend to be the most vocal, whilst the satisfied ones just tend to sit on the sidelines and wait.

Also i couldnt find that poll started by the dev, have a link?? I did find another poll though.. "Will you buy Arma 3 (Steam exclusive)", yes = 349 votes (86.90%), no = 54 (13.40%)

Also who said anywhere that you still couldnt add mods manualy? i hark to skyrim like tanker did, thats steam only, uses the workshop, but you can also just totally ignore it like i do and use the nexus site instead. If your such a hater of steam i'm going to presume you've never actually used or seen the workshop and how it actually works, which kinda makes all your points about it null and void really.

At the end of the day it comes down to this, the decisions been made, #%&*$# about all you want it'll have feck all effect.

I believe BI is ditching their FADE protection and using Steamworks for anti-piracy protection.

I recommend that you read about 'sampling bias' before suggesting that a forum poll, likely up for a few days at best after the announcement, is a meaningful representation of a game's player base.

2/10 I was trolled, won't be trolled again.

I recommend that you gather some facts before talking about bias fresh after an announcement. The poll took place on Feb 24th 2011...long before any official announcement and those were the numbers I was referring to.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?115256


I'm not sure what trolling you are referring to...we were having a discussion.

The "majority" is the number of owners of Arma 2. The forums are instead going to be a sampling of those users and potential users.

Simply, not every Arma 2 owner is on the BIS forums (I'm not, never have been, despite having played OFP, Arma 1, 2, and OA since their respective releases and having a good 1000 hrs in them combined). Also, there will be people on the BIS forums who do not own A2:OA, or perhaps just OA, or perhaps still use A1 or even OFP because they have really old PCs and perhaps don't seriously consider buying A3 because they won't be able to play it or don't like "future" tech or whatever.
As Tao said, a poll seen and responded to even by a majority of that forum's users (and there's no guarantee that many users never saw it or ignored it) is still not the same thing as their customer base.

The fact that the poll was 2 years ago further invalidates it. Back then, DayZ didn't exist. Far fewer people owned A2 then compared to now. It's like a poll held tomorrow asking who people will vote for President in 2016.

Only BIS knows how many A2 users use Steam, and how many use the other methods. They're doing this because it makes sense to them, even if not to you. "We've had 5 million sales, of which 1.5 million were on Steam...so A3 will be Steam only!!" Hardly.

Are you seriously implying that if far less than 50% of their customers were using Steam they'd consider this route? That's like a car company deciding not to market to women...they may not target every ad at both men and women, or women alone, but you can bet they're targeting them nonetheless in some ads.





The Jedi Master

That poll had 365 votes.

The BI Studio Forums, for ALL of their games, has: Members 55,565. Active Members 4,610. Most users ever online was 1551. (bottom of http://forums.bistudio.com/forum.php)

DayZ alone has 1,612,251 unique players, according to http://dayzmod.com/. Since numerous ArmA 2 owners have never played DayZ, the number of people who own ArmA 2 and therefore might be looking at buying ArmA 3 is even higher than that.

Trolling was suggesting that I had some ulterior motivation, as if I were a BI plant here to sing the virtues of Steam. My original post notes that I'm not much of a Steam fan. But this is just good sense on BI's part, both from a technical perspective and from a business perspective.

"Not to forget, the majority of our players already come from Steam." -- Marek Španel (http://www.gamespot.com/news/arma-iii-a-steam-exclusive-6404338)

Well, my original complaint on p1 was about the poor functionality and integration of steam and boxed versions of ArmA2 and it's expansions, and the seemingly obstinate efforts by the steam interface to make tinkering/modding difficult.

If ArmA3 coming exclusively on steam means that any official expansions will likewise come through steam and will therefore work properly (and without this kind of nonsense), and as well steam will provide support for mods directly through their service, then i have no complaints. But given the precedent, you can understand my (and other's) concern.

I will concede that the numbers are pre-Dayz explosion which IMO influenced Bis's decision to go Steam only. I don't consider the pimply faced hyperactive Zombie crazed teens core Arma players. Sure they jumped on board later but Arma 2 never cracked steam's charts until after Dayz came out.

I will say this loud and clear: I don't have a problem with Arma 3 being released on Steam. My problem is why does it have to be exclusive? BIS is talking about releasing physical copies anyway...like many Steam games do...why can't they release a non-Steam version via other download delivery sites? As far as Steam's DRM solution...it's not really a solution because practically every Steam exclusive game has been cracked and pirated just like any other title.

My guess would be that Steam pressured BIS for exclusive distribution rights or none at all...Steam is pretty much big enough to use such tactics.

Exclusive is just another word for "monopoly" and monopolies are not good in any form of business. It might not purely be a monopoly in the strict sense of the word...but you definitely have the biggest distributer throwing it's weight around IMO.

One more thing: Dayz licensed the Arma 2 engine for a stand alone title so Arma 3 (God willing) will not have any sort of Zombie frenzy of buyers at release and probably not for awhile afterwards. It will pretty much be core Arma players with large investments in hardware doing the buying initially. Lets hope they didn't piss off their core customers too badly to hurt them.

My suspicion is that a major reason they are going Steam-exclusive so that they can use VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat), which is a formidable anti-cheating system that is tied deeply to Steam. It is formidable not because it can't be broken, but because if you get banned, they can ban your entire Steam account. That's a lot of games for many people and would certainly deter casual/'haha it's funny' cheaters.

Adopting VAC and punishing cheaters in MP would be a meaningful step towards solving the large amount of cheating that I have heard happens on ArmA 2 public servers and DayZ.

BI most likely saw that it would take a huge dev effort (enough to delay the release past the end of 2013) to make BattlEye more effective at this (it's not effective at all, frankly), and so they decided to go with Steam + VAC.

Just speculation.

This is actually one of my problems with Steam. Let me start by saying that I despise cheating, and cheating in a tactical military sim makes you wonder why that type of cheater would even purchase such a sim. That said...the kind of power wielded by Steam is too much.

Here is an example of what I mean (I posted this before in another thread) A Steam user loved Steam and tried to register his Stronghold 2 game on Steam (it was a non-Steam boxed version). Some point after attempting this, his account was disabled. He was denied the right to play the hundreds of dollars worth of games he purchased on Steam and the reason he got from Steam was something like "We feel you have aquired this game through Gamecopyworld and is a violation of Steams user agreement". He pointed out how completley daft that statement is since Gamecopyworld only hosts CD and DVD cracks for purchased games.

Long story short....after sending pictures of receipts, the box, serial number etc. he finally got his account re-instated. I don't want to just "borrow" Arma 3 from Steam until they decide otherwise...they like to flick that sabre of power and shoot from the hip a little too often for my taste. I realize when you buy a regular boxed game you don't exactly "own" it... but the only one that can stop you from playing is you.

But that's just it, that method is going the way of the dodo. Almost all games now will have some form of online DRM, whether "always on" or "activate only" or via MP or whatever. That means if the company dies out, the company doing DRM dies out, or some sort of financial change happens making it too costly for them to bother with any longer, your game will be useless. That's just what the "new normal" is.

As for why it must be exclusive, it's a cost-saving measure. When the majority of the customers are there, they have to make that one the priority. To then make it work without Steam, and still connect in MP, and still have a workable DRM, raises their costs and development time. Even if they decided to charge more to make up for that, not being able to get the game out this year would be a big headache for them. Not counting their DLC, it's almost 3 years since OA's release. They want A3 out before that becomes 4.



The Jedi Master

This is my point Jedi. The only reason this is accepted as the "new normal" is because gamers have shown developers and publishers their willingness to "bend over" and accept ridiculous terms to get their hands on the latest fix of digital crack. I passed on Battlefield 3 because of Origin's tactics...and guess what...there were plenty of other good games to play instead.

Make no mistake, we are the frogs being slowly boiled alive. They are going to keep moving the goalposts and pushing the limits as long as gamers show this kind of attitude. Pretty soon you might not be able to play a game unless you have an active credit card on file so they can ding you for infractions. Ten years from now, we will be having this conversation and you will be saying "I don't see the big deal...it's just a stool sample and a social security number" you won't realize what you are saying because you have been slowly groomed to accept such things.