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sector24 said:
I may be wrong here (and feel perfectly free to tell me so) but I think Shrapnel is very sensitive to piracy, far more so than some companies. Digitial download opens the dark door to the scary place. Some companies believe that the increased sales outweigh the small percentage of pirated copies, but I have never seen any hard numbers on this subject.
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I always find this type of argument very silly. Steve Jobs wrote an interesting piece talking about how the vast majority of music sold by CD-labels is sold DRM free, or with DRM that is so easy to circumvent that it might as well not even be there. CD ripping software is easy to use, and convenient.
On the flip side, said Jobs, the DRM you buy from digital downloads is atrocious.
Why then, if the vast majority of your output is unprotected, do you mire a rather small proportion of it in this draconic, DIVX style, DRM? The answer is, you shouldn't be.
So to make the comparison complete, the DRM on Dom 3 (CD-key) is relatively trivial. Pirated copies are out there on the internet, available with CD-keys. This is a reality of modern gaming that applies readily not just to Dom 3, but to all games.
So the idea that releasing it into a format with digital downloading would somehow increase piracy, when the game is already readily available in pirated form, is just silly. The genie is already out of the metaphorical bottle. By making the game available for download on say, Steam, which has decent DRM in place that would not require any more work by the illwinter staff AFAIK, they'd be able to reach a whole new audience.
Personally I'd /love/ to see Dom 3 turn into a block buster multimillion dollar product for the designers of the game. That way they could actually hire some people, and churn out Dom 4 with all sorts of neat goodies. Of which I would be first in line to pre order the gold version
Just to nip this in the bud, I have both a legitimate copy of Dom 2 and 3. I was thinking about taking a photo with my copy of the Dom 3 manual, but I seem to have misplaced my digital camera during the move =\
Jazzepi