Saito Producer just mentioned steam version on the Dengeki stream.
He said they are working on it, but they have to do something about the pirating issue, and because of recent certain game being broken (I assume he is mentioning RE7 issue but I am not 100% sure) they have to do something about it. He said it won't take long so please wait for it.
I was already hesitant about buying this at launch due to the poor quality of previous Platinum ports, but delaying the release to add even more restrictive DRM is incentive for people to avoid buying the game entirely - or at least wait for it to be cheap in a sale.
I'm really torn over this, as it was one of the games that I actually planned on buying at full price from Steam instead of waiting or shopping around, to show my support and hopefully encourage SE to bring the previous game and more over to PC.
Denuvo in its current state is bad enough, having to constantly re-activate or being locked out of playing games offline.
If someone is going to pirate the game, they weren't going to buy it anyway.
Having a simultaneous release and more positive word of mouth about the game - even if some of that comes from pirates - is going to do far more for sales than delaying the game and paying another company to implement restrictive DRM.
And let's imagine for a moment that we lived in a world where everything was online-only and DRM was perfect.
Think how much of an impact that would have on the preservation of games.
- Any time you're without internet access (which is frequent for some of us) or if the servers are busy or down temporarily, you wouldn't be able to play games at all.
- Anything more than a few years old would be rendered unplayable once they shut down the servers.
- If sales for licensed games are bad, they might pull the game from sale to save money on renewing the license.
- Even if the sales are good, things are not licensed indefinitely and once they expire the games disappear from sale and can never be purchased again - or may even be rendered unplayable.
- The game you're trying to play is more than a few years old an has issues running on newer hardware? Tough luck. The developer/publisher isn't going to pay to update it, and there's no way to fix it yourself any more if you can't modify the executable or inject DLLs.
- Would emulation even exist? Lots of companies don't seem to care about their back catalog of games, and you have to wonder if companies would have deemed it worth the cost of developing an emulator just to sell old games, if the concept had not already been proven by the emulation community.
Just look at how many games/DLC items have been removed from Steam for various reasons - including Platinum's previous game:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3071895
And there are many more PC games which never even made it onto digital storefronts due to licensing deals, trying to find the rightsholders, lack of publisher interest etc.
Unless a physical version of these games exists - which is often no longer the case for new releases - they could potentially be lost forever due to DRM or other online requirements.
Even
with physical releases, anything using SafeDisc or SecuROM is no longer playable on updated versions of Windows without cracking the game. If that DRM was uncrackable, those games would have been lost.
Some companies are even selling cracked versions of their games now, because they no longer have a clean copy of the game to distribute any more.
I don't believe that DRM-free releases hurt sales, and I personally care far more about the preservation of games than any "potential sales" lost to piracy.
Of course that's easy for me to say when I'm not trying to sell a game myself - though I think if there is any potential harm, it's more likely to impact small indie developers than games from big companies like SE.
With the convenience of services like Steam/GOG, I can't imagine that there are many people who would pirate a game instead of buying it just because a pirated version exists.
People who pirate games never intended to buy it. If piracy wasn't an option, they simply wouldn't be playing the game. They're not going to suddenly hand over $60.
I am far less opposed to the idea of DRM schemes like Denuvo if companies actually committed to its removal 3-6 months after release like
DOOM and
Inside did though.
Assuming that the game wasn't cracked, at that point you have protected the game during the initial sales period (if you believe that it actually does this) and secured the majority of your sales.
Past that point, its inclusion seems far less important, and you may get a second-wind of sales from its removal - perhaps by launching it on other storefronts like GOG now that it's DRM-free.
Having a DRM-free version of the game in existence secures its preservation even if it is later removed from sale. Platinum's TMNT game didn't even last 9 months.
I'd be extremely disappointed in Sony if they had a hand in any potential delay of the PC port.
They missed their chance at making this a PS4 exclusive, so trying to retroactively buy timed exclusivity would be so petty and blatantly anti-consumer behaviour.
The entire concept of exclusives is anti-consumer, whether they're timed or not.
I'd much rather have a late port than none at all - but companies shouldn't be surprised when the sales are low if they do this.
_/¯
