There's nothing curious about it. You guys tend to take for granted a service that's inherently bound with layers upon layers of complexity and dependencies. It leaves a sour taste to bind the use of a paid for product to something that has so much potential for unreliability and instability. Not to mention that nowadays we do have sufficient examples of such schemes going belly up or having to get changed under the combination of customer outcry, reduced sales and no dent in piracy whatsoever.
If publishers actually funded the developers with as much money as they spend on advertising and coming up with new DRM implementations maybe the developers could actually turn a decent profit to stay in the business. Make no mistake, these two are different from one another. What usually happens however is that devs do the work and get some return of investment while publishers push the crates to the shelves, get the big money and if something goes wrong they just have to abandon the developer team to fend for itself.
As a result of this, i seriously wish 1c would self-distribute in Europe too. It's no wonder more and more small, independent game developers pursue this route. Take stardock games for example. They published 2-3 titles with no DRM and made a killing despite the piracy hit since they didn't have to shoulder the overhead of a third party acting as publisher. They have grown so much that nowadays they are carrying all the AAA titles along with most of the small, independent ones and can afford to make weekly promotional offers on all of them.
This is no revolt or anything similar like it has jokingly been pointed out, just observations from recent events in the field of gaming combined with what is expected of a vendor when you buy something...you want it to WORK in a manner that doesn't inconvenience you.
If my net goes down right now the worst that can happen is losing a few lines of text on a forum i don't pay to post on, but i can still use everything on my PC that i spent money on. It's not about the actual amount of money, it's just a matter of principle and being a business with principles is what guarantees a loyal following.
As for what changes and what doesn't, if i was the only one with such an opinion then you would be right Gunslinger. Turns out i'm not however, or Ubi would still be running their always online scheme which they abandoned. I'm not glad SH5 more or less flopped, but i'm overjoyed that Ubi was forced to change their ridiculous copy protection scheme that inconvenienced only legitimate buyers, while pirates played the game just fine. Small tip: making sure your game runs worse than the equivalent pirate copy is definitely not the way to reduce piracy
Anyway, i'm not trying to step on anyone's toes or force my opinion. I'm just arguing the case that it would be a friggin' shame to lose so many potential customers when SoW has been in development for so long.
We're all just killing time and speculating here, but one thing we can agree on is that all of us want SoW to be a success. What prompted me to post is a genuine question in regards to this and nothing else. Why would any fan of team Maddox and their work want their new title to be saddled with something that could potentially cause it to have a slow launch like RoF or a fate similar to SH5?
If this, i guess purely rhetorical, question annoys people so much then they shouldn't worry about having to hear me much longer in case a problematic DRM implementations is used, as things will turn out the way they did with RoF.
I eagerly expected that title too, argued against their chosen implementation of DRM, people accused me of single-handedly sabotaging the hobby (apparently my opinion mattered not one iota but millions, all of a sudden
) and eventually my interest in the title was sapped. I left the RoF forums in simHQ, the guys flying RoF were happy doing so and i was happy not having to deal with it's initial issues (not to mention the belief blindly held by a handful of guys there that DRM was the magic wand that would ensure their favorite company stays in business)
In fact, i didn't even check out the free demo until a year and a half later when i decided to give it another chance. A year and a half.
You could argue that i'm an isolated basket case, an anti-DRM zealot, whatever. Problem for the guys selling RoF was that i wasn't the only one and it showed big time, which would indicate that maybe their strategy was wrong.
The original publisher (ND games wasn't it?) selling the title rights to the N.American one (777 studios), who in turn changed the DRM and tried to relaunch the game (the iron cross edition) proved this as plain as day, not to mention the fact that when SH5 came along many among the people who praised RoF's DRM were suddenly angry at Ubi for using a similar method
It certainly didn't flop as a game and it's much better than it originally was, but nobody can say it had the successful launch that IL2 enjoyed, with servers sprouting all around the place and massive community work in the form of skins, missions and campaigns providing added value to it.
It does have it's community doing the same things, but much later from the date of launch and to a lesser extent than IL2 did, a big reason for that being that they managed to cripple their impulse buying potential.
I remember some of their initial sales figures during their first year and it was under 500000 copies (their words, not mine), when the previous incarnation of Silent Hunter (an even more niche genre) managed to score more than a million copies.
Now why would i ever honestly want a similar fate to befall SoW?
WWI i can wait for a bit more, for u-boats i can still use modded SH3, but WWII is my main field of interest and as such, i would hate to see a game about it that's built by a company i like and respect suffer that kind of drawbacks, especially when the precedent is clearly there and the examples for avoidance still fresh.
That being said, i'm actually optimistic about SoW. Mr. Maddox more or less said he doesn't like the method Ubi used in SH5 and even if the publisher is Ubi they have changed their system after SH5's failure.
Just for the record, i do have a single title that requires online activation. It works more or less the way i described in my previous post and that's why i bought it. Oh, and it really has no problems with piracy since bug fixes, gameplay tweaks and interface improvements (much like team maddox has done with IL2) are too frequent for pirates to keep up with the updates.