Arma 3 is Exclusive to Steam

Bohemia Interactive has revealed that its upcoming military sandbox game will be exclusive to Valve's Steam platform. According to a blog post by project lead Joris-Jan van 't Land, this was a necessary step in order for Arma 3 to hit its 2013 launch target.

"A long four months ago, I took over as Project Lead for Arma 3, having previously worked on the game as Lead Playable Content. As a team we were facing two quite serious situations: we were not happy with how the project was going, and on top of that two of our colleagues were suddenly arrested for alleged espionage in Greece. The first two months on the job were all about taking an inventory of the project and team, seeing what was going well, what was not, and coming up with plans to fix it all. The mission set by our CEO, Marek ?paněl, was clear: do all we can to release Arma 3 in 2013."

The reasons included for putting Arma 3 only on Valve's platform are many, including ease of patching and the convenience of Bohemia being able to use Steamworks. In the blog post, piracy is also mentioned.

"Think of it what you want, but piracy is affecting us as a business. However, Bohemia Interactive has tried to grow with the evolution of the Internet, rather than to fight it. We have removed intrusive Digital Rights Management (DRM) from our games several months after release, but cannot afford to launch without such technologies. We strongly believe the best anti-piracy comes from offering valuable online services that people are willing to invest in. Supporting that philosophy: we saw we could not deliver in-house solutions on time, but could take Steam's and expand upon them. It will be possible to run Steam in Offline mode, and still play the game (with the exception of online services obviously, including multiplayer itself)."

No exact release date is yet known. Though Arma 3 will require Steam to play, Bohemia Interactive still plans on distributing boxed copies.