Skyrim - Uses Steamworks

Today Bethesda confirmed in a tweet that they will be using Steamworks for Skyrim.
More information.

It's pretty clear that in the foreseable future all Bethesda Softworks games will have Steamworks.

It's a good choice from their perspective, they are just in the third year of their ambition to become a large publisher and they don't have the resources/knowledge to develop their own DRM/CommunityPortal scheme like Ubisoft and EA have done.

I have no opinion on Games for Windows Live but apparently Bethesda wasn't impressed with the support or how it worked when Fallout 3 used it.

The last three games (Fallout:NV, Brink and Hunted) and the soon to be released Rage and Skyrim will all be using Steamworks.

It is probably safe to say that Prey 2 and Dishonered will use it too.

agreed with above comment

Excellent news! GFWL is so horrible, and I'm not just spouting cliches here. GFWL seriously degrades enjoyment of a game. It needs to die.

Anyway, Steamworks is the best thing we have on PC. Although I sort of liked the old days when games were self-contained...oh well.

JuliusMagnus said:

It's pretty clear that in the foreseable future all Bethesda Softworks games will have Steamworks.

It's a good choice from their perspective, they are just in the third year of their ambition to become a large publisher and they don't have the resources/knowledge to develop their own DRM/CommunityPortal scheme like Ubisoft and EA have done.

I have no opinion on Games for Windows Live but apparently Bethesda wasn't impressed with the support or how it worked when Fallout 3 used it.

The last three games (Fallout:NV, Brink and Hunted) and the soon to be released Rage and Skyrim will all be using Steamworks.

It is probably safe to say that Prey 2 and Dishonered will use it too.

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Excellent point, Julius. I hadn't considered the cost involved to develop their own DRM, but I completely agree.

I don't really get the hate for GFWL in Fallout 3 because you could completely ignore it. Set it to display nothing and never activate through it and the game works fine. FO3 was actually DRM free because you could run the exe without the disc in the drive, just avoid the launcher. Even the DLC was DRM free!

Now-a-days GFWL does use mandatory online activation though, and Steam is better, so whatevs.

None of these DRM methods really bother me, I can crack them should the companies ever die. Only persistent online connection DRM makes me angry because it harms my gameplay experience and pushes company control too forcefully.

JuliusMagnus said:

It's pretty clear that in the foreseable future all Bethesda Softworks games will have Steamworks.

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Strangely Hunted: The Demon's Forge did not use Steamworks, but Gamespy.

Well, that's disappointing. Why didn't the annonce this earlier? The game is mere months away. I thought I'd read that there wouldn't be intrusive DRM? (running a DRM-client to play a single player game is intrusive in my book). I'm amazed that no one views Steam's increasing dominance as a game DRM enforecment system with any suspicion or unease.

booboo said:

Well, that's disappointing. Why didn't the annonce this earlier? The game is mere months away. I thought I'd read that there wouldn't be intrusive DRM? (running a DRM-client to play a single player game is intrusive in my book). I'm amazed that no one views Steam's increasing dominance as a game DRM enforecment system with any suspicion or unease.

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I do but people are sheep. Now with EA bringing Orgin pretty soon every game will need a DRM-client to play. I dont like it but I'm in the minority and so are people like me.

booboo said:

Well, that's disappointing. Why didn't the annonce this earlier? The game is mere months away. I thought I'd read that there wouldn't be intrusive DRM? (running a DRM-client to play a single player game is intrusive in my book). I'm amazed that no one views Steam's increasing dominance as a game DRM enforecment system with any suspicion or unease.

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Did they say they will require Steam to play? Most games in Steam require Steam to be installed, but after that you can play without Steam on (but having Steam on gives you access to additional out-of-game things like achievements and other perks, so you are encouraged to have it on)

booboo said:

Well, that's disappointing. Why didn't the annonce this earlier? The game is mere months away. I thought I'd read that there wouldn't be intrusive DRM? (running a DRM-client to play a single player game is intrusive in my book). I'm amazed that no one views Steam's increasing dominance as a game DRM enforecment system with any suspicion or unease.

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I'm with you.

Glad to see that they stuck with something I've already had for years. Hopefully, steam will have a really nice preorder bundle for Skyrim.

I am resigned to the fact that new games are going to have some of DRM so I just put up with it...

However a monopoly is never a good thing even for DRMs so I hope other STEAM like DRM system becomes popular and a viable alternative.

Couchpotato said:

I do but people are sheep. Now with EA bringing Orgin pretty soon every game will need a DRM-client to play. I dont like it but I'm in the minority and so are people like me.

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You don't have to use Origin to start a game downloaded through Origin and clicking the icon on your desktop doesn't start up Origin either.

lostforever said:

I am resigned to the fact that new games are going to have some of DRM so I just put up with it…

However a monopoly is never a good thing even for DRMs so I hope other STEAM like DRM system becomes popular and a viable alternative.

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The problem is for digital download sites more is not good. It's far easier to have them all in one. Now if they want to do their DRM on other systems fine, I just don't want to get into a situation (like EA is really pushing for) where games will be fragmented among multiple download services. I guarantee you if EA gets their way it will be a worse system for everyone and will squeeze the small to mid level developers out because they aren't going to get the traffic viewing their games that they do when the majority of people are just going to one single games portal.

Also, as far as monopolies on DRM Securom pretty much held that for a long time and no one was complaining. They complained about the DRM yes, but not the fact that they were the ones doing it the majority of the time.

booboo said:

Well, that's disappointing. Why didn't the annonce this earlier? The game is mere months away. I thought I'd read that there wouldn't be intrusive DRM? (running a DRM-client to play a single player game is intrusive in my book). I'm amazed that no one views Steam's increasing dominance as a game DRM enforecment system with any suspicion or unease.

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The majority of people like Steam and don't consider it intrusive, so you can't expect them to complain. I agree with you more than them, but capitalism means majority rule.

booboo said:

I'm amazed that no one views Steam's increasing dominance as a game DRM enforecment system with any suspicion or unease.

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One of the sheep reporting in here. I can certainly understand if you don't like Steam - even if I personally like it - but of what should I be suspicious?

I have to say that I am a convert after really using Steam and discovering for myself how convenient and unobtrusive it really is.

I used to dislike Steam because people on some forums I frequent, like this one, ranted against it like it was the anti-Christ, so I thought it must be bad. I mean DRM=evil. We all hate it. Having to be connected to the net to play is limiting etc etc.

Well, I actually tried out Steam begrudgingly when I got a couple of games that I didn't realize were Steamworks. I found I was able to mod them without issue. I was under a mistaken impression that would be a problem. I also found you could turn autoupdates off and run in offline mode.

When the summer sale came I felt like I got a lot of good deals. I also like that Steam has a front page on their portal and regularly features various new releases and specials. I find they are pretty even and will equally give space to promote small indie games or the large titles. I have found out about and purchased a number of indie games through Steam that I otherwise would not have known about. I suppose I could have followed blogs or the like but it's really easy just to have one place to go to.

Speaking of that, as I got more and more games, I can't tell you how convenient it is to have just one place for all my games and know that I can redownload the games (and in some cases the saves) if I ever need to. Auto-patching for me was also a great feature. It may not be a big deal to hunt down patches for one or two games but for many it's a hassle. I found the time saving and convenience features to be useful and I wondered why someone didn't do this before and why I didn't use it before.

As far as DRM goes, I can only speak personally, but I have never had any issues with Steam's DRM slowing my system down or giving me crashes or not letting me run games or DLC. I have had all of the above problems with other implementations of DLC like securom, tagis and Bioware's implementation.

Now I'm not saying anyone else needs to be converted or whatever. Seriously, do what you want. If you want to crack it to run without Steam crack it (but do buy the games please). If you don't want to buy it because of Steam then don't buy it; find something else. I do think it might not be a bad idea for people to give Steam a chance though. I used to dislike Steam because of the idea of it, or rather my idea (via others) of it but once I used it I found I really like the reality of Steam.

The other thing I wanted to add is that I like what Bethesda is doing with Steam. Now I realize I am not always the biggest Bethesda supporter and I don't care for some of the things they do, but they recently updated some of their older games like Oblivion and Morrowind to add the Steam cloud save feature. How many companies are still adding features to 10 year old games? I wish I had that feature long ago because I had some old saves where I put many hours in for both games that I wouldn't mind playing again but have long since lost.

I love Steam, I just dislike the idea of games expiring someday. They say they will patch Steam out if they ever close, but you can't really trust that. Plenty of online portals have closed without removing DRM.

That said on an open platform like the PC it doesn't really matter. These games will always be made playable by someone.

Yeah, I'm not too concerned. Either they will do it officially or someone will do it unofficially.