Ahead of their release plans announcement, Bohemia Interactive has revealed that Valve’s Steam will be required to play Arma 3. In a developer’s blog post, Project Lead Joris-Jan van ‘t Land explains the studio’s motivations, stating that the game could otherwise not be released in 2013.
As we stand on the verge of revealing our plans for Arma 3, there is one big topic we'd like to get out there first. 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 Španěl, was clear: do all we can to release Arma 3 in 2013.
One of the steps in this plan has been to select Valve's Steam as our primary platform. Not only is Arma 3 PC-exclusive, but now we have decided to make it Steam-exclusive as well. Since we expect this will upset some of our fans, I'd like to take the time to honestly explain our motivations.
The bottom-line: we feel that without going Steam-exclusive, we would not be able to release Arma 3 in 2013.
Prague, Czech Republic February 15th 2013 - Bohemia Interactive, the award-winning independent Czech development studio, is delighted to announce the release of Arma2: Complete Collection, finally available as one complete package fans new and old alike can experience all that Arma2 has to offer.