Okay Geek Farm
Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition on PC doing away with restrictive, anti-piracy measures
Okay Geek Team
Not sure if you heard or not, but the PC version of Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition was originally supposed to ship with DRM features that would seriously hinder the offline experience unless otherwise signed-in to a Games for Windows Live account. One of the restrictions considered was to limit offline players to only to 15 characters out of the total 39 character line up! Needless to say, this ticked off a lot of fighters who main as Dan (just kidding), and so Capcom is hadouken’ing their way outta of the situation by getting rid of it entirely.
First Call of Duty is thinking of charging for their online play, and now Capcom wants to penalize those who don’t play online? What’s happened to the gaming universe all of a sudden! Yes, I’m aware that this was meant to be a counter-measure to pirates who might’ve torrented the game illegally and all that, but there’s got to be another way aside from punishing the players who actually threw down the cash for it.
On Capcom Unity’s blog, Capcom US VP Chris Svensson detailed how a title update after the game’s initial launch will remedy the issue of these DRM restrictions:
Christian “Sven” Svensson
Capcom USA Vice President“Last week, when I put up a blog about all of the great new features and thoughtful PC-specific design considerations that were added to Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition PC, many folks ignored the goodness therein and zeroed in on the implementation of the offline mode and its limitations.
This in turn gave rise to threads on our boards and others, which in turn spawnedstories at several web outlets lamenting our approach for protecting the content. To try and make this discussion more constructive, I engaged our fans in the Ask Capcom forum on how best to improve the situation.
The argument that legitimate users would have a worse experience than pirates was the loudest and most convincing. We certainly don’t want that to be the case and that was never our intention.
So we’ve heard you loud and clear and here’s what we’re going to do about it:
Shortly after launch (it might even be at launch, but we’ll see how submission timing and approval goes) we will roll out a small title update that will completely remove the character limitations for offline mode. That is to say, once you’ve updated, you will be able to use all 39 characters when not connected to the Internet to practice your combo timings, have some fun with a friend on a laptop, or whatever while offline.
As one would logically expect, to get any of the benefits of the online services (online multiplayer, replay sharing/watching, achievements, etc.) you must be online and logged in.
With that hurdle hopefully now cleared, I hope that we can make Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition the most successful fighting game ever on PC. I’d certainly like to continue to grow our audience on the largest platform in the world.
Thanks again for your passion, input and support.
/hadouken”
It’s sad to see that games companies have subjected players to these kinda of flip-flop situations, and you’d think that by now there’d be a solution to this whole anti-piracy thing. Well, regardless Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition releases as an update for current Super Street Fighter IV owners on June 7th via Xbox Live and PSN, and the retail “disc” version will go on sale in stores June 24th.
