DRM News

When Crystal Dynamics rolls out what they hope will be a rebirth of the Tomb Raider franchise with the release of Lara Croft : Guardian of Light later this year, the PC version will do so with Steamworks as part of the deal.

Global brand manager Karl Stewart had the following to say to CVG :

"We’ve gone down the road of implementing Steam DRM where we’ve committed to the US being an exclusive and we’re going to make a decision as to whether or not we’ll use different distribution channels," he said.

"But I think for now, because it’s online and it’s got leader boards, Steam offers us the best opportunity to hit a broad audience with that type of game."

"Tomb Raider’s got a huge following, when you look at Tomb Raider games in the past and how many times they’ve been pirated. I go on some BitTorrent sites and within the first 48 hours there’s like four hundred thousand downloads, it’s crazy," he said.

"Given that Tomb Raider has traditionally been a single player game we have the risk of people saying, ‘I never really wanted to play the online mode, I just want to play as a single player’ You don’t have to do the leader boards, you don’t have to go online. We had to mitigate those risks by doing things like DRM."

This new Tomb Raider game will be download only, and is more of a co-op adventure title with an isometric camera view.

Steamworks implementation means that the game must be downloaded, installed and run through Steam.