To be fair, I've already thought about this a lot.

EDIT: And a good thing too. If this had happened to me when I was a teenager, I'd probably have spitefully done everything in my power to encourage people to play the pirated TBS2 instead of paying. (I'm generally a fairly laid-back guy, but I have a vengeful streak to my personality that comes out when someone tries to screw me over and I wind up not caring how much of my own time I waste as long as I ensure that they lost more than they gained by cheating me.)

People, people...

It's quite obvious that Banner Saga 2 will inevitably arrive on GOG. Unfortunately it will take probably one or two years before it arrives here.
Right now the greedy devs are just milking the DRM cow to see if they can get extra $.

I've been playing video games for more than 30 years and DRM or copy protection was never a solution against piracy of any sort. It's only a hidrance to the honest buyer.

There are more shady reasons behind DRM than the "piracy" argument. That's a lame excuse that no-one in the industry still believes anymore. Doom was one of most pirated games in the world. Yet it still made enough money for Carmack and Romero to buy a Ferrari each in 1993.

What really scares me is why the devs and publishers still feel the need to enforce the "always-online" DRMs for playing games. Makes me wonder what Valve does with its users online data.

Its called advertising, and its worth more than the selling of any product.

You mean they sell the info gathered by "steamworks" to the other companies, is that it?

Anything and everything. Just the mere mention above has probably linked these ids to that tag now.

they don't, by the way.

Most of the data gathered by Steamworks is used by the developers of the games, and the data is anonymised and chunked. It is actually a very good tool for developers to see how long on average the game is being played, and by which groups and so on.

achievements, in particular, is quite powerful, because it shows the developer exactly at what points players starts to fall off (a good indication that something is wrong there), how large % of players manage to complete the game and so on. Quite invaluable data to use for fixes, patches and lessons for next game.

On top of this, you also have the Steam Hardware survey (which is optional ,and also anonymised and chunked), which is another good indication on the status of the player base.

Overall, it is very good tools for the developers.

Analytics are only as good as the analysis and given the analysis you typically see from such things it will just get used to further pre-existing notions.

It works towards a kind of manipulative game design where the notion of fun is lost to the quantifiable data points like the criticism you see of the metrics used in analysing video codecs, where the numbers get better but the video doesn't look better. You end up with a game that you play religiously for hours and when you get to the end realise you hated every second.

I hate Stoic for that. The game was cracked at the same day of the release. DRM can not prevent software piracy. And Stoic does not understand that....

They changed their minds quick, it's on gog's upcoming tab.

Yup. Makes me wonder if it was because of the stink raised or whether the whole thing was a misunderstanding in the first place...

Glad it is though, as I would love to see the saga to it's conclusion.

I can't believe it... in their answer-email they wrote me they don't intend to bring the game drm-free, they not even considered a drm-free version at all etc. and now this. Is there an official statement from Stoic? I'm not sure if I should be euphoric or suspicious. The answer they've sent me left a bitter taste in my opinion about their attitude.

If the upcoming tab is to be believed, we will both be glad that we didn't sell our Humble keys! If it does release here, I intend to ask the Stoic representative on KS what their definition of "not being planned" actually means.

Good news! It seems like they've reconsidered their position so congratulations, because Stoic is in right way. I hope the game come here in the very soon and it'll be an instabuy for sure :)

Genesis, Genesis, Genesis!
Oh, sorry, wrong Band, I meant:

Yes, Yes, Yes!

How does it happend? Did they realize game is being pirated EITHER way?