Bohemia Interactive has released a statement on the anti-piracy measures being featured in its new flight simulation, Take On Helicopters. The game features a degradation system whereby gameplay mechanics and art assets degrade over time, eventually making the game unplayable. Checkout their full statement below for more information!
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Prague, Czech Republic November 09th 2011 – Bohemia Interactive, the award-winning independent Czech development studio, is lifting the lid on a rarely discussed topic, copy protection.
On October 27th we released the initial digital launch version of Take On Helicopters to digital distribution partners around the world, we’re very proud of the title not only because it’s a departure from the military games we’ve worked on in the past but also in how it combines storytelling with realistic helicopter flight mechanics, it was the result of a lot of thought and many long hours of hard work.
One of the aspects of developing any game in this modern age is how to protect it, it’s widely known that as soon as any game is released there are those who are looking to download it for free, who for whatever reason feel that their right is to not pay for something despite all the thousands of hours that have gone into its development. Obviously game developers have a responsibility to themselves to try to protect their company’s future, but also a responsibility to the community that supports them by buying their titles, no gamer who has spent their hard earned money to buy a game wants to be playing MP against others who didn’t buy their game, no add-on maker wants to have things they created over countless hours downloaded and used by people who didn’t buy the game it’s intended for. That is why we try to come up with unique and irrefutable ways to stop people from playing our games without paying for them, that’s why Take On Helicopters shipped with our unique anti-piracy countermeasures.
Dating back as far as 2001 with the original Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis developed by Bohemia Interactive, the antipiracy countermeasures have been unique and whilst not initially stopped the illegal downloader from playing the game they only get a small taste before many aspects of the game, including performance start to degrade, and as the original line from Operation Flashpoint stated “Original games don’t fade”, if you don’t buy, you don’t get to enjoy!
Bohemia Interactive deploys various antipiracy countermeasures in its titles and Take On Helicopters is no exception, some users have reported morphed/watery image degradation (see
http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=126991 ). The original version of Take On Helicopters does not suffer from this degradation of visual quality. Piracy is a big problem for Bohemia Interactive, as an independent PC developer, and we’re trying to focus our support as much as possible towards users of legitimate copies. Counterfeit copies of our games may degrade and, moral aspects aside, we certainly recommend only playing the original version. We have a free public demo version of Take On Helicopters in the development pipeline for those that prefer to test it before buying.
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