Yes, you read that right. While most companies with shooters on the market promptly drop support for the older game once the newer one in the series is released, Bohemia Interactive continues to support the older Arma II, in spite of the release of Arma III last year. But then again, they’re not like most other companies, are they? And neither is Arma like most other shooters.
Update 1.63 for Operation Arrowhead generally exists to move the matchmaking of the game from Gamespy’s servers to Steam. Remember, Gamespy recently shut down its servers for online play, and while that caused a lot of well liked online games to go dark, a lot of developers pledged to come up with alternate solutions to keep the online communities on their Gamespy dependent games alive.
Because this update moves matchmaking to Steam, it must also be downloaded through Steam. If you have a retail copy of the game (and therefore one that can’t receive Steam updates) you can simply activate its key on Steam, and download the game from there (and then proceed to update it there).
Bohemia has also announced an alternate solution for their other games affected by the Gamespy shutdown, which may be accessed here.
Gotta say, Bohemia’s commitment to its older games and its community is absolutely admirable here.