In order to fight the ever increasing problem of piracy, Crystal Dynamics the developers behind Lara Croft: Guardian of Light will deploy the PC version on Steam. Global brand manager Karl Stewart has said that: “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, 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.
“The biggest fear we have is that people are going to be inquisitive and are going to download it.
“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.”