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There’s currently a lot of hubbabaloo on the forums about the new copy-protection method that Relic’s using for Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts. Before that though, there was a little bit of noise from people concerned that Relic was launching Opposing Fronts before it was ready. I was one of the people concerned about the game launching early.

I got a chance to air my concerns with Relic, and Josh Mosqueira’s answered some questions.

For those people concerned about the new authentication method, pay close attention to this portion of the article.

First it was critical for us to have a world-wide simultaneous ship. Not having one could have delayed the RTM (release to manufacture - UJ) date of Opposing Fronts but this was not a call we wanted to make. Why, piracy.

Not having a world-wide launch of OF means more opportunities for illegal copies of OF to flood the internet. Looking at the data that we have, piracy hurt the sales of CoH especially in regions that shipped CoH after the main release of the game.

We did not want the same to happen with OF so the decision to simultaneous ship was made. This is why the September 15th RTM existed in the first place - we wanted to give localization and operations enough time to wrap up so this is where the November ship date came from.

So, Relic got screwed by software piracy. I wonder if that would piss anyone off? It got me so mad I made angry words appear on people’s screens on the forums and I got a one week (delayed) suspension for it.

If folks have more questions for Josh, perhaps we can get him to answer. Post your comments in this post and let’s see if we can generate some answers. Don’t be angry like me :-)