Focus Home Interactive and Valve have announced an agreement today to bring TrackMania United to Steam, with a discounted pre-order rate at that. Those who pre-order the game on Steam by June 14th will receive a 20% discount off the regular price. TrackMania United will also be available via traditional retail.
“Trackmania has captured the attention of both racing and action gamers across Europe and the world,” said Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve. “The launch of this title not only expands Steam’s collection of racing titles, but also continues in the Steam tradition of introducing innovative titles to our worldwide audience of over 13 million customers and growing.”
“As an unrivaled digital distribution platform, Steam is the ideal vehicle to introduce TrackMania United to audiences around the world,” said Cedric Lagarrigue, Chief Operating Officer at Focus Home Interactive.
It still comes infected with StarForce malware (can’t think why, since there’s no CD) so I’m still not going to buy it.
That is strange that it’ll still come with StarForce in its downloadable form. I’ve personally never had any issues with games that have used StarForce, so it doesn’t bother me too much, at least not enough to boycott a game just because it has it. I definitely understand why most hate it and do wish it wasn’t used.
How do you know its still got starforce on steam? its not out yet stupid!
OK, to settle this StarForce issue, TMU on Steam does not, I repeat, DOES NOT install StarForce on your system, so I’m not sure where you heard that it still does. Here is the official quote on the matter I received today from a PR rep for the game:
”
The Steam version of TrackMania United is protected by Steam and not Starforce. Starforce is used by Focus for protection of TrackMania United’s game specific data. The Steam version of Track Mania United does not include the copy protection drivers from Starforce. Therefore, any issues that might be associated with the copy protection drivers in Starforce do not apply in this case.”
Matt, the place ‘where I got this from’ is the product information page on Steam. ‘This game includes Starforce security software’ (direct quote from Steam). Pretty unambiguous to me. However, Valve have now removed Starforce malware from the Steam version, so problem solved.