*Fallout 4 Discs for PC Intentionally Missing Content to Thwart Piracy

For those of you who prefer to hold PC games in your hand through physical media, you'll still need to hop on Steam and download content in order to play Fallout 4. Why?

It turns out the disc is missing content. Pete Hines, Vice President of Public Relations and Marketing for Bethesda, revealed as much on Twitter when asked if it would be possible to install Fallout 4 from discs

(as opposed to them simply containing a Steam installer).

"Yes, though you will still have to download from Steam. The disc doesn't contain the entire game," Hines said.

When pressed on why Fallout 4 media for consoles contain the entire game while the PC version doesn't,

Hines said: it's because "PC requires activation on Steam. Console does not. Console ship on Blu-rays, PC ships on DVDs."

That's only half the explanation. Hines told the rest of the story in a follow-up Twitter post, noting that the reason is, quite simply, "piracy."

(* negative statements from users have been Intentionally removed, to not compromise the topic. !!! )

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Nothing revealed so far about the remaining game data that will be downloaded through steam.

Also as mentioned above, there will be a huge day one patch. !!!

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Bethesda's open world titles have a history of bad performance on PlayStation, with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout 3 both launching in shamefully shoddy condition on Sony's last-gen console.

Having said that, fears will undoubtedly remain until we're all playing the post-apocalyptic release for ourselves, but that hasn't stopped Bethesda's VP of marketing, Pete Hines, from commenting on the PS4 version of the game.

When asked if he was aware of any performance issues - most notably frame rate dips - Hines replied by saying that the title runs at a "solid 30 FPS".

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I thing that's all the news we know so far...

And console games don't need patching? Joke of the decade.

You really expect system like Steam go down in 10-15 years? You're being naive. Steam is hammering tons of profit, has been for all of its existance. Won't be going down that quick. In 50 years? Maybe. In 10-15? Not likely.

The physical medium is not future proof. In fact it has much shorter life expectancy than digital. What happens when the disc of your precious physical only game breaks? That can easily happen no matter how carefully you handle it. Once broken, no more gaming. In digital form there's the fallback solution, you can download the game as many times you want.

You mean like pretty much every Steam game in the past 5-10 years? (And a number of other games from the "online copy protection" era...)

Having the final bit of an install come from an online server - or having an online access needed to register your product code & de-encrypt an on-disc archive - is nothing new, or surprising.

You do know there was going to be a day 1 patch no matter what, right? I've been expecting to need to download something. Just like console games these days have to download stuff when you first get them. Even though they have Blu-Ray drives & nice big discs that they get games physically on.

Pete Hines is aware that the majority of PC games actually do not get pirated until AFTER release and that it is console games that get pirated earlier isn't he?

> Pete Hines is aware that the majority of PC games actually do not get pirated...<

I thing you are not aware what's really going on, on the piracy market. Are you ??? (no offence)

IT'S A CANCER !!!

However nothing it's safe, even with or without steam. If the full game has been downloaded to any mass storage media, anything is possible !!!

The only secure way for not pirating the game, is to play it straight from a - lets say "Game Server" with your personal authentication code, and nothing downloaded to any mass storage media.

But as you can imagine, that has some complications...and it's easier said than done.

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As for the consoles...

The only platform with piracy actually, is the PC. Console games are much bigger in size than PC, therefore Sony (and now Microsoft) using single or dual layer Blu-ray discs, something you rarely see on PC.

So it's easier to download a PC game than a console one, unless you mean what happened with the XBOX 360 DVD games. !!!

> You mean like pretty much every Steam game in the past 5-10 years? (And a number of other games from the "online copy protection" era...)

Having the final bit of an install come from an online server - or having an online access needed to register your product code & de-encrypt an on-disc archive - is nothing new, or surprising. <

That was from the article i posted, and not related to me anyway...

Actually I'm quite aware. PC games do not get pirated until well after release, there are few occasions, very few, where a PC game was pirated before release. Console games get pirated before release 99 times out of a hundred. Publishers provide no demos and just bank on people rolling the dice, yet publishers and developers who have faith in their product not only release the entire game on the disc they do so w/o drm. Point? The people who are going to pirate will do so without regard to having the game on day one.

Has absolutely nothing to do with my initial statement. What does not putting the entire game on the disc for the PC accomplish? A small delay for those who had no intention to buy it to begin with.

You have got to be kidding. Piracy was/is rampant as ever on the 360 and PS3 with many, many shops offering to mod consoles for dirt cheap. All bit title releases on those platforms were leaked early and spread like a cancer as you say among the torrent and iso sites. Now you could say that is true for the current console since TMU they have not been hacked, yet. But please don't claim I or anyone else is not aware of what is going on within the piracy market if you are going to chose to ignore facts pertaining to console piracy.

How is downloading X amount of GB's easier for someone with a cap or slow internet easier? As I said contrary to popular belief godly internet connections are not available everywhere. The dev's

> How is downloading X amount of GB's easier for someone with a cap or slow internet easier? <

That's a misunderstanding. !!!

I did mention the enormous GB's of data of a console game versus the much less space that is required on a disc for a PC game.

I didn't mentioned anything about downloading...

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> Piracy was/is rampant as ever on the 360 and PS3 with many, many shops offering to mod consoles for dirt cheap. <

Did i say anything different ??? (even so, it did not last long for the PS3 console anyway.)

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> Has absolutely nothing to do with my initial statement. What does not putting the entire game on the disc for the PC accomplish? A small delay for those who had no intention to buy it to begin with. <

I thing you don't understood what i mean !!!

The game will be streamed to you, and not downloaded at all.

Have you ever heard about gaming "from the cloud". It's an online stream, which doesn't require the full game to ever be downloaded.

User input is uploaded to the server, rendered frames and sound-data is downloaded to the browser. This reduces processing load on your local machine as well,

but you need a REALLY good internet connection to do this. !!!

So, just say good buy to physical disks. THE ONLY WAY STOPPING PIRACY FOR GOOD...

You will see, after 20 years there will be no more physical gaming disks to buy.

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At the end the goal is the same.: STOP THE PIRACY...and i don't wanna turn this thread into controversy anyway...

Unfortunately the reason to not ship the whole game on disc but also requiring steam download makes sense to avoid unwanted piracy of game content.

I ordered the Pip boy so yeah going to be a pain to get the game and then having to wait once i get the game home from the store but we have waited this long what is 1 more hour or 2 running away to hide.

I'm leaning towards canceling my physical copy and just download the whole thing from Steam, because I have to anyway. The physical copy does have the SPECIAL poster...

man u really dont know, lol i know ppl here that pirate game for PS4 and Xbox one all the time, they just need to install it on the hard-drive of the Console.

Is hard to prevent piracy.

This practice isn’t something new: every PC game that comes with Steam activation requires you to download some data on day one.
But what worries me is this post

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/3pmx20/about_30gb_download_is_necessary_to_play_the/

This Hungarian retailer says: "According to the publisher , for the PC version there will be one DVD in the box that will install a smaller part of the game, but you will need to download a significant amount of data from steam to finish the installation. To install and run the game, you will need to download about 30 gigabytes of data."

Russian retailer also claims that the game comes with only one DVD

http://www.1c-interes.ru/catalog/all6963/20462674/

So, why the hell they can’t release it on multiple DVDs to make download smaller? 30 gb is basically whole game. It bugs me, especially when all recent games published by Bethesda were shipped on multiple DVDs (Evil Within and New Order had like 4 discs in the box).

I asked Pete on twitter to confirm "only one DVD" thing, but he didn’t respond.

Hmm, 30GB is a bit to much i guess.

It's almost the entire game...

The PC specs mentioning about 30GB HDD space.

Also Pete Hines stated there will be data on the disk (so nothing related to Metal Gear Solid V), just not the entire game.

Are those sources really accurate ???

I would suggest that they are not at all accurate. If Bethesda isn't confirming anything about the amount of data on the DVD, then I highly doubt that some Hungarian or Russian retailer has the inside scoop. I'm sure the DVD (or DVDs, we don't know that it's only one) will contain as much compressed data as they could fit, but most likely not the actual EXE file.

Of course, one question would be "why do Hungarian & Russian retailers know this detail, but seemingly no-one else?"

Eh, I certainly hope that we don't have to download some huge amount.

Another thing to ponder - what has Beth (publisher) done recently with other large games? Did any of their other recent releases need/get multiple discs? (Wolfenstein, Evil Within, Dishonored, etc)

Was just looking through some of my boxes for "larger" PC games, regardless of publisher. Rage got 3 discs, DA:Inquisition is on 4, SWTOR has 3. Can't seem to find my Bioshock Infinite case, but it apparently had 3.

Wolfenstein New Order was released on 4 dvd`s, same thing with Evil Within

Most recent Bethesda release - Wolfenstein: The Old Blood was also released on 4 dvd`s

> will contain as much compressed data as they could fit, but most likely not the actual EXE file. <

Compressed data are the key in that matter - therefore the no multiple discs release. (or even for production costs and time)

That's what i thing anyway...

Well, compression can only go so far... The other day I downloaded the new Director's Cut version of Wasteland 2. the download was a little under 8GB for a 15GB install size, so almost 50% compression for typical game content. For a game the size of Fallout 4, that's still going to be multiple DVDs to get most of the content into the physical release.

It would be nice if someone from Bethesda confirmed that there are multiple DVDs

So far, every Ukrainian or Russian retailer that I found claims that there is only 1 disk. Recently they released info on what would be included in standard edition:

1 disc with a game
A poster
A manual
A code to download game soundtrack

Edit: Polish retailers state the same thing

http://www.empik.com/fallout-4-bethesda-softworks,p1109664542,multimedia-p

Liczba no?ników: 1 (Disc count: 1)

...and when have they ever included a soundtrack download in one of their games? More and more, it looks like someone's making something up.

All retailers state that this is official information from the publisher - Bethesda

Btw maybe there is some US or UK store where we can check standard edition content?

Nothing on Amazon, Best Buy, or Gamestop about contents, number of discs, or included soundtracks. Nor on Bethesda's "order Fallout" page.

So we got some data on the disc but still have to download the rest thru steam.

https://twitter.com/DCDeacon/status/654763011677143041

http://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-4-will-require-a-steam-download-even-if-you-buy-it-on-disc/

Oops double post, so i delete mine...