Myself and many of my team members owe our careers to the open Arma platform. It's our job to detect the edge cases that pull players out from their immersion and solve them. But since we love the openness so much, we accept these imperfections. There are too many variables, combinations and situations to ever test for. In my opinion such game experience cannot be perfect and bug-free. In a way our biggest strength is our biggest weakness: the sandbox. We're trying to make the setup experience and first play session smoother. This was one of the things myself, co-creative director Jay Crowe, and the team really wanted to improve for Arma 3. Joris: Yes, I believe the criticism was deserved. RPS: The presentation of Arma 3 seems far slicker than in previous games - was this designed to address criticism of your previous games? Do you think Bohemia had earned a reputation for technical brilliance without production polish? Was that deserved? So far our decision is helping to achieve these ambitious goals, as seen by our Alpha release now. As a Project Lead I want to release the best game on time, as a designer I want to release the best platform to tinker with, and as a gamer I want to release the best game to explore and have memorable experiences in. Arma 3 will still sell via our sales platform, and other platforms, but every game does run through Steam. We have to accept we cannot do everything on our own. Rather, to remain independent we need to be pragmatic and use existing solutions where appropriate. We don't see this move as becoming less independent.

You cannot keep a team motivated for years and it's hard to keep the technology state-of-the-art. The requirement from ourselves to release in 2013 is not just a business decision this is important for the team as well. They will all unlock Arma 3's potential and longevity. Making the setup process smoother, having updates be more frequent and distributed quicker, being able to deliver mods and other user-generated content easier, and freeing up time for us to support important things like the SDK. I believe it's important to keep in mind that any benefit to us as developer, should be a benefit to players. To sum it up: we took an honest look at where we were, weighed up all of our options, and decided on this as the best way forward for Arma 3. Joris: Most of the reasoning is covered in our development blog. What changed? Are you admitting to defeat to the Valve empire? RPS: Can you explain your decision to make Arma 3 a Steam exclusive? I had always seen Bohemia as fiercely independent, with you developing your own sales platform and so on. But before we get to that, let's see what project lead Joris-Jan van ‘t Land has to say about the state of the project, and the plans for this early release of the madly anticipated sandbox soldier sim. I've been playing the Arma 3 alpha! I know.

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