magerette
Hedgewitch
- Joined
- October 18, 2006
- Messages
- 7,834
blatantninja writes in to point out a recent article on the piracy issue at tech website Ars Technica detailing Ubisoft's decision not to include copy-protection on its next PC entry in the well-known Prince of Persia series:
The conclusion speculates:Let me fill you in on something we've learned in the past year: PC gamers do not like DRM. EA was reminded of this the hard way, and every PC release that includes SecuROM inspires legions of gamers to claim that they'll refuse to buy the game because of the program's inclusion. Ubisoft has heard you, and the retail, boxed version of Prince of Persia on the PC has absolutely no copy protection. It's doubtful the company is doing this out of the goodness of its heart, however.
"You're right when you say that when people want to pirate the game they will but DRM is there to make it as difficult as possible for pirates to make copies of our games," Community Manager UbiRazz wrote on the official forum. "A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP PC has no DRM we'll see how truthful people actually are. Not very, I imagine." He goes on to note that only retail copies are DRM-less, since the Steam-bought version will, of course, [have] to be tied to Steam's authentication system.
Ubisoft has already had its eye blackened a few times recently when it comes to DRM and piracy. Assassin's Creed suffered from a shoddy PC port, and the game constantly tried to authenticate online, causing problems for players who bought the game... Gamers often had to shut off their Internet connection to play the game.
In another case, a patch for Rainbow Six Vegas 2 broke the game for some people; the game asked for the CD to be placed in the drive, and of course players who purchased the game online had no disc...
More information.So what will happen with Prince of Persia? The game will be pirated. The game would have been pirated no matter what DRM was placed in the game, naturally, but by removing DRM and waiting for the title to hit the torrents, Ubisoft has given itself an out whenever they're taken to task over DRM in the future. "We tried removing it, and we lost money!" will be an easy answer from now on...
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2006
- Messages
- 7,834