Ubisoft has released the potential blockbuster Prince of Persia for the PC without any DRM but the company says it still expects piracy to be high.
A post on the official Ubisoft forum from Ubisoft community development manager Chris Easton, notes the decision.
“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. A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP [Prince of Persia] PC has no DRM we`ll see how truthful people actually are.”
However, he still expects piracy to be high. How “truthful” will people be? “Not very, I imagine,” he concluded.
When a user posted that developers need to stop blaming piracy for everthing and that “If you make a good game, people will buy it,” Easton remarks:
“Well this time we’ve got a good game with no DRM so there really is no reason to pirate it, right? We should expect good sales because there’s no reason to not buy a copy.”
“I’m fairly skeptical as it’s an easy answer given by a lot of people why they pirate games but if you’re going to buy this game instead of pirating purely because of no DRM in the store version, then if I ever meet you in real life I’ll happily shake your hand and buy you a drink.”
Result for: pirate games
Crytek, the developer of the hit game Crysis, has announced that it will no longer be PC exclusive in the future, citing growing piracy as the reason why.
For those not into computer gaming, Crysis was arguably one of the most highly praised PC-exclusive for 2007 and even one some awards for its stunning graphics.
In an interview with the magazine PC Play, the studio’s director and founder, Cevat Yerli noted that there are a number of problems besetting his studio, the worst of which is growing piracy.
“We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin… PC gamers that pirate games, inherently destroy the platform.
“Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us, and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.”
After that answer Yerli was asked if Crysis would be ported to consoles in the near future. Unfortunately not added Yerli, stating that it would be nearly “impossible,” and that the game would have to be “largely changed to bring it to Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.”
