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: ubisoft
According to a post on the official Ubisoft forum, it appears the French game publisher is looking to not fall into the same traps that Electronic Arts has with their hit game Spore which has been slammed for using restrictive SecuROM DRM.
For the upcoming expected blockbuster Far Cry 2, Ubisoft has admitted they will be using DRM, but with much less restrictions then Spore or Bioshock.
According to the Ubisoft Manager,
* You have five activations on three separate PCs.
* Uninstalling the game “refunds” an activation. This process is called “revoke”, so as long as you complete proper uninstall you will be able to install the game an unlimited number of times on 3 systems.
* You can upgrade your computer as many times as you want (using our revoke system)
* Ubisoft is committed to the support of our games, and additional activations can be provided.
* Ubisoft is committed to the long-term support of our games: you’ll always be able to play Far Cry 2.
The clear difference is that of the “revoke” feature. For an EA game, you never get any installations back, and you certainly don’t get up to 15 installations. You will lose one if your hard drives crash, but that is not as likely as someone wanting to upgrade, or reformat their OS.
