Ubisoft Tests Gamers: No DRM in Prince of Persia (PC). Will You Still Pirate It?

Sat, Dec 13, 2008

anti-drm5

Remember when Ubisoft released Assassin’s Creed on the PC, and were dismayed when it went on to become one of the most pirated PC games? Even though they loaded it up with DRM? Ubi remembers, and they remember how plenty of pirates blamed that very DRM for their downloads. So with Prince of Persia, they’re asking pirates to put their money where their mouth is; Prince of Persia PC won’t have any DRM whatsoever.

“A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games,” writes Ubisoft community manager Chris Easton in a post on their official forums, “but as PoP PC has no DRM we`ll see how truthful people actually are. Not very, I imagine.”

Will the lack of DRM significantly reduce piracy of Prince of Persia and increase its sales? Hard to say, but I’m guessing not really. The fact is, people will pirate what they want to pirate, and chances are PoP will be pirated and sell just as often as it would have even if Ubi included draconian DRM. Publishers and developers don’t seem to realize that not every pirated copy is a lost sale, and not every lost sale leads to piracy. I know lots of people who do pirate because of issues like DRM, but for most, it’s just an easy excuse. And even with DRM, pirates can easily get around it if anyone cares about the game at all.

The good news, though, is that the people who really are negatively impacted by DRM in games—legitimate owners—won’t have to deal with it this time around. Hopefully, the lack of a spike in piracy on Prince of Persia combined with some of the non-DRM success stories out there will convince the few stubborn companies that still swear by DRM to at least try giving it up. The only people it hurts are the people who bought your games, people.

(PS, if you're ever in Montreal and want a free drink, just shoot Chris an email and tell him you've never pirated a game.)

Assassin's Creed, Chris Easton, DRM, piracy, Prince of Persia, SecuROM, Ubisoft

This post was written by:

Brendon Lindsey - who has written 274 posts on GameCyte.

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4 Comments For This Post

Alexander Galerakis Says:
December 13th, 2008 at 12:59 am
What a sad excuse... Yes, a lot of people complain about DRM, and you'll likely earn a few sales (and how are you going to measure, you CAN'T know how many sales you'd get if you HAD used DRM for THIS particular game), but you aren't going to convince hardcore pirates to change their ways, so coming up with piracy stats after a couple of weeks, or however long, isn't going to prove anything. ANYTHING.

If he wants to try to make that kind of point, then should we also bring up Spore, one of the most protected games, and how it shot up to being the number 1 pirated game? Then that should prove DRM is 100% useless and does only affect legitimate customers.

That's the main point really, that DRM hurts consumers and doesn't hinder pirates, not that if you have no DRM your sales will shoot up sky high and that NOBODY will pirate your game or something like that. Where did he hear that?

Seriously, how can people in the industry be this clueless and make that kind of ignorant statements? It almost seems like they only made this choice to then talk about how pirated their game was (with imaginary numbers as usual) and use it to justify any crappy DRM they decide to use from now on. I still haven't forgiven them for using Starforce in their older titles, that's one reason I never played the Sands of Time sequels -- though from what I gather they weren't as good as SoT anyway -- I wasn't going to ruin another DVD drive while pirates enjoyed full freedom and no risks. So yeah, they lost two sales there, but I'm sure piracy rate wasn't affected, just as it won't be affected now with the no-DRM decision.

Ugh, rant over.
Solarian Knight Says:
December 13th, 2008 at 1:53 am
Actually, this may be a blessing in disguise for Ubisoft. There's a certain portion of sales that will be lost to piracy, whether or not DRM is included. Just how effective the DRM would be is a matter of speculation, but I want to instead put forth an alternative theory.

Perhaps Ubisoft will end up making more money on the game, even if it is pirated extensively, because they do not have to pay Macrovision or whoever they would normally pay for the DRM license. I cannot pretend to have knowledge of how much they would have paid, nor would have made if they did use DRM, but it's still interesting to think about.

Alexander, StarForce isn't as bad as everyone claims it is. Yes, it installs a device driver. Yes, the device driver runs at ring 0. However, it was nowhere near as dangerous as the Sony rootkit that would stealth any file name that was preceded with the string "$sys$". Most of the StarForce debacle is a great deal of misinformation and outright lying.
Alexander Galerakis Says:
December 13th, 2008 at 2:22 am
I don't care about the StarForce debacle, I only care about its effects on me. Later versions did perhaps improve, earlier versions did cause problems like I mention in my last post for a great deal of people. I'm not going to test if they've improved though, and I doubt you have done extensive testing also. But even if you have, guess what, software doesn't affect every configuration in the same way. I'd say your opinion of the "debacle" is pure speculation -- though you might be right as I didn't follow it closely -- but I'm glad no company uses Starforce lately. At least on the games I've bought.

And yes, Ubisoft will make more money on this game. The point is, will they be smart enough to appreciate it, or will they just look at the unchanged piracy statistics and resort to more DRM in the future? From the statements in the article, it seems that the guy expects zero piracy thanks to the no-DRM policy as the only suitable outcome. We all -- him included -- know that won't happen so, it seems they'll merely use that to justify further use of DRM in the future, even though Spore and just about any other game in existence proves DRM is really ineffective and a waste of money, time and legitimate users' patience.
Sean Hollister Says:
December 13th, 2008 at 2:47 am
My philosophy is this: if the game is available for both console and PC, the PC version doesn't have DRM and comes from a company without a reputation for shoddy ports, I'll buy the PC version every time.

Why? Because with the decent computer I have now, they'll probably look the same... and four years down the road, when I can run it on maximum settings and bump up the anti-aliasing, it'll look far better. I actually happen to own Sands of Time on PC and PS2, but I'm not really sure why I bother holding onto the PS2 version at this point.

Thing is, if Ubisoft told us 3-4 weeks ago that Prince of Persia PC wouldn't have DRM, I'd be all over it. But like everyone else who absolutely had to have Prince of Persia right away, I bought my copy on console last week.

It strikes me as rather odd that they're announcing this at the last minute.

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