Prince of Persia’s Got No DRM… It’s a Tarp?

Ubisoft releasing a game with no DRM? No crippling install limit or broken rootkit? Has the world gone mad? Possibly, but probably not.

As Ben Kuchera points out in his article on Ars Technica, this could all be a rather cunning ruse by Ubisoft to prove DRM works. Pirates often claim that the reason they wear an eye patch and shout “Arrr” is due to the often crappy DRM that comes free with most PC games. By providing a game without DRM, Ubisoft are running an experiment to prove them wrong.

Writing on the official Ubisoft forum, pessimistic Community Manager UbiRazz said: “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.”

So, either Ubisoft will sell more copies, or they have a great excuse to put DLC on everything else, ever. I think Kuchera sums it up best.

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.

Via: Game Politics