It'll certainly cut down on the piracy as you won't get people going "I want to play the game but I don't want it to install invasive DRM that invalidates my hardware/software, and the only way to do that is with a pirate game"

It won't eliminate piracy, because there will always be people who just want the game for free, but you won't get it on anywhere near the scale of DRMd titles.

And as for DRM "making it as hard as possible to pirate" a game, exactly how far before retail was Spore cracked? and how soon after release was GTA IV? it doesn't even slow down the pirates, it just makes them more determined to crack your game.Posted at 7:29PM on Dec 11th 2008 by Stefan

A nice change from the last PoP game, which used StarForce. Ironically it took groups a very very very long time to crack it (year+), but it was an unacceptable form of DRM on the consumer end.Posted at 7:30PM on Dec 11th 2008 by Sokkratez

There's no way to tell how many people actually steal the game versus "pirate" it because DRM breaks their user experience or computer.

How do you measure UE killing DRM versus the success of the game?

The success of the pirates and Spore shows that you can't stop a determined thief, and you can't boost sales by pissing off your customers.Posted at 7:43PM on Dec 11th 2008 by Xerloq

@Stefan

Exactly. Perhaps DRM will stop the casual pirate, but an experienced pirate plus the casual web 2.0 user renders DRM largely useless. It could be argued it was useful in the pre-broadband era of the internet because mass distribution was so difficult.

DRM can prevent the less sophisticated user from casually copying, but casual copying isn't what they're trying to stop.Posted at 7:49PM on Dec 11th 2008 by Xerloq

Spore was cracked before release.
GTA IV was cracked around two days after release.Posted at 8:11PM on Dec 11th 2008 by Einhanderkiller

I'm very surprised by this news. And I'm also very impressed on the developer's side of things and I respect him a lot for having the balls to test PC gamers' true loyalties.

Pirates just use the DRM as an excuse to justify them downloading the game. They not only use that excuse around other people, they use it for themselves so they believe that they are doing it for the right cause when, in fact, they just want free games.Posted at 7:54AM on Dec 12th 2008 by Hashbrown Hunter

This will not be an accurate test as to wheather people pirate games because of DRM or not. I just bought the game. On the back cover in a yellow box at the bottom it states:

"Notice: This game contains technology intended to prevent copying that may conflict with some disc and virtual drives."

If Ubisoft is seriously trying to get a benchmark on how many people pirate because of DRM, they should really state that the game is DRM free on the back of the box, otherwise no one besides us forum dwellers will ever know.Posted at 2:45AM on Dec 14th 2008 by Eric Jackson