14 DAY TRIAL // Two of the main developer studios working on titles for French publisher Ubisoft have offered very different visions on how Digital Rights Management solutions and piracy impact the PC gaming market.
Martin Edmonson, who is the man who founded the Reflections studio and worked on Driver: San Francisco, told Eurogamer that, “It's difficult to get away from the fact that... piracy on the PC is utterly unbelievable”.
He believes that the measures Ubisoft has used are proportional to the impact that piracy is having and added that, “If there was very little trouble with piracy then we wouldn't need it.”
On the other hand Christofer Sundberg, who is the founder of Avalanche Studios and created the Just Cause series, told Edge magazine that piracy cannot be defeated and that, “My solution to the problem is to start designing games for the PC player, and award PC players for being part of the community of your game and for staying connected to you - not forcing them. If you continuously tell the player that you care about their opinions, and appreciate their investment, you will lower the amount of bootleg copies.”
Ubisoft has recently been criticized for the way it has handled the DRM issue for its God game From Dust.
The company initially said that the PC version of the title will only need Internet for activation but players quickly discovered that they needed to be always connected in order to play the game.
Since then Ubisoft has announced that a patch removing the DRM was being worked on and that it will revise its future policy for PC games.
Ubisoft has implemented tougher DRM measures for its games and says that it has seen a reduction in the impact of piracy for its titles since it has done so.
The big fall launch for Ubisoft is Assassin's Creed: Revelations, which is also set to get a PC version.