In the past Ubisoft have earned a name for themselves as being ones to blame the woes of the PC squarely at the feet of video game pirates. So it comes as no surprise to read that Far Cry 2 will be using the same DRM as found in Spore, Red Alert 3 and other recent EA titles. Ubisoft forum manager bukowski113 has posted the details of the DRM on the Far Cry 2 forums.

-You have 5 activations per machine on 3 separate PCs.

- The 3 machine activations can be concurrent, but you must have the disc in the drive to run the game

- 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 time 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.

While I obviously am not best pleased to see constrictive DRM methods used in this game, I will still be buying it. However I fear that this is going to lead to a similar backlash as to what happened with Spore with many people refusing to purchase the game due to the DRM. In fact I think that the DRM will do more harm than good and we will see more people pirate it as there will likely be a non-DRM version of the game on the usual suspects soon.

Furthermore EA CEO John Riccitiello has commented (as reported by Yahoo) on the use of DRM in EA games.

“We’re still working out the kinks. We implemented a form of DRM and it’s something that 99.8 percent of users wouldn’t notice. But for the other .2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it. I personally don’t like DRM. It interrupts the user experience. We would like to get around that. But there is this problem called piracy out there.”

We have a policy at work, if we see a product on the shelf that we wouldn’t buy ourselves then we remove it from display. It is something which should apply for a whole lot of other businesses too. If the CEO of EA doesn’t like DRM then why of why would he insist on it being implemented in his games? He may have a point that only a minority of people will actually be impacted greatly by DRM, but even this is too much. It is more the fact that people shouldn’t be affected by the actions of the pirates. Hell I already know that people go out and pirate non-DRM versions of games that have it. These are people that had pre-orders in place or were just waiting for the game to be released before purchasing it. Due to the DRM they went and pirated it.

The game companies should realise that DRM is doing more harm than good and is contributing to the (overblown) problem of piracy on the PC.

Tags: DRM, EA, Far Cry 2, Piracy, Ubisoft

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 4:35 pm and is filed under General News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.