Ubisoft Releases DRM-free Prince of Persia

It’s a video game. It’s a sociology experiment. It’s a publicity stunt. It’s financial suicide. It’s surrendering to the file-sharing criminal underground. It’s calling the torrent-pirate’s bluff by robbing them of their favorite justification.

Whatever your opinion, there’s some real cunning in Ubisoft’s decision to release their newest Prince of Persia title sans any DRM copyright protection. Of course a game in a franchise that lucrative and that popular is sure to be widely pirated anyway, DRM or no DRM, and Ubisoft had problems with DRM-created phone-home functions on the Assassin’s Creed disks. So dumping DRM altogether probably saves them some trouble.

The downside of course is, without any DRM at all, well… it sounds like an open invitation to pirate the game. And, according to developer Chris Easton, it is, but not in the way you’d think.

He wants to know how honorable you are. If you can’t use “avoiding DRM” as an excuse to pirate a game, a good game that deserves your money and is readily available almost anywhere…. will you buy it? Or will you stick to the free option, knowing that the only reason why is that it’s free?

It’s pretty clear from Easton’s forum posts that he’s pretty pessimistic about the outcome of this experiment. Perhaps more pessimistic then he needs to be. After all, Radiohead did him one better, allowing people to download their album for free if they wanted to, or any other sum they thought appropriate, and that experiment was a runaway success. In Rainbows the album has earned more before its physical release then their previous album, Hail to the Thief, has to date. All because Radiohead wanted you to think about how much you really thought their music was worth.

Prince of Persia fans now face some identical soul-searching. The results are sure to be interesting.