Ubisoft is no stranger to DRM. They’ve always found unique ways of locking their content to fight piracy, and most of the times it has proved to be futile. Chris Early, Ubisoft’s VP of digital publishing has admitted that they could have done a better job with these issues, but also claimed that they’ve resolved most issues quickly.
“With Driver: San Francisco, for example, we had some issues with content activation,” he said in an interview with VG247.
“We had a good system in place but there was an error in the codes and so I’d say that, yes, we made a mistake – not necessarily in that the system was included in the first place – but that there was a procedural mistake with the codes that were required to activate the content.
“But then what did we do? Within a couple of days we patched it completely out of the game rather than trying to reissue codes and complicate it further,” he added.
“I think people looked at that situation and said, ‘You screwed up, but you took the right approach in solving it’.”
He also tried to justify DRM by saying that, as content creators they need to be compensated for their work – and people enjoying their content without paying for it is simply unfair. He also admitted that paying customers shouldn’t be inconvenienced, and they need to find a way to implement DRM without doing that.
“For us, the whole question of DRM is one of how we get compensated as a creator of content when someone is enjoying that content,” Early revealed.
“The goal is to find the balancing point so as to do that in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the paying customer. That’s something that, as an industry, we sometimes succeed in and sometimes fail at.”
Ubisoft has been pretty blunt in the past when dealing with such issues and they have even said that “there’s simply no way to bypass that.”
It remains to be seen if they change their ways, but at least they acknowledge it which is a step in the right direction.
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