Driver dev defends Ubisoft's DRM

Ubisoft's intrusive always-on DRM policy has seriously irked gamers over the past few years, and now a developer on Driver: San Francisco is coming out to defend the unpopular policy.


Speaking to Eurogamer, Martin Edmonson who founded Ubisoft Reflections (the studio behind Driver: San Francisco,) expressed exasperation and even moral superiority in the fight against internet piracy.

"You have to do something," he said. "It's just, simply, PC piracy is at the most incredible rates. This game cost a huge amount of money to develop, and it has to be, quite rightly, quite morally correctly, protected. If there was very little trouble with piracy then we wouldn't need it."

He also defended Ubisoft's Uplay Passport which packages each individual game with a unique code for accessing online features. If you rent the game or buy it used, you have to purchase the passport online for $9.99. "If people don't buy the game when it first comes out and wait and pay for rental or for second-hand usage, then the publisher sees absolutely nothing of that. [The online pass is] just one of those things we have to get used to. It's going to happen."