The new Prince of Persia game will lack the severe anti-piracy security measures featured by other games  to the annoyance and fury of users. According to Shacknews, Ubisoft employee Chris Easton revealed on the company’s forum that retail copies of the game will be DRM-free. The company’s decision is somewhat surprising, as many of its greatest games (i.e. Assassin’s Creed, Rainbow Six: Vegas 2) were launched with DRM. So should we rejoice?

Yes and no. First of all, downloaded versions of Prince of Persia may not be allowed to wander as freely as the retail ones. Second, it’s something Easton says on his forum post: “A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as POP PC has no DRM we'll see how truthful people actually are. Not very, I imagine.”

In other words, Ubisoft may have decided to launch the game without DRM just so they could later prove to the users that no DRM means heavy pirating and that the company was right, and the consumers, wrong.

Previous Prince of Persia games featured a DRM system called Starforce, and that’s why gamers were particularly upset with the French company, and they weren’t placated by much even Ubisoft eventually dropped Starforce in favor of other copy-protection methods.  

So we’ll just have to see how this new episode of the DRM wars evolves. These protests against Digital Rights Management for PC were not always such a big issue; it was only after the Spore incident that opposition to DRM grew exponentially. And protests continue, even if piracy is the reason why many game developing companies have now started considering the PC as being a too problematic gaming platform.