In what many people expected to be another horrid chapter in the DRM saga, Bethesda have announced that they won’t be including Spore-like DRM at all.
In fact all they’ll be including for copy protection says Peter Hines is the standard disc check, just like in Oblivion. Even that’s a ”pain in the ass” he says to have to add.
He says it will be ”pretty similar to what we did for Oblivion, which was–we basically don’t do any”, much to the delight of fans everywhere I’m sure. He continued saying that ”we do the mildest form possible. I actually don’t know if I even want to get into what it is that we exactly do, but we try to be really noninvasive when it comes to that stuff.”
”And it is a pain in the ass–it is a pain in the ass that we have to do it at all in the first place. But when you spend tens of millions of dollars, we don’t think it’s right to just put something out there and let everybody do whatever they want and pass it around…”
Many argue that DRM is a waste of resources for everyone involved; DRM failed to protect Spore from being exploited and appearing on torrent sites. These systems may prevent the games succumbing to piracy at launch but savvy coders get there in the end.
”It’s very important for us not to ruin the experience for the person who did buy a copy, so we try to be very careful… We want to remove anything that is a hindrance or an annoyance to the player, we’re trying to just get to the game and have fun…”
So no online activation and no installation limit, just good old fashioned disc check - now there’s a PC game. Peter Hines spilled this juicy morsel during an interview with Shacknews.