In our recent review , we praised Shadow Warrior 2 for its varied weapons, random level generation, and over-the-top shooting. Apparently, the game has another feature that's sure to draw praise from many gamers: a complete lack of piracy protection or digital rights management, which the developers apparently think is a waste of time.

"We don't support piracy, but currently there isn't a good way to stop it without hurting our customers," Flying Wild Hog developer Krzysztof “KriS” Narkowicz wrote on the game's Steam forum (in response to a question about trying to force potential pirates to purchase the game instead). "Denuvo means we would have to spend money for making a worse version for our legit customers. It's like this FBI warning screen on legit movies."

Expanding on those thoughts in a recent interview with Kotaku, Narkowicz explained why he felt the DRM value proposition wasn't worth it. "Any DRM we would have needs to be implemented and tested," he told Kotaku. "We prefer to spend resources on making our game the best possible in terms of quality, rather than spending time and money on putting some protection that will not work anyway."

“The trade-off is clear,” Flying Wild Hog colleagues Artur Maksara and Tadeusz Zielinski added. "We might sell a little less, but hey, that’s the way the cookie crumbles!"

The anti-DRM comments come amid a pitched battle between game crackers and Denuvo, the current top-of-the-line DRM solution. After frustrating crackers for months with an unbroken protection record, small cracks started developing in Denuvo's DRM this summer, with a handful of games being pirated despite protection. Those game-specific DRM cracks are reportedly being tweaked for many other games with the same basic Denuvo protection scheme, though Denuvo is working to close the loophole in subsequent releases.

In any case, at least one more major PC developer is now on record as leaving the whole game of cat-and-mouse with DRM behind, relying on fans to buy the game because they want to, rather than because of technology that forces them away from pirated versions. "We hope that our fans, who were always very supportive, will support us this time as well," Zielinski told Kotaku. "...In our imperfect world, the best anti-pirate protection is when the games are good, highly polished, easily accessible and inexpensive," Maksara added.