Fallout 3 shipping sans DRM

DRM has been a huge issue for PC gamers lately. EA has come under fire for their DRM integrated into Spore and Crysis Warhead; a class action suit was filed last week for their use of SecuROM and its lack of an uninstall feature. DRM has become so obtrusive that it's getting to the point where many PC gamers need to know which DRM techniques ship with games before they're released. 

With this in mind, Shacknews asked Bethesda's Pete Hines about the copy protection techniques integrated into Fallout 3. Here is what Pete had to say on the topic:

Shack: Similar question in the sense that it's an issue that can be overblown. What kind of copy protection will be included on the PC version of Fallout 3?

Pete Hines: Pretty similar to what we did for Oblivion, which was--we basically don't do any--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. [ed- Oblivion employed a simple DVD check.] And to have to support all of that--which is often the unspoken thing that nobody really wants to point to. You can argue all day whether or not somebody would have bought a copy of a game they pirated, but you can't argue, and you will never win the argument that I'm not having to provide tech support for those folks. Because I know for a fact that we are. We catch those folks all the time, where we're providing support for somebody who turns out didn't actually pay for the game and just downloaded a copy.

I see HUGE sales in Fallout 3's future! I'll certainly be adding it to the list of games we use for hardware testing.
Further along in the interview Hines mentions that the game has been extensively tested with NVIDIA cards, but he doesn't mention ATI hardware. Hopefully the game will work equally well with both IHVs products when it debuts later this year.