The Ultimate Insanity

By Reach For the Sky

Is anyone really surprised by this?

I still am. How does this sort of thing happen in any professional industry? Ubisoft has released two games since they game up with this unbelievably stupid system. Basically, in order to play the games Ubisoft publishes (Assassin's Creed 2, and Silent Hunter 5 so far), you need to have an account with them. If you don't have an internet connection, you can't play. If you lose connectivity while playing, you are immediately kicked out of the game. A single-player game. They also have the ability to suspend your account and prevent you from playing games you have already paid for, without refund. And finally, if for any reason the servers become unavailable, as they were the first day of release, nobody who payed for the game can play it until the problem is fixed, as they did on Assassin's Creed 2's first day of release.

Keep in mind this doesn't actually affect anybody who downloaded the game illegally. The game is cracked. The DRM has already been circumvented. Pirates are playing this game and having fun, and people who payed for the game were locked out of it. What logic are they working under? Not only has this not put a dent in piracy rates(positively at least, who knows how many have sworn off paying for a Ubisoft product because of this), but the system actively targets paying customers who have jumped through all these insane hoops of registration just so they could play a game they payed for. In reality this is probably a good thing. The general public couldn't care less about the DRM debate, save for the occasions it interferes with their fun. Most people don't care about the fact that 2KGames installed a rootkit alongside Bioshock on their loyal customers' computers. Nor do they care about the fact that they might not be able to play a game that was made a few years ago because the company that ran the authentication servers is now out of business. They will care about a game they payed for being unavailable on day one because Ubisoft thinks they could be a pirate.

There isn't a lot more I can say about this. I could write posts about DRM every day for the next million years and it wouldn't make as much a difference as the event itself has.

edit: So apparently crackers and pirates are horrible, horrible liars (shocking, I know) and they did not have the game cracked immediately. That doesn't change the fact that legitimate customers were locked out of the game. according to more reliable sources, the game was cracked 2 months after release. The sales figures have not rocked the charts of the hinges, which means that the DRM is not the end-all solution to lost sales Ubisoft thought it would be.