Ubisoft’s Retarded DRM Hacked and Their Response

(Author’s Note: Originally posted on March 2010)

For those of us who are PC gamers, the hits have kept coming over the past couple of years. Loss of dedicated server support, no LAN support, dropped games from the list, and a myriad of other issues have shattered our faith in game developers. The latest thing, which takes the cake, is starting with Ubisoft in the form of their new DRM.

DRM, for those of you who are unaware, stands for Digital Rights Management. Ubisoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided that in order to combat piracy they would make it so that you have to have a constant connection to the internet to play the game. Not just the multiplayer aspect of it but the single player portion as well.

How could someone not think that this would be a bad idea? The first thing that went through my mind was “What if the master servers are down for maintenance?” Gamers won’t even be able to play the single player now because it is reliant on these servers.

Well surprise, surprise! Such things and others have occurred according to an article I found on Kotaku.

We’ve known for sometime that Ubisoft’s plans to curb piracy on the PC will include a required internet connection to play the publisher’s games, including the upcoming release of Assassin’s Creed II. But we didn’t know it was this unsavory.

We’ve known that there is no “off-line” option, as clearly specified in Ubisoft’s online services Q&A and that, should your internet connection be interrupted at any time while playing, it’s unplayable until that connection is restored. But PC Gamer’s hands-on experience with Assassin’s Creed II and Settlers VII sounds worse than we’d expected.

“If you get disconnected while playing, you’re booted out of the game,” PC Gamer’s Tom Francis writes. “All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you’re reconnected.”

And if you have a rock solid, up 24/7 connection? There’s still potential bad news, as “any time Ubisoft’s ‘Master servers’ are down for any reason, everyone playing a current Ubisoft game is kicked out of it and loses their progress.”

To be clear, that’s PC Gamer’s experience with the PC version of Assassin’s Creed II, not ours. We’ve reached out to Ubisoft reps to get comment on the report. They initially directed us to the online services Q&A linked earlier and promised a forthcoming statement. We’ll update when that happens.

Doesn’t the game sound pleasant now? Who wouldn’t want to buy a game that requires a constant connection to the internet?

Of course, the day after Silent Hunter 5, Ubisoft’s first release using the new DRM, the security on this game has already been cracked. So who gets to suffer? The honest consumer who wouldn’t hack or pirate these games.

So now Ubisoft is burning the midnight oil in order to change the system to hopefully satisfy consumers. Seriously, Assassin’s Creed II is not even out for the PC and already there is a v1.01 for users to download. However the only way that I can see to satisfy customers is to get rid of this ridiculous anti-piracy strategy altogether. 

Of course, so long as people continue to buy these games then developers will continue to move ahead with this particular strategy.

Right now, the future seems to be looking a bit bleak for the pc community. I guess we’ll just have to keep waiting and watching to see how things unfold.

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