Ubisoft and their newest DRM at work

The new DRM scheme Ubisoft introduced in «Assassin’s Creed II», «Silent Hunter 5» and «Settlers 7» was not well received by many potential customers. All 3 games are offline games, but they will only work with a permanent online connection.

Savegames, for example, are backedup to ubi servers, but there seem to be permanent online checks going on to see if the game is «genuine». The game will pause if the online connection is lost (in an offline game, WTF). Many internet connections are quiet unreliable (since the introduction of the so called "Unlimmited" contracts).

Critics of this system have pointed out, that this will introduce a single point of failure. Ubisoft was quiet confident that their system is stable. Turns out it's not. Today the authentication servers went down. Ubisoft first reported they are working on the problem and now state (via twitter) that they are victims of a DDoS attack. Whatever is true seems to be irrelevant from the POV of a customer.

Ubisoft has put in quiet a lot of money to get this DRM stuff running (extra development, running distributed servers which are prone to a high load [peak times] and all the attacks which are run against any internet connected server) and it is only a matter of days now until the finished crack will be released. Circumventing the DRM might be legal in many (if not all) all European countries.

Punishing paying customers with this crap is not acceptable. Downloading a (so called) pirated copy is:

• more convenient (fire up bittorrent, download and play)
• no check if the CD is in the drive or if some servers are available
• cheaper

Buying such product involves:

• go to store (most people still buy a box)
• install
• find no-cd/no-drm crack
• install crack

Downloading illigally (although I do not recommend it) is just plain more convenient. I guess that the young ones will not have the money to buy the game anyway (probably the customers which would make up the highest volume in sales). So they eighter download or let it be. Guess what they do? The downloaded Version has the DRM already stripped. The publisher doesn't get the money anyway. So why punish the legit customer with this is beyond my understanding.

I, for one, have decided long ago not to play any of these games, although I would have bought all of them.