Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed

A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting: "If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. 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. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."

Comments

Pirates will be remembered as archivists, scribes

[mykos]

In ten to twenty years, when we're playing these games on emulators and reminiscing about the good old days, when these activation servers are dead and gone, we will be thankful that someone took the time to remove these checks from our games so that we could play them in the future.
And I wonder, in this never ending holy war against pirates, what they think that Pyrrhic victory after Pyrrhic victory will earn them? Countless fortunes? Unending wealth? Do they think that making your game difficult to play will somehow make it sell billions of copies?

Finally

[TACD]

At last, they've made DRM so obnoxious, intrusive and butt-fuckingly annoying that even the average Joe will become enraged at the audacity of the thing. Hope Ubisoft has a team of people standing by ready to explain to people with shaky wireless routers or traffic-shaping ISPs why their game keeps booting them out.

I'm calling it - less than three months after release before they patch this out due to overwhelmingly bad press. Christ Ubisoft, who do you think you are?

DDOS

[Anonymous Coward]

so, if someon DDOS their servers, all people on the world will be kicked out and lose their progress ?
hmm . . . what a great idea.

Cloud gaming?

[T Murphy]

I'm assuming Ubisoft, EA and the like are starting to dream about gaming on the cloud- complete control over access to the content, mandatory constant internet connection to the servers, and no pirateable game files being distributed to consumers. In addition, it will become much easier to cite server costs as a reason to shut down a game after a few years.

Re:BRING IT ON !!

[Dunbal]

If your customers somehow took 85% of your revenue

[citation needed]

Ubisoft: 3rd quarter sales (Feb 9, 2010) 495 million pounds sterling.

Now let's see if I get the math right, if 495 million is 15 percent, then 33 million is 1 percent, therefore 3.3 billion pounds is 100 percent.

So, according to you, a company like Ubisoft should be selling 3.3 billion pounds PER QUARTER? Just as a minor comparison, General Dynamix (a small defense company that makes oh, fighter jets and boats) only sold 2.1 billion DOLLARS last quarter.

I absolutely LAUGH at "piracy hurts sales" whiners who start throwing BS numbers like that 85% about. You are full of shit.

Case of "pirate archivism"

[Lonewolf666]

Ever heard of Metropolis? Famous movie from the silent film era?

Parts of it were lost, but a few years ago most of those were dicovered (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)#Rediscovery) on a 16mm copy in Argentine that was not destroyed (as required) after showing the film.
Technically that makes the cinema owner from the 1920s a pirate, but thanks to his breach of contract(?) Metropolis is almost complete again.