Thanks to DRM, Some Ubisoft Games Won't Work Next Week

hypnosec writes "Several of Ubisoft's biggest titles won't be playable as of next week thanks to a server move by the publisher and the restrictive DRM that was used in their development. This isn't just multiplayer either. Because Ubisoft thought it would be a smart plan to use always on DRM for even the single player portion of games like Assassin's Creed, even the single player portion of that title won't be playable during the server move. Some of the other games affected by this move will be Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7. The Mac games that will be broken during this period are Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell Conviction and The Settlers. This move was announced this week as part of a community letter, with Ubisoft describing how the data servers for many of the publisher's online services would be migrated from third party facilities to a new location starting on the 7th February. The publisher didn't reveal how long the transfer would take."

Comments

Yarr!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand. I seem to be unaffected by this.

Now, on t' more pressin' matters. Where did I put that bottle o' rum?

Small Claims Court

[i8a4re]

Everyone who can't play a game during this move should take Ubisoft to small claims court. Lawyers are not allowed in small claims court, so this is an advantage for you. Just claim the value of the game as damages and the cost to file the claim. If Ubisoft doesn't make an appearance, you win by default. If they show up and you lose, you still caused them to lose far more money than they got from you for buying their game. If you win and they fail to pay your claim, you can put a lien on them or have an equivalent value of their property seized.

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[Mr.LightFoot]

I do this for a living. Migrating sites for major companies the size of FB and MS and the like. I can tell you, with a well planned execution w/database moves, loads, etc., it takes months of planning to make sure everything works well. The general plan above is accurate in terms of the basic/high-level steps. There will be outages. For a DB such as this, I'd estimate at least 1/2 a day is required but it can be several days to get all the bugs worked out post migration. DNS takes about 15-30 min to replicate to the TLD and then spread across the DNS caches out there which can take up to 24-48 hours depending on where you are located and what ISPs do. Some ISPs cache DNS for a longer than TTL so I've seen up to a week when we migrate large sites before it becomes available to end users. Mileage may vary.

Re:I just...

[Rary]

You're missing the best part. They're creating a period of time during which the only people in the world who can play the game are the pirates.