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07 March 2010

Ubisoft's DRM fails again

Well, I hate to overshadow the amazing work Valve has done with the Portal 2 ARG and announcement (wtg Valve!), especially with a new post about DRM, but here goes.

Ubisoft's DRM servers have been down for Europe today. That's right, people in Europe have been unable to play Ubisoft's recently released games because Ubisoft's servers aren't working. According to reports from the escapist, at about 8am GMT (1 am MST) customers began posting in the Assassin's Creed 2 forums that they were unable to play their games because they couldn't access the authentification servers. As of 11:30am MST the issue still hadn't been resolved, and there was a post from an Ubisoft employee.

"I don't have any clear information on what the issue is ... but clearly the extended downtime and lengthy login issues are unacceptable, particularly as I've been told these servers are constantly monitored," said 'Ubi.Vigil', adding, "I'll do what I can to get more information on what the issue is here first thing tomorrow and push for a resolution and assurance this won't happen in the future."

This is one of the things MANY potential customers, as well as blogs/reviewers/tech sites were worried about. There are so many potential issues with this DRM. If Ubisoft's servers don't work right (even though Ubisoft was so excited about how great their servers were going to be) you don't have access to your game - even a single player one. If your connection is flaky, you could lose your access to your game. If their servers are shut down, they have promised they'd like to release a patch to remove the authentication. But what if they don't have the resources at the time to devote to it? Or what if they just decide it isn't worth their time? I mean, EA didn't plan on taking so many of it's games offline 2-3 years after they were released, did they?

I hope that Ubisoft will see reason. I hope.

1 comment:

That One Guy said...

Two words...
EPIC FAIL!

And to think, we paying customers get to pay extra for those "features".