Oh the irony: Ubisoft DRM servers stop working.
I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’…
Do you remember a few weeks ago, when the everyone in the entire world said that Ubisoft’s new DRM – you remember, the stuff which requires you to be connected to the internet all the time if you want to play a Ubisoft game on the PC – was an inexorably appalling idea, the sort of ejacta dreamed up by some coked-up executive desperate to stem the flow of piracy who clearly hasn’t grasped the idea that if you make it easier to pirate than to buy legitimately, you might lose customers? Do you remember that? Remember how Ubisoft said it couldn’t be cracked (it could). Do you also remember how they said something to the effect of ‘the servers won’t go down’? ‘It’ll all be fine, trust us?’ Well guess what? The servers are down.
If I could type this with glee, I would. There’s a rather long thread in the Ubisoft forums which consists of people saying rather hostile things towards Ubisoft and their DRM policy, and even when a Ubisoft press officer issued a rather vague ‘sorry, we’re doing what we can’ statement in the thread, people didn’t seem to calm down. Quite the opposite, in fact. Choice quotes include:
THIS IS REALLY DRIVING ME MAD NOW! I HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO PLAY AT ALL TODAY! DON’T SELL YOUR ****ING GAMES IF PEOPLE CAN’T PLAY THEM!
from someone called LadyRinsun and this
I am 100% returning this game tomorrow! i have lost an entire weekend trying over and over to play this. I urge everyone to return this shambolic cack. Someone is bound to get around your DRM soon. I’ll just wait for that! Ubi….you deserve to make massive losses on this, bad forward thinking.
from mattymcrae1979!
Now, before you accuse me of dancing on a grave (so to speak), I’m obviously not pleased that people can’t play their copies of AC2. What I am happy about is that all the problems with Ubisoft’s quite frankly cretinous and moronic DRM strategy are floating to the surface immediately, and consumers, not just the press, are up in arms about it. It’ll discourage them from pursuing it with such gusto in future. I only feel sorry for all the devs and PR people who have to try and defend this indefensible tripe.
Via Joystiq, picture via Roger Ebert’s Twitpic
Tags: Assassin's Creed 2 PC, Assassin's Creed II, assassins creed 2, DRM servers down, ubisoft, Ubisoft DRM, Ubisoft DRM fail
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Love the photo. “Every time you torrent… what's torrent mean?” (looks it up on iPhone) “You mean I can watch this movie free?” (goes home)
Wow that's pretty pathetic. After all the crap Ubisoft has produced on the Wii, I feel pretty happy this crap happened to them.
I am glad it happened so fast. In all of the interviews with Ubisoft, they were constantly approached with the question of what would happen when the servers went down and their response was always one of “that should never happen, we're doing too much to keep it up and want people to be able to play.”. As we all know here in the Real World (TM), it does, and it DID happen.
I can't wait to see what the fallout from this will be. Odds are Ubisoft won't change anything and no one really cares about that part of the PC anymore, but there is a glimmer of hope that it could happen.
I agree, it is a good thing that this happened right out of the gate. Remember all that talk about redundancies and what not. Apparently, they all failed, and the outage was not for a few minutes. This was hours of downtime. Ubisoft, this is completely unacceptable. Worse still is that the rumor going around the campfire is that Ubisoft has a patch to remove the DRM, but was waiting to see if pirates would crack it before they released it. Now they might have to do it due to their own failure.
Who else here smells a lawyer rubbing his oily hands together for the class action suit that will come out of this.
I wish *I* was a lawyer just to go after this. Seems slam-dunk in my eyes: not maintaining QoS for purchased product and failure to meet advertised claims.
they should take a lesson or 2 from the South Park episode “Christian Rock Hard” as long as fans are playing your game its their happiness that matters and not the money.
great post