Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

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