Serving notice that I am now boycotting all games from Ubisoft (and when I boycott something, I really boycott it).
Ubisoft have always had issues with DRM. They were one of the developers who used Starforce, which is also on my boycott list, before finally dumping it after they were hit with a 5 million dollar lawsuit (I understand the lawsuit was settled out of court). Unfortunately, after dumping Starforce, they switched to SecuRom which is just another waste of time abusive DRM. Although, admittedly, SecuRom doesn't appear to be anywhere near as bad as Starforce was.
Just a couple of Ubisoft DRM incidents which stick out in recent memory.
There was a hilarious incident with the PC version of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 where one of their official patches ended up breaking the legally purchased downloaded version of the game. Ubisoft's fix for this was to distribute a new patch which solved the problem. Unfortunately, it soon came to light that the patch was actually a crack taken from a warez site without any attribution to the original author. Real classy.
And then there was the DRM in Prince of Persia. Ubisoft included no DRM in Prince of Persia. Did they finally see sense? Of course not. As you can clearly see from this post from the Ubisoft community manager on 3 December 2008, they were very surly about the decision. To quote the community manager, "A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP PC has no DRM we`ll see how truthful people actually are. Not very, I imagine." Nice 'tude asshole.
I guess that given Ubisofts attitude towards DRM in the past, their latest move isn't surprising. A while ago, Ubisoft announced that they would require a constant internet connection to play their PC games. As you can imagine, this caused an uproar amongst the gaming community and I was hoping that Ubisoft would back down and change their minds. Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case.
PC Gamer received the review copy of a couple of Ubisoft games and has confirmed that a constant internet connection is indeed required to play the games. If you lose your internet connection for any reason during the game (or even if Ubisoft servers are down for any reason), you are instantly kicked out of the game. Not only that, you lose any progress since your last save. You don't even get the option to save the game before quitting (probably because the save games are also stored on Ubisoft servers although I'm sure they could have found a way around this if they wanted to).
And that, for me, is the straw that breaks the camel's back and is why I'm now putting Ubisoft on my boycott list. Which is a shame as I've played several Ubisoft games in the past and really enjoyed them (I have quite a few of the Tom Clancy branded games). I was also originally intending to buy Assassin's Creed 2 (albeit on the X360) as I really enjoyed the first Assassin's Creed despite the repetitive nature of the game.
I will certainly miss playing their games, but as a gamer, I'm not willing to put up with this kind of shabby treatment (even though it probably wouldn't have affected me directly as I primarily play their games on the X360).
4 comments:
Stupid. I can understand requiring an internet connection to validate at startup, but needing one continuously to play?
I don't even like the internet connection to validate. Too annoying when I want to play that game but don't have an internet connection.
I got burned by this with Company of Heroes. I got the game on Steam but nowhere on the site did it mention that you would need to validate online before you could play. In fact, in the forums, it even had a guide on how to get the game working in Steam's offline mode.
What I missed was that the guide was only for the original Company of Heroes. The expansion pack made it so that you had to have an internet connection to validate before you could play (no legal workaround). This really cheesed me off when I found out particularly as installing the expansion pack meant that you couldn't launch the original CoH separately.
Naturally, I only found this out when I tried to play while offline but couldn't. Imagine my sense of disappointment at not being able to play. Now imagine all the extra time it took me to search the forums to understand why the game wasn't running despite me following the instructions on how to play in offline mode. I mean, its not like I have stackloads of leisure time to start with.
Ultimately, I got around this by being online at the validation stage before returning the ethernet cable to the missus. Such a pain though. Also worth mentioning that although I finished the original CoH campaign, I just never got around to finishing the campaign in the expansion pack (and in fact have now deleted it from my hard drive). Not sure how much this contributed though as, to be honest, I didn't find the campaign in the expansion pack as interesting.
I was also really angry with Steam for not making this clear up front although admittedly, part of it is my fault for not doing my research properly.
Interesting. I've been using wireless for so long that I didn't envisage not having an internet connection. I guess the developers probably thought the same way.
Thinking further, once you've validated once at FIRST startup, why is there a need to validate at EVERY startup?
How come you have to use wireless? I thought you had a desktop?
Anyway, I have wireless as well - I just avoid using it unless I have to. Wireless is a big elec drain so I avoid unless there is a reason to be connected. For example, tracking my xbox game play on my X360 blog is a "value add" (ymmv) which is why I am generally online when playing on X360 even though I'm playing single player games.
For campaign CoH, there was no benefit to me at all in being online so I wanted to avoid turning on the wireless for it. Plus, when I first found out about the problem, I thought the issue was with my settings rather than with the game so I was focused on finding out what was wrong with my settings rather than simply turning on wireless to do the validation.
Re multiple validations - I really have no idea why you have to validate the game each time you play. All I know is that it isn't something I want to put up with.
Post a Comment