Saw this article and thought I should share. Basically upcoming Ubisoft titles require gamers to be online when they play, whether single-player or otherwise. If your Internet connection drops, your game stops, giving you the option of quitting or waiting for the connection to come back up, but according to the article losing all progress since the last (auto)-save.

I get the point of DRM, to the extent of making it challenging for kiddies to go about copying games willy nilly. But I really don't understand how developers think that impinging on the gaming experience will create anything but a negative impact on their titles (and presumably sales). As someone who's lived with pretty flimsy Internet connections in the past, I can only imagine that being one helluvva frustrating gaming experience!

I see your point, but don't completely agree.

Valve have produced a great example of what a developer can achieve when their products aren't so easy to crack - and there are countless developers who have gone under despite their games being widely played.

Stardock went other way, completely freeing their games from DRM. It sounds great in principle, but of maybe ten to a dozen regular players I've come across who play Galactic Civilisations II - I'm the only one I know of who actually paid for it.

You're right to rail against the draconian nature of what Ubisoft have done - but surely the blame is better laid at the door of the people who have put them in this position? What choice are they actually left with?

I'm not some massive anti-piracy nut - I'd be fibbing if I said I hadn't touched a few dodgy titles - but do think it's a case of "you reap what you sow".

Hehe, well I wouldn't particularly expect anyone to completely agree with me, but cheers for the answer!

Valve is a fair example, though you have to account for the fact that multiplayer gaming can be very much its own piracy-protection. I wonder how many dodgy copies of HL2 went around in the day? But at the same time, as an example of DRM, Steam provides players with a number of benefits and rather few drawbacks. Sure it can seem a bit stodgy, and the adverts they throw up are potentially intrusive, but playing via Steam does not preclude having to be online to do it, nor are you implicitly restricted to any numbers of installs; in fact, you can simultaneously install titles without extra layers of protection on multiple PCs without hassle, and more recent stuff like the Steam cloud make that even more user-friendly to do.

What Ubisoft are proposing just goes entirely in the opposite direction. Piracy's just a part of the business; there'll always be people who set their wits about getting around anti-piracy measures, and there'll always be people willing to take advantage of those efforts. But I don't think I could blame those people when companies like Ubisoft create such oppressive systems to protect their products.

(And incidentally I think Valve should have Steam forcibly hived off them and made into an open marketplace for all developers, but that's an entirely separate issue ;-))

They're talking about this on SlashDot.

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/02/27/163226/The-Awful-Anti-Pirate-System-That-Will-Probably-Work

Sad recent update, the folks Down Under are getting the hardest time of playing their games even in single player.

http://kotaku.com/5506062/ubisofts-drm-kicks-australia-while-its-down?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kotaku%2Ffull+%28Kotaku%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Though in other news, I understand the fella who's been preventing Australia from getting an improved classification system for games is stepping down, so maybe in future it'll only be Germany that demands censored versions of games for its untrustworthy citizens to play with.

Breaking news, politician provides diplomatic answer to a direct question. "No preconceptions" my right testicle, he's human isn't he?