Ubisoft's New DRM System

[Hoffman]

Ubisoft in their infinite wisdom dropped Starforce. But instead of using one of the more less intrusive DRMs out there on the market they have came up with their own system. You may want to sit down for this.

Consumers of the company’s PC titles will be required to connect to Ubi.com accounts to authenticate games online each time they play them, meaning players will always need to be connected to the internet.

Yep. So if you're not connected to the net. You can't play your game.

Brent Wilkinson, director of customer service and production planning at Ubisoft, told GameSpy that Ubisoft isn’t expecting a backlash from consumers over the new anti-piracy measures, which debuted with the recently launched Settlers 7 beta.

"We think most people are going to be fine with it. Most people are always connected to an internet connection," he said.


Contender for most ignorant statement of the year right there. But wait! It gets worse:

What will happen if I lose my Internet connection when I play the game?

If you lose your Internet connection the game will pause while it tries to reconnect. If the Internet Connection is unable to resume you can continue the game from where you left off or from the last saved game.

Yep. If your net goes down while you're playing. The game will pause. You cannot play the game without a dedicated internet connection.


Online Services Platform Q&A | Ubisoft Official Video Game Website

 

[Icharus_Falling]

Thats a shame. I always considered ubisoft to be one of the best software companies that never sold out to the mega-conglomerates (think EA, Microsoft, etc.)

Those measures sound retarded. The security or consultant company they hired to think that out has never played a computer game. =P

It sounds like it would be easy to crack if you can duplicate the return signal it gets from the ubi.com website.

Ubisoft has put out some great software going back to the early 90's. It would be a damn shame to see them go down for something like this.

 

[Assassin]

Tsk, wouldn't surprise me if this is to get player info as well. They should stop with the DRM anyway, doesn't fight piracy at all, only gets in the way of the honest buyers. Pirates will crack everything eventually.

 

[Titcher]

Yep. It's easier to crack this stuff and take it out than to do it all the way they want. I do it all the time with games I own, having to use discs and signing into weird online servers sucks. Of course, this HAS to have an offline mode of some kind, it's not common for everyone to have dedicated internet and they'd be losing whole regions of customers. So I'm sure if you didn't mind playing in Portuguese you could play without being online.

 

[Nimrod]

Inability to share (lend the game to a friend) or sell....... Ill give it a miss.

 

[paardje]

What kind of STUPIDITY is this??? What if you have no internet AT ALL??? What then??? Please stop the DRM crap!!! It will fall!!!

 

[BabaJaga]

What kind of STUPIDITY is this??? [...] Please stop the DRM crap!!! [...]

please don't forget, Steam is DRM too! companies won't stop DRM as long as customers pay for that shit
and belive me, all those kiddies and/or hardcore gamer will pay because they don't care about..

 

[InsaneNutter]

please don't forget, Steam is DRM too! companies won't stop DRM as long as customers pay for that shit
and belive me, all those kiddies and/or hardcore gamer will pay because they don't care about..

I don't personally see the DRM Steam uses as bad, the game is tied to your Steam account so you can install the game on multiple PC's and just sign in on which ever PC you wish to play on.

Steam can be used totally offline, ive installed a couple of games from Steam on my netbook, told steam to only work in offline mode and ive been able to play those games for months without needing to be connected to the internet.

Dont get me wrong i'm not a big of fan of any sort of DRM, as is proved time and time again DRM only hurts people who actually buy the game. Credit where credit is due though Steam has by far the most user friendly DRM system in my opinion and doesn't treat legit customers as pirates.

 

[Rustwick]

Your saves will be stored remotely on Ubi servers, allowing access to your game saves on any machine.

So does this mean that when they shut the servers down in however many years time, you won't be able to save your game? Either way, it's a poor strategy and I think it's thrown me off getting Settlers 7 (and any other game that'll use this).

Source.

 

[InsaneNutter]

So does this mean that when they shut the servers down in however many years time, you won't be able to save your game?

Yes but you also wont be able to play the game so thats probably the lest of your worries.
Im sure unless they go bust if the servers ever way to be taken offline a patch would be released to make the game work offline.

Reminds me of MSN Music, anyone remember that? if you were unlucky enough to purchase anything off that you can no longer re activate your music when upgrading to a new PC.

 

[MasterChief]

So does this mean that when they shut the servers down in however many years time, you won't be able to save your game? Either way, it's a poor strategy and I think it's thrown me off getting Settlers 7 (and any other game that'll use this).

Source.

Reminds me of MSN Music, anyone remember that? if you were unlucky enough to purchase anything off that you can no longer re activate your music when upgrading to a new PC.

So basically the moral of the story is you should just pirate anything with DRM like that.

Honestly i pirate stuff like that just to make a point, no matter how good the game is.