You can view the Ubisoft forum rage here.
I’m sure we all saw this coming. It seems as if Unisoft’s DRM authentication servers have gone down. What’s this mean? For the past 16 hours, users who legitimately purchased Assassins Creed 2 are unable to play the game, at all. Needless to say this has angered many Assassins Creed 2 owners. When Ubisoft’s new DRM system was announced, this was one of the top concerns with it. Assassins Creed 2 has been out for no longer than a week and is already having severe issues. With an 86% uptime, Ubisoft’s DRM servers have the lowest uptime percentage of any server I’ve ever seen. Ubisoft is learning first hand why people pirate their games, especially games with excessive methods of copy protection.
How Ubisoft’s new DRM works
For some reason, someone at Ubisoft thought it would be a good idea to add excessive amounts of DRM to their new games. In order to play Assassins Creed 2, you need a persistent internet connection. Are you in an area where you don’t have internet access, or perhaps your cable has gone out? Well then you won’t be able to play Assassins Creed 2. Whenever the game detects a loss of internet connection, it will lock up until your internet connection comes back. This is because the game is constantly checking Ubisoft’s DRM servers to make sure you have a legitimate copy of the game.
What Happened
Ubisoft hasn’t said much about the 16+ hours of downtime. All we know is their DRM authentication server has gone down. No DRM authentication server means the game treats you like a criminal and disallows any game play until the server is back up so they can determine if you own a legitimate copy of the game. There’s really nothing you can do about it until Ubisoft fixes their servers.
The Funny Parts
Here’s where it gets good. Ubisoft added all this DRM protection to their game in order to prevent users from pirating their game. Well guess what, the game, despite only being out in Australia and the UK, has already been pirated and is available on BitTorrent sites to US gamers. This is hilarious for a few reasons. First being that Ubisoft actually thought they would stop illegal distribution of their game with their new DRM method, which has already proven to be incorrect. Second is that Ubisoft hoped that because of the inability to pirate the game, their sales would increase since users would have to purchase the game instead of pirate it. This too has also been proven to be incorrect. Gamers in the US are already playing the game, DRM free thanks to programmers dedicated to stripping Assassins Creed 2 of it’s DRM. So not only has Ubisoft failed miserably in their attempt to stop pirating, but currently ONLY users who pirated Assassins Creed 2 can actually play the game!
What is DRM?
DRM, or Digital rights management, is a way for companies to protect data so that it cannot be copied, thus eliminating sales lost due to pirated, or illegally obtained applications, games, music, movies, or any other digital media. While DRM was designed to stop pirates, I’ve never actually seen a piece of DRM protected media that hasn’t been cracked and uploaded for free download via torrents. In fact, all DRM actually does is screw over legitimate customers by causing problems for legitimate users.