Ubisoft’s new DRM system for PC games has been quite controversial, for several reasons- it requires the player to stay connected to the net all the time if he or she is to play the game; it saves the game on Ubi’s servers, which have crashed, leading to a loss of data; the net connections keep dropping, causing all the player’s progress per session to be lost.
This has evidently caused a drop in Ubisoft’s PC sales, because they’re not implementing it in their upcoming WW2 RTS, RUSE. The game will use Steamworks instead, allowing the player to be offline while playing singleplayer. Hurray, for the restoration of logic.
“When R.U.S.E. is released in September, it will benefit from Valve’s Steamworks API to offer the best community experience to players,” Ubisoft told CVG. “Consequently, a Steam account and Internet connection will be required to activate the game, as per Steam policy. For this reason, R.U.S.E. will not use the Ubisoft protection. Single player can be played offline.”
Well, thanks, Ubisoft. If only you hadn’t included this kind of DRM mechanism in your PC port of Assassin’s Creed II, I’d hae genuinely enjoyed it. Bleah.