{"id":404226,"date":"2010-03-08T16:19:37","date_gmt":"2010-03-08T20:19:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/freakbits.com\/?p=1708"},"modified":"2010-03-08T16:19:37","modified_gmt":"2010-03-08T20:19:37","slug":"drm-woes-torpedoes-ubisoft-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/404226","title":{"rendered":"DRM Woes Torpedoes Ubisoft Customers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Ubisoft has been a firm believer in DRM. When it announced a new DRM system last month, it assumed people would be happy. After a day where that new system has already lead to a spectacular failing, it has to be asked if this is what sinks DRM for good.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ubisoft and DRM have had a ‘colourful past’. 18 months ago, one of their customer support people had to resort to sending people\u00a0scene cracks<\/a>, because of DRM problems. They then released one of their Prince of Persia games\u00a0without it<\/a>, to see if that would induce people to buy it. Last month, though, they released info on their new DRM system, which was (at least partially) cracked\u00a0within a day<\/a> of Silent hunter 5’s release. That new DRM (\u201cOnline Services Platform\u201d or OSP) system has now backfired on Ubisoft, as the authentication servers, needed to play the game, have been unreachable for the majority of March 7th, and are still<\/a> unreachable at the time of publication, almost 36 hours after the initial reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are many things that can be said about DRM, but there are two things that are inescapable. The first is that, if everything is done perfectly, the DRM is unnoticed; but if something goes wrong with it, people are left with nothing to show for their money. The second is that while it’s meant to prevent ‘piracy’, the first thing that ‘pirates’ do, is remove or circumvent the DRM, so the only people who end up dealing with it, are the legitimate customers.<\/p>\n

Right now, the legitimate customers of Ubisoft \u2013 specifically those who have bought Assassins Creed 2, or Silent Hunter 5 \u2013 have been experiencing the inconvenience of that new DRM system first-hand. The online servers that purchasers are required to log onto in order to play have been unreachable, preventing any game-play at all. On the Ubisoft Forums, a community manager gave a brief description,\u00a0saying<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Due to exceptional demand, we are currently experiencing difficulties with the Online Service Platform. This does not affect customers who are currently playing, but customers attempting to start a game may experience difficulty in accessing our servers. We are currently working to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Many players are, unsurprisingly,\u00a0livid<\/a>, or amazed that it has taken so little time for it to happen. Both OSP-based games were released within the last week (Silent hunter on March 2nd and Assassins Creed 2 had it’s EU release March 3rd). The system overload problem should never have happened, as Ubisoft supposedly\u00a0monitors capacity<\/a> 24\/7 and has backup systems online to deal with surges. Worse, the US release of Assassins Creed is this coming Tuesday, and that is\u00a0likely\u00a0to lead to another huge surge, potentially knocking the servers out of reach again.<\/p>\n

The fallout from this, so soon after the the Playstation outage, will certainly give many a reason to shy away from further Ubisoft purchases, meaning that the DRM, rather than boosting sales through inhibiting piracy, has instead put a large torpedo into those sales, followed by dropping them from a great height.<\/p>\n

How long it will be until Ubisoft gets the message from it’s users is unclear, but the smartest thing Ubisoft can do at this point, is disable the system and put it down to a bad idea, and hope to regain consumer confidence. Instead, it’s more likely that worse-than-expected sales will be attributed to piracy, leading to more DRM, driving away more sales, and that cycle continuing. Meanwhile, the only people playing Assassins Creed 2 or Silent Hunter 5 during all this, are the ones that didn’t buy it.<\/p>\n

Article from: FreakBits<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ubisoft has been a firm believer in DRM. When it announced a new DRM system last month, it assumed people would be happy. After a day where that new system has already lead to a spectacular failing, it has to be asked if this is what sinks DRM for good. Ubisoft and DRM have had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-404226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}