Congratulations are due to Ubisoft. As of today I haven’t heard of any confirmed cracks for Assassin’s Creed II (There are rumors, and there are counter rumors, and there are rumors that it is out there but is gimped in some way). Of course there was that small hiccup that prevented people from playing the game for over 12 hours, but that is a small price to pay to prevent piracy.
I had planned for this blog post to slam Ubisoft’s DRM, talk about how worthless it is and how even if it works people will boycott the games that have it and we will show Ubisoft that we won’t suffer broken products! Sadly I don’t think that this is the case at all.
I don’t believe that their addition of ridiculous DRM has hurt the games sales on the PC in any way. I also don’t believe that it has helped the sales, after all pirates probably aren’t going to buy your game anyway.
We won’t know for sure until sales figures come out but my guess is that the public has spoken. We may rail against all things DRM but it hasn’t stopped us from purchasing these games (I sadly bought it on the 360 long before I heard about the DRM included in the PC version. If I had known I never would have bought any copy). And don’t think that hearing about the PC’s DRM and deciding to get it on a console is going to “show” Ubisoft anything. They still got your money, and the money of thousands of other irate gamers.
We like to think that we stick to our guns and if a company does something terrible we won’t suffer their crap, but the truth of the matter is that Ubisoft games will continue to sell on PC and console, Activision games like Modern Warfare 3, 4, 5 and 6 (all coming in 2011 probably) will sell, and there is nothing we WILL do about it.
They called our bluff, smacked us in the face, and we will still come crawling back throwing money at them when the time comes. Well played Ubisoft, well played.
I’m going to go take a hot shower and debate changing my hobby from gaming to wood carving.
Manifest Pixel 