Posts Tagged "Drm"

God, where to begin.....

The announcement at PAX East that Penny Arcade Adventures Episodes 3 and 4 have been canceled is sad and rage inducing. It would have been nice to say this about 6 months ago, or when Khoo said there would be news at PAX and made it sound like a positive development. Hothead abandoned the game probably because EA threw bags of money at them and sacrificed PAA for Deathspank. That last part is my opinion, but the link makes it sound that way.

Kasumi gets delayed to late in the day on PC because MS can't get their act together on Live. My thoughts can be be summed up in my post in the PA ME2 thread - "So remember kids, not only is GFWL not very good for PC gaming, Live as a whole now prevents you from getting content on time regardless of platform." We all know that if there was a problem with pushing some content out on the PC, no one would hold up the release for the console version if it was fine.

On the Ubisoft front, our Aussie friends have been having trouble playing their legitimately bought copies of Settlers 7. Big surprise there. Oh, also someone perfected the AC2 crack into an emulated server solution.

I guess that's it for now.....

According to Escapist, their authentication servers went down early today and have been offline for over 10 hours. No one who bought their games can actually play them, and the rep says he's trying to get more info and hoping everything will be back online by tomorrow.


Again....That didn't take long, now did it kids?

EDIT RPS has picked up on this as well.

HA HA HA HA HA!

Torrentfreak

Destructoid

RPS

That didn't take long, now did it kids?

If you've been keeping up with the news, Ubisoft is still going full speed ahead with this "Always Online DRM". The truly sad thing is that despite it saying this in CAPSLOCKED TEXT in 2 plainly visible places on the store page, AC2 has risen to Number 2 in the Top Sellers on Steam as of this post.

I honestly don't know what to say to that. I especially like the part in the huge text stating that they can terminate the online activation anytime with a 30 day warning. Good luck with that.

On the upside, our buddy LewieP of SavyGamer fame is rallying Europe to battle the French publisher/developer. It's a nice angle of attack. No sales and Ubi will scream piracy, huge sales and they smugly announce they were right. Sales that end up being returned, refunded and makes a chunk of their stock get labeled "Used" and resold with a lower price point just might be the way to get their attention. That's what I hope anyway.

As of now I'm unaware if there's anything similar happening on this side of the Atlantic, but our return policies here aren't nearly as understanding.

We'll keep everyone informed if anything else develops.

What the fuck Ubisoft. What the fuck.

Seriously? This is how you treat your PC gamers? When the game disconnects from your servers for whatever reason you're booted off - for a single player game? Wow, just wow. Even Steam doesn't do this, you lose your connection mid game and keep playing (with the exception of a multiplayer game naturally).

So yeah, Assassin's Creed 2 = skip, and any other Ubisoft game that uses this kind of mechanic. I have a pretty solid connection but even that is prone to the occasional hiccup.

I just, I just feel shocked.

Let's suppose for a minute that "The Man" is north American.  He would have you believe that PC gaming is dying, and were I to take a walk through my local EB I'd be inclined to agree.  So why is this once powerful platform withering away - at least in the mind of "the man"?  

They'd have us believe that piracy is to blame. Clearly, people who are willing to spend thousands of dollars bulding their dream PCs are nothing more than digital thieves. 

I have a different theory for why the likes of Ubisoft are seeing a decline in their PC sales.  It's no accident that I've singled out Ubisoft as a company that just doesn't "get it", their latest announcement of draconian DRM coupled with an inflated price for Assassin's Creed 2 points to an overall lack of understanding of the industry.  

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