14 DAY TRIAL // A lot has been said about the new DRM measures that Ubisoft is testing and plans to implement for most of its future titles. The always on Internet connection and the save games that get put in the cloud have turned off quite a lot of the PC gamers whom the measures are supposed to target and it seems that one very reasonable compromise, that of a patch, which can remove the restrictive DRM after a certain amount of time (when most of the sales are done), is not on Ubisoft's mind.
When the guys at PC Gamer pressed a Ubisoft representative over the possibility of patching out the always Internet connected DRM after a while or in the event that the authentication servers are brought down, the Ubisoft man answered, “The system is made by guys who love PC games. They play PC games, they are your friends.”
When asked if the company could commit to stating that the systems would be patched out, the Ubisoft representative revealed, “That's the plan. […] That's written into the goal of the overall plan of the thing. But we don't plan on shutting down the servers, we really don't.”
It's true that the videogame industry is at the moment offering pretty short lived experiences. It's unlikely that Splinter Cell: Conviction will be widely played five or ten years from now and with Ubisoft requiring a constant Internet connection, it can actually keep track of the number of gamers that are playing its titles at any given moment.
But even if Ubisoft chooses to shut down the authentication servers when less than 1,000 people are still rarely firing up the game, the backlash from gamers will be quite significant, pointing out the fallibility of the publisher and of the DRM measures.
The problem is that the shutdowns can happen quite quickly. Electronic Arts took down online servers for Mercenaries 2, a game that achieved little success but was only launched in 2008, less than 730 days ago.