14 DAY TRIAL // After the web was set ablaze due to the restrictive anti-piracy measures taken by Ubisoft with its recent Anno 2070 strategy game, the company has finally made changes to its digital rights management (DRM) software, in order to avoid imposing awkward limitations on owners of the title.
In case you’re not aware of this small scandal, everything started late last week when benchmarking website Guru3D wanted to try out Anno 2070 on a variety of graphics cards for some tests. Their attempt was foiled by the game’s DRM system, which required a new activation of the title every time the graphics card was changed.
Seeing as how the game only has three activations, this sparked a wave of anger directed at Ubisoft, with lots of websites quickly reporting on the issue all over the world, leading to lots of gamers becoming aware of the restrictive DRM and avoiding the strategy game.
Now, Guru3D reports that the French company, together with Anno 2070’s developer, BlueByte, has removed the graphics card verification from the game’s DRM software. As such, you won’t be forced to re-activate it every time you make such a change to your computer’s hardware.
“Just wanted to let you know, that we now remove the graphics hardware from the hash used to identify the PC. That means everyone should now be able to switch the GFX as many times as he/she wants,” a representative of BlueByte told the website.
Bear in mind, however, that bigger changes to a computer’s hardware, like swapping the CPU or the motherboard still require an activation of the game.
While this change is more than welcome, let’s not applaud Ubisoft, as the company made the decision for such a restrictive DRM in the first place. Instead, let’s hope that its next games won’t have such a restrictive security system in place.