The facts of life: A heartfelt defense of Ubisoft and DRM

[tater]

People see the box that says a constant net connection is required and buy the game. They do so because they know they have a constant net connection.

Their experience is that every time they fire up google, it works. Every time they go to buy something on Amazon, it works. They are operating under the assumption that the multi-billion Euro company Ubisoft can has similarly bulletproof servers. It doesn't even occur to them that UBI might fail the "constant connection" test—nor should it.

Ubi apologizing for "high demand" breaking there servers is rubbish, plain and simple. That's what you hear every single time you get most tech support call centers on the phone "due to high demand, waiting times are long, but calls will be answered in the order they are received. Many questions can be answered at poopyco.com." Note that if you aim for the sales floor, you are very rarely delayed.

It's NEVER high demand, it's demand in excess of what they chose to supply. They always lowball the capability to save money because in this case the servers or phone systems are not really mission critical. In the case of Ubi, the servers are not critical because they already took your money.

Originally Posted by MattDizzle

You guys are saying "Do something else" "Try something else". Well what would you do that has the end result of getting more money from each silent hunter unit into the pockets of the developers and distributors? "Make better games, be nice and hope for the best" is not a responsible business model.

I made suggestions that would work within OSP. Again, if you require 100% connectivity, then you MUST provide enough value that people accept the odd downtime (particularly if you go cheap on the server farm so you cannot deal with DDOS attacks).

Other than that, have some sort of offline mode. Heck, they could have OSP check your client on launch, then only recheck randomly during play. Some people would have the check during a session, others would have fewer than current checks, some would have none past startup. This would reduce server load. If the servers get above a certain number of requests, the refused connection could automatically enable play on all games—that should be the default behavior on a failure. Why would this not be just as good from a piracy standpoint as 100% on (particularly if it's cracked anyway?"