Explain something about the online DRM buisness model.

[Placoderm]

Originally Posted by SteamWake

How... do you continue to pay for those ongoing costs once the sales of the product begin to dry up?

You don't need to. The servers are not dedicated to just one game. SHV uses the same servers as Assasins Creed 2 which uses the same servers as Settlers 7. There is no ongoing cost that increases with each title, nor is there any unfunded maintenance needed as older titles become less popular...since new titles continue to be released that will use the same servers.

As an analogy, The internet does not need to be changed every time you buy a new computer, or every time Microsoft releases a new operating system...because the internet is a self-supporting entity that is not dependent upon any one specific application accessing it. In the same sense, it costs nothing for Ubisoft to leave DRM in older titles as newer ones are released, since it is the sale of the newer titles that will support the servers and their ongoing maintenance.

When SH6 or AC3 or Settlers8 are released sometime in the future, the server load from the previous titles will have decreased anyway, and so the cost of removing the DRM could very well outweigh the benefit of any saved bandwidth in doing so. In other words, Ubisoft could very well be better off just letting the older titles die slowly and fade away as new replacement title sales cover the cost of the servers into perpetuity.

Originally Posted by captainprid

...When the game drops down to 2.99 and can be found at the local BP fuel stop, the DRM will be removed.

That may not necessarily be the case. From a business standpoint, as long as the servers are already operating and serving other games, the minimal impact of a title that is selling for $2.99 may not justify the cost of removing the DRM at all. Patches cost the publisher money, and if the title is already selling below the profit threshold, it would take a lot of server impact to justify such an investment on their part.

It would be cheaper for Ubisoft to just forget about the paltry server impact of a game that is past it's prime and move on to newer releases. At best, they may decide to pull the plug on future sales of a given title to insure that the product life is somewhat controllable, but by that time funding a DRM removal patch would be nothing but a financial loss.