Ubisoft's DRM servers crash, locking players out of their games


When it was revealed that Ubisoft’s new DRM scheme would require you to be online at all times, and if disconnected for any reason would boot you out of the game, people immediately asked the obvious question: “Well, what if your DRM servers go down?” Ubisoft was not forthcoming, unless this little calamity is their roguish idea of an answer. Yes, the servers which must be connected to constantly in order to play, save, or do anything at all went down early this morning, and everyone who wants to play their new legitimately-purchased copy of Assassin’s Creed II is SOL.

The outage appears to be ongoing, if this forum thread is any indication, and I don’t see any official response stickied or anything. A little googling shows some workarounds for getting into the game but no crack yet from any of the major groups. Don’t worry, that’ll only take a couple more days. So everyone is pretty much dead in the water at this point. Some people are floating the idea that it’s a DDoS attack, and hey, why not? Let’s be honest: they were practically begging for it.

Now, the informed, vocal, forum-going internet citizen might be able to bear this outage philosophically, because they understand what DRM really is and how this particular DRM works. It sucks, yes, but most will grin and bear it. But there are many, many people out there who are completely unaware of the vast network of strings being pulled behind the scenes, and will simply return the game, thinking it broken. And really, it is, isn’t it?