Gamers Stung by Ubisoft DRM Offered Free Stuff

Lol, more fail.

It's absolutely no use. The DRM is just unacceptable [Though it is a smart way to tackle piracy, but the 'side-effects' are a bit too annoying]

Ubisoft will understand this when they see their sales drop down steeply with their next big release.

Oh boy! Free bad games!

Could those freebies now have DRM protection as well?

there is no way in hell I would evar fork over my hard earned money for a game I can not play uninterrupted. Ubisoft wants us to give them our money for this shyte? While I don't agree with piracy, I don't agree with big corporations trying to pirate my money for half baked idea that they think would be acceptable to the consumer either./end rant

It's really sad when DRM causes headaches for legit buyers and is not an issue at all for the Pirates.

I thought game companys learned this years ago?

Make a good game, people WILL buy it.
Otherwise, you deserve to loose revenue and go bankrupt!

People need to STOP buying games that use these kinds of intrusive protection.

LOL. How can they 'soften' the pain if people can't play because their dsl is not up to it?! Some people live in areas where the dsl is not perfect..
Did you thought about that mister/misses Ubisoft?!

There's a reason I have the xbox 360 version of this game.

You know, I'd like to play games nowdays, but restrictive DRM is just making it too annoying to have fun.

At least I can thank EA and Ubisoft for getting me back into books and going outside

lol @ r0x0r's comment. yeah, recent WoW server crashes (EU servers) have made me start cycling a lot more!

on the DRM note...i would be up in arms if i HAD bought a special edition copy...it's like: 1) i paid more to get exclusive content, 2) i ALSO couldn't play while the servers were down 3) what do i get? Exclusive, exclusive content? ... words fail me with Ubisoft's DRM... any news on the cracking front

I wait 6 months to a year before I buy a game. Less expensive or the game includes expansion packs. And I can avoid really intrusive DRM.

I won't be buying anything from Ubisoft.

When do they learn, its impossible to come up with a thing that prevent piracy completely, piracy is something multimedia companies will have to live with. The only way forward is to educate people about the negative sides of piracy, with drm and dragging people to court you only aggrivate people and make more likely to pirate stuff.

They should have said something like this: " We need to earn money on our products, for that to happen we need to make products that isnt pirated so much, with much piracy going on our music will be in large part made for old people as they tend to buy their music and not pirate it "

but don't forget countries that have lower income. games still sell the same price as US there. it motivates piracy even the game is at their best.

Follow up to my previous post.

Gaming and movie companies could go: " Piracy causes us to cut budgets on our upcomming games/ movies and we can not make titles that may not sell, the innovation within our business will stop or slow down as innovation is too risky and will cause us to lose money."

Did someone say free stuff?

well I just wont buy it. Why pay for something just to be treated like you stole it.

Man I bought this stupid game and I still had to torrent it to play! WTF is up with that!

Yeh, If you had DRM troubles with Ubisoft before, they're gonna make it better by giving you more broken garbage!

is this only happening on the PC versions... if so could this be a ploy to move everyone over to the console versions?

Gumby74 I think personally that "most" developers would like to see this, which is sad.

I am starting to agree that piracy is a big problem on the PC as well. When NFS Shift came out I read that alot of people with ATI hardware were having issues, so first I went and grabbed the torrent. I couldn't believe how many people were grabbing it. Somewhere around 3,000,000 DLing, and 2,000,000 seeds. After I got the torrent I tried it and it ran fine, so I went out and bought it. If 5 million+ people downloaded it, that had to take alot of money away from the developers. It's still a business, and if companies are losing money for "any" reason on a scale like this it's kinda understandable why they would want to go to console only. It sucks big time though, because I would rather play on the PC any day.

Now with that said, I still don't like DRM. I think the industry as a whole needs to figure something out that works a hell of alot better, for the consumers and the developers. All digital downloads, linked to an account only maybe? Similar to steam. I still can't figure out why companies can't do something to scan certain crucial files before loading the game to find changes. If found, then the game throws people back to the desktop.

Now guys this is all just my personal opinion, but something has to be done because it's getting worse and worse all the time. Back 10 years ago there would of only been a few thousand illegal downloads, and now it's in the millions for almost all new titles. At the same time the developers should of done something a long time ago to nip this in the bud. Same goes for movies, and music. It's there fault for letting it get as bad as what it is IMO.

Well, so many people download it as compared with the time 10 years ago because much more people have now internet and no money t shell out for games. I mean, you would not pay 50$ for every game out there in China or India, similar for Eastern Europe or South America. But those people are not the one who can be considered "lost sales". Also there are many people who download it and never play or not more than an hour or two and delete it or so.
I believe that real loses might be around 10% of these numbers, those represent people which might have bought the game - might have, not necessarily, depending on the factors how like they really like it etc. They probably download much more that they can play anyway.

I agree with what your saying, but even 10% of 5 million is still 500,000 copies. Take that and multiply it by $50 a game, and a company just lost 25 million. See what I'm saying? Even if it was only 5% that could of been sales, that's still 250,000 copies and 12.5 million lost.

Next step, sue your grandmother or some 7 year old girl for the 12 million. That will fix the problem, right?

You're largely on the ball there, but in truth, it's a HORRIBLE way of tackling piracy, because it contradicts the very rules of capitalism. If you want someone to buy a game rather than pirate it, you have to offer a better deal. In this case, they're offering a gimped game that is prone to downtime frequently and other frustrations, versus a game that is otherwise identical, but runs flawlessly. Now, if the former was free, and the latter $50US, you could bet that plenty would pay for the latter. But if the prices were reversed? It hence becomes a no-brainer that piracy is so frequent; many go not simply because they don't have to pay, but because it's a better product. Capitalism doesn't work in a perversely different way just because some publisher/label wishes it.



Yes, you're saying you have little to no clue how the sales model for games works. You see a $50US price sticker on AC2 at GameStop, and you think that Ubisoft gets every dime? Rather, they get a small fraction of that; there's a bunch of people between the developer and the gamer, and each wants to take their own cut. First off, GameStop (or Wal-Mart, or whoever sells it) wants their profit too; it's how they stay open. Then there's the cost of distributing all those copies; trucking them thousands of miles, from the publisher's warehouse, to the seller's warehouse, and finally to their store. Then there's the cost of stamping each disc, printing the box, manual, inserts, etc. and packing them all in. None of this is profit for Ubi; in the end, they get maybe a few dollars out of each sale.

At that point, you have to wonder if $1-2US million in "lost sales" is worth the effort of trying to recover. It's much the same as with the government, where some taxes and fines cost more to collect than they bring in. Again, capitalism at work. With "luxury goods" (i.e, those non-essential to living) you can't circumvent the rules of capitalism no matter how hard you try.

LOL, so by what your saying the game companies only get a few bucks from a sale. So "if" that was true, why even make them? Game cost 10-20 million to make, but they only get a few bucks for a couple hundred thousand copies? So that 10-20 million dollar game gets them only a few hundred thousand or a million? Sounds a little messed up to me, by your logic.

Honestly IMO alot of the guys here are tring to justify piracy. Try doing that once the rest of the companies pull from the PC because of it. Alot have and more will. If this trend continues, all we'll be left with is RTS's and MMO's soon. Well hopefully the next console is practically a PC, then maybe we'll be allright.

I love how my friend (who bought the game 1 week ago on steam, and didn't have any DRM issues) gets a free game but I (who bought the game 2 days after it released and was disconnected/unable to connect several times) have yet to receive an email. gg Ubisoft.

Awesome!! New Content!! Now if I could just play it...I was going to buy this one after hearing about it, but will probably pass. Starting to get tired of DRM like this.

So free content. Meh. I will stick with my TF2 that has had more than a new games worth of free content, more to come and tons of user creatd content no in the form of hats/weapons.

Sorry Ubisoft. Your DRM is epic in teh fail.

DRM still blows... they want to fix the problem, remove the DRM or start using STEAM.

5 million people pirated NFS Shift?! HOLY SMOKES! That is horrible! For a publisher, that is painful. But there isn't much they can do about it. I'd say that a large part of the piracy market is China. The ratio of piracy is still pretty much the same as always in the USA & Europe, but people do buy games. But when you have a high speed connection, it makes it easy to get a pirated version of a game. Those people most likely would never have bought the game anyways.

Now, perhaps the smart thing to do would be to make a china-only version for $8... but I think the game would still be pirated pretty much just as much.