Yet by placing ridiculous restrictions on paying, loyal customers, Ubisoft surely dissuades people from buying its games. With piracy an issue that will never go away, isn’t that what the company should be worried about?
Ubisoft has shown more concern for piracy than customer convenience. Forcing me to always be online to play a single player game does just one thing. It stops me from buying it.
Recently I passed on Splinter Cell: Conviction on Steam’s Summer Sale. I played a trial on OnLive awhile back and loved it. Would have been great to play it on PC but of course my first thought when purchasing was to check if their was DRM that required I be online to play and it did. No thanks.
This is a bigger deal than you think. The internet isn’t available everywhere and simply isn’t reliable enough. Worse yet you become completely dependent on Ubisoft and their servers to play a title you legitimately bought. What if Ubisoft decides to shut down the servers for that game after a year or two? What if Ubisoft is no longer in business? You can no longer play that game.
While this does happen for some console games thats just for the multiplayer portion. In this case a PC game with Ubisoft DRM would stop you from even playing single-player!
In the end DRM only hurts the paying customer.