Ubisoft vs PC gamers

Ubisoft thinks you are going to like this.

Well, NO. We are not going to like this.

Ubisoft wants PC gamers to be constantly connected to their internet servers. If not, BAM! You are expelled from the game. That is stupid on so many levels... If you want to stop it before it's too late, try to get organized, and do something that may work.

I respect Ubisoft. One of my first games was Zombi, a shameless rip-off adapting George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead to 8-bit computers. Yes, at that time Ubi Soft was a new French company "inspired" by B movies (they also released Manhattan 95, a transparent adaptation of John Carpenter's Escape from New York) and with very little shame.

For me, Ubisoft means imagination, risk... Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, XIII, Beyond Good & Evil... A company that combines commercial tripe and cash-ins with innovation and imagination. But they can be also evil. Their PC DRM schemes are usually as annoying as possible: They put Tages in XIII, Starforce in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, SecuROM on FarCry 2... But that was nothing compared to this.

In 2005 I decided I wouldn't play pirated games anymore. I've sticked to that, and now I purchase all my games on Steam. But if they also include SecuROM and those stupid activation limits, I'm out (well, unless they sell it for $3.75...). When you have Steam, you don't really need any other DRM, and even that is too much.

I used to buy those expensive House M.D. DVD box-sets, but when I put a disc in the DVD player I always had to watch an unskippable anti-piracy ad, the annoying "You wouldn't steal a car" one, every single time. Well, I like to watch a whole series in a short time, so I watched two or three episodes every day. At the end of the week, I had seen that bloody video a dozen times. And I was thinking all the time, "But I bought this! The people who get these episodes from the internet don't have to endure this crap".

Then, I bought the third and the fourth season, and... they had repeated or missing discs (!) and several packaging defects. I tried to contact Universal, but they ignored me. Are you surprised that I stopped buying House M.D., or any other Universal series for that matter? Of course not.

Ubisoft will be surprised when their customers do the logical thing. I won't.