Lessons Learned from the Ubisoft DRM Disaster

It’s a metaphor.

Over the past few days, servers at Ubisoft have been under attack by a DDoS assault that’s rendered their DRM servers useless. What that has meant for players of Assassin’s Creed 2, using Ubi’s newly formed DRM system, that they cannot play the game at all, even in single player mode, as a constant internet connection to Ubi’s servers is required, and when their servers are down, you’re simply shit out of luck.

This has caused something of an outrage all across the internet, where PC gamers have been lamenting their plight across forums and comment boards alike. As this inane disaster comes to a close, what are the lessons we’ve learned from it?

1. Piracy is the best way to play single-player PC games

For most multiplayer PC games, players will usually bite the bullet and buy the game, as they know if they’re caught online with a cracked version of the game, they’ll be banned forever, and will likely be forced to buy the game like they should have purchased in the first place.

A game that requires players to be online is a more easy way to monitor whether or not their game is legit, so Ubisoft got the genius idea to do this to its largely single player games as well, thinking it would stop piracy of its game.

Well, when a server goes down at Battle.net or Valve or the like, people say, sure, OK, these things happen. But when you’re strolling around Venice playing Assassin’s Creed by YOURSELF and you’re all of a sudden kicked out? This doesn’t fly at all, and creates an uproar like we’ve seen in the past few days. The common phrase going around the internet is “If I had pirated Assassin’s Creed 2, I could be playing it right now.”

When pirates are able to play a game that paying customers are not, it turns off what could have been loyal customers to the brand and causes all those who pirated the game to laugh at those who actually paid money for it.

2. DRM punishes paying consumers and hurts more than it helps

DRM thinks that it’s saving the industry because for every pirate it stops, the company assumes that that person is buying the game instead. For example, if the company sees the piracy rate of a title drop by 50% (though note, with DRM this never actually happens), the company believes that it’s saving itself hundreds of thousands of dollars, because they subscribe to the tried and untrue philosophy that one download equals one lost sale.

Why is this untrue? Well I know…people who have six hundred and fifty movies downloaded onto a portable terabyte hard drive hooked up to their TV. Does that mean had each of these movies been copy protected and impossible to download that this person would have bought all six hundred and fifty of these movies? No, absolutely not. Sure, they might have picked up a handful of titles they actually thought were worth the money to rent or buy, but that number goes no higher than maybe 50 out of 650, and the majority of those 50 would probably likely be rentals rather than actual purchases.

The same is true for games. The ability of someone to get something for free increases the chance that the person will want that item, and for PC gamers, it’s much easier to pirate game than it is for console players. This makes up for the fact that PC gamers cannot rent games like their console counterparts, meaning that the ONLY way to play Assassin’s Creed 2 in any meaningful capacity is to pay full price for it, or pirate it for free. This is in contrast to the acceptable middleground of renting the game via Blockbuster or Gamefly for $8 like I did. Anything with 10 hours of playing time or under just isn’t worth $60, and PC gamers are forced into an all or nothing scenario that is the driving force behind increased piracy rates.

3. Big publishers don’t give a shit about PC gamers

Lastly, this is the most obvious thing to come out of this whole debacle. Ubisoft fundamentally doesn’t care about its PC gamer base because simply, the sales numbers in that sector are dwarfed by PS3 and 360 players. Who cares if players are screwed by DLC as long as it saves a couple bucks from piracy? Who cares if servers go down and the vast majority of AC2 players (on consoles) are still able to play the game?

Another prime example of this is Activision/Infinity Ward’s complete disregard for PC support for Modern Warfare 2. Yes, the game came out for the PC, but without any dedicated servers and stripped players of the ability to mod the game, something that’s long been a tradition in the PC community. They simply ported the console version over, leaving PC players to just “deal with it.”

Now of course, this isn’t to say that PC gamers are being left in the dust completely. Companies like Blizzard and Valve are almost entirely devoted to making their legions of fans happy, and as a result, they have massively selling titles year after year without the kind of pain-in-the-ass DRM that other publishers use. The result? Extremely loyal fanbases who would fall on a sword for Gabe Newell or a Starcraft 2 beta key. Brand loyalty through customer satisfaction. Goddamn brilliant.

I see this divide widening as time goes on. PC loyal companies will continue taking their time to utilize new technology to make sure that their consumers get the best games possible (one that are actually worth paying full price for), and the other brands will just keep making their games direct console ports, saddling them with DRM that make them unplayable in certain circumstances. And after this week, it’s clear Ubisoft has chosen its side.