Planet Sillicon

Could you FAIL any harder, Ubisoft?

By blog on Mar. 17, 2010.

Ubisoft certainly ruffled some feathers on launch day of Assassin’s Creed II.

So the PC version of Assassin’s Creed II launched in the US, UK, and Australia earlier this month, and within a week of the US release, Ubisoft’s servers were attacked. Which, of course, left many new owners of the game unable to play it. At all.

Ubisoft issued the requisite apology, stating that 95% of players weren’t affected, and that if you were already playing the game you wouldn’t have been affected, but that some players did experience the inability to play as the result of the attack. One has to wonder if that attack was by pirates, just trying to show Ubisoft up for being so ham-handed with their security policies.

It’s really interesting to see the reaction from gamers to actually having the game. It’s all well and good for us to blog our hearts out about how clumsy a security measure Ubisoft’s DRM is, but once the game is actually installed and running, well that’s when game developers and producers should really be paying attention.

If you’ve got a game, reviewed on IGN for a score of 8.9, and yet you’ve got a reader average of just 1.6, well you know you’ve messed up somewhere. That’s an enourmous disparity, and that also includes the fanboys who’ve rated the game 10, and those who’ve not had any problem and rated it in the 9’s. Half of the reader reviews on the game have given it 0.0 – no, that’s not a cute little emoticon, that’s zero-point-zero.

Ubisoft, it’s time to wake up and smell the poutine. You’ve got to realise you can’t just attach any price, any condition, any must-do to your games and expect them to be well received and sell well. I bet that a surprising percentage of Assassin’s Creed II copies for the PC get taken back to stores across the globe.

For those in remote places, the connection to the master server at Ubisoft is not an accessible thing, as noted in the Wiki page for the game. It’s unfair to expect that not only do people have to have a net connection to even be able to install the game, but to even play it! This is just poor form in my opinion. Those attacks on Ubisoft’s master server are just going to get worse and worse, in my opinion, until there is a cracked version of the game. Watch that cracked version take off, too. Many gamers who’ve never downloaded a torrent in their life will probably learn for this game, just to spite Ubisoft and their sledgehammer methods.