Legal Niches

Ubisoft DRM Servers Attacked Rendering Games Unplayable

By pete_gallagher

Ubisoft's new DRM scheme, which requires a constant Internet connection to authenticate game sessions, had a bit of a hick up this weekend.

Ubi posted to its Twitter feed this morning apologizing to 'anyone who couldn't play ACII [Assassin's Creed II] or SH5 [Silent Hunter 5] yesterday.' While the company originally blamed the outage on 'exceptional demand,' Ubi stated on its Twitter feed that their servers were 'attacked, which limited service from 2:30pm to 9pm Paris time.'

Ubisoft added that '95% of players were not affected, but a small group of players attempting to open a game session did receive denial of service errors.'

Joystiq also points us towards a thread on the Ubisoft forums in which the affected '5%' voice their displeasure.

GP: On a related note, I grabbed Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for the PC this weekend and during the install was prompted to choose my favored method of DRM—disc-based or online authentication (I chose disc-based). In a perfect world there would be no need for DRM, but if it is required, this method of offering the user a choice at least goes a little way towards lessening the impact (and might make DRM-based gaming functionable on an Army base or a cruise ship). Bad Company 2 uses Sony's SecuROM technology.

As another aside, while the DRM tech worked fine, Bad Company 2 had its own online problems for a little bit yesterday, though their issues appeared to be Punkbuster-related.

|Thanks PHX Corp and DarkSaber!|

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on March 08, 2010 (boomark / email).