Assassin's Creed 2 PC DRM or Reap What You Sew

By Teirdome February 17, 2010 26 Comments

PG gaming has long been heralded as dying as developers continue to flee the platform for the greener pastures of the console space.  An estimated 4.1 million pirated copies of Modern Warfare 2 was another nail in the platform's coffin, serving to continue discouraging PC development of AAA games.  Fuck, they were another 4.1 million nails in the coffin.  It's not limited to big games either, World of Goo had an estimated 90% piracy rate at one point.  Even the bold crusader against DRM- Brad Wardell of Stardock and Demigod- admitted that there were only 18,000 legitimate connections to their servers out of 120,000.  Those connections from pirated copies were one of the big factors in Demigod's terrible launch as they caused network problems.
 
The simple truth if you are one of those goody-two-shoes that actually gave your money to the publisher and developer for a PC title, you are the minority.  I see this trend even among my friends that have not abandoned the PC altogether.  Only two of five of us do not pirate single player games, and that's because the two of us that don't are software developers.  Some modern proverb about shitting and eating prevents us from going there.  We're all well into our careers, all of us making oddles above the average wage, yet piracy is still prevalent.
 

Today's report and subsequent outrage from sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun over the extremely harsh Assassin's Creed 2 DRM has me more pissed than a 1 year old's diaper.  Basically Ubisoft is making the game phone home every few minutes and if it cannot connect you get dumped back to the menu.  That's right, you will loose your progress since your last checkpoint save if it cannot call home because of a router problem, toddler chewing on your ethernet cord, foreign espionage agent jamming your wireless signal, or even if a cosmic ray strikes a transmission line and flips a bit.  Of course, there's also a reconnect button, and the real reason behind this is that your game's state is saved on the Ubi's cloud, but let's avoid those oh-so-damning points for sake of indulging these freak-out artists.
 
PC gamers have no right to be pissed about this for two reasons: it is not unlike the PC's current most popular title and we more than deserve it.
 
The most popular PC game possibly of all time requires constant internet access, and this has not been such a big deal.  It has consistantly been in the top three titles played on GiantBomb and is always in the top 5 on Raptr.  This bizarre phenomenon that must exclude tons of gamers without internet connections is known to laymen as World of Warcraft.  If WoW can be that successful, there is no excuse for another title- even a single player one- not requiring an internet connection.

While it is a valid point that there is not 1-to-1 correlation between games pirated and a lost sale, there is certainly some correlation.  Regardless, attempting to argue from this point is akin to saying "they were not going to buy this car no matter what the manufacturer did, so why not let them steal it?"   Clearly the person pirating the game was interested enough in it to waste the time downloading the torrent, patch it, and get it up and running.  There had to be some interest there for the thief to get this far.  Is it now the publisher and developer's fault for not tapping into that interest?
 
There's always the argument that Brad Wardell champions while adding DRM through Stardock: if you remove DRM and focus on the customer experience instead, the end result will be more sales.  Well, Ubisoft already tried that with Prince of Persia on the PC and it didn't fare so well.  Again, there are likely more factors impacting this flop of a console port, but the real point here is that the DRM-free approach did not benefit Ubisoft enough for them to be able to justify continuing down the DRM-free road.  You could argue that they released PoP DRM-free only to justify this new despotic approach at a future date, but if there had not been the piracy, it would have been much more difficult for them to justify it and to take the steam cloud approach (allow local saves if you fail to connect to the cloud) instead.
 
In the end, I don't care what your attempts at justifying conceptual theft are or your faux consumer advocacy; PC gamers deserve the DRM.  When a farmer has bugs attack his crop, reducing his potential yield, he applies pesticide (or if he's organic, breeds bugs that eat the bugs that are eating his plants).  Demanding publishers not do the same thing and actively try to prevent protective measures (DRM or otherwise) will only continue to make the PC the forgotten platform just as the farmer would we wiped out without some kind of pest control.
 
So please, tell me why I'm wrong.  Is piracy not really that bad?  Is it more important to the growth of the medium that people experience games instead of people making a profit making games?  Am I the overreacting drama queen instead of the patsies at Rock, Paper, Shotgun?
 
Note: GB editor totally freaked out, so I'm going to have to edit this post... darnit.

26 Comments