A sorry would have been nice, but at least things are changing.
By Chris Pereira, 09/06/2012



Ubisoft is not held in the highest esteem among PC gamers. There are a variety of reasons for that, the most prominent being the manner in which the publisher has handled DRM. Its games have been saddled with what is perceived by many as being unacceptable forms of digital rights management, the technology used to combat piracy. The company has now declared it is changing the way it handles things, and while it hasn't given us the satisfaction of admitting it was wrong, the important thing is one of the world's biggest biggest publishers now appears to be taking computer gaming much more seriously.

To be fair, Ubisoft had already taken some steps to further capitalize on the PC gaming market recently. It announced several new free-to-play titles last month and then launched Uplay PC, a digital distribution platform for its PC games that operates like Origin or Steam. Whom this was targeted at was unclear; with Ubisoft having the reputation it does, many hardcore PC gamers shy away from buying PC versions of Ubisoft's games in the first place. (I count myself among this group; I think Anno 2070 looks great, and even though it has been discounted numerous times on Steam, tales of its DRM were enough for me to take a stand and not buy it.) The odds that these people would not only support its games despite the way they are treated, but do so directly through its own distribution service were not high.

That the company would bother investing in such a service seemed unusual, since shortly thereafter CEO Yves Guillemot claimed PC games see a piracy rate of 93 to 95 percent, a figure so staggeringly high it was hard to believe. It was presented, as such claims almost always are, without any hard evidence or specifics as to which games or regions these numbers applied to. It also seemed curious considering the always-online DRM Ubisoft often uses, which requires players to be online in order to play even single-player content, was deemed a success by the publisher last year.

The fact that Ubisoft would even open up and discuss the subject with anyone seems like a promising sign in and of itself; aside from these seemingly baseless comments about piracy rates and the ability of DRM to keep pirates locked out, it typically avoided broaching the subject. That changed this week when worldwide director for online games Stephanie Perotti and corporate communications manager Michael Burk spoke with Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Neither was willing to admit regret over the form of DRM used in the past or that doing so had been a mistake -- something RPS' John Walker surmises, and I agree, could be to avoid shareholder backlash -- but we did get some encouraging news regarding the way things will be handled going forward.



Calling last year's proclamation that always-on DRM was a success "unfortunate," Perotti said, "We have listened to feedback, and since June last year our policy for all of PC games is that we only require a one-time online activation when you first install the game, and from then you are free to play the game offline." When asked if there were any regrets over how things had been handled previously, the closest we got to an apology was her stating, "We've listened to feedback, we will continue to listen to feedback, we will continue to make sure that we deliver great games and great services, and are now operating under this policy."

Later in the interview it was reaffirmed that for games like Assassin's Creed III and beyond, there will be only a one-time activation with no limits on the number of computers a game can be installed on. This is, suffice it to say, great news.

Perhaps the single most troublesome thing about stringent DRM is how it primarily impacts legitimate gamers. DRM may or may not prevent a game from being pirated as quickly as it otherwise would be, but ultimately that DRM is cracked. This leaves its effects (like a requirement that you always be online) to only be felt by those who have spent their hard-earned money on a copy of the game, essentially incentivizing the act of pirating or cracking the game. Perotti wouldn't agree customers were the only ones DRM affects, which may be frustrating to hear for anyone who has lost single-player progress because their Internet connection cut out or anyone who could not play their legally acquired game when Ubisoft was moving its servers while pirates could.

DRM aside, the other common issue with PC versions of Ubisoft's games is the way they are almost always delayed so they come out some time after their console counterparts. (For example, here is the gap between the release of the console and PC versions of the first three main Assassin's Creed titles: five months, four months, and four months.) There are those who suspect this is so that impatient gamers opt to pick up the console version as opposed to pirating the PC version, which you (in most cases) can't do if the game hasn't been released yet. What's especially annoying about this is the way we often don't learn of this delay until much later than we should.

According to Perotti, these delays are due to a need for more time to complete the PC version, a claim some may take issue with considering a game like Sleeping Dogs -- which had an extremely well-done PC version -- was released on the same day on consoles and PC. Regardless, she acknowledged the inconsistency and the "need to improve our communication, and make sure we provide better visibility to the PC community on our release dates for PC." She went on to make it clear Ubisoft is "committed to continue to improve on that front and continue to release PC games as close as possible to console releases," highlighting Far Cry 3's day-and-date release on consoles and PCs and Assassin's Creed III's coming to PC only a few weeks late as evidence of this.

The situation with AC III's release isn't perfect, certainly, though it is preferable to those months-long waits for some of the earlier titles in the series. And although it's actually seeing more simultaneous releases that we really need, the admission that Ubisoft hasn't been great in this regard is a first step in that direction.

The same could be said about this entire situation. While it would have been preferable and more likely to garner respect had Ubisoft come right out and apologized and admitted it had been wrong with the way it handled PC gaming previously, a public declaration that it is trying to be better with release dates and is abandoning both always-on DRM and activation limits is surely the next best thing.