DRM News

What happens when an always online DRM system has problems? Well Ubisoft is finding out it gets unhappy customers. Apparently in the early hours (roughly 3am) this morning the authentication servers went down, and 11 hours later they are still not up. What does this mean? It means players who bought the game cannot play it. So far, it appears as though it’s only the European servers that are at issue.

Vigil, an Ubisoft Community Manager for the UK, had this to say:

Due to exceptional demand, we are currently experiencing difficulties with the Online Service Platform. This does not affect customers who are currently playing, but customers attempting to start a game may experience difficulty in accessing our servers. We are currently working to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience.

This is the first ‘official’ statement from Ubisoft about this. Ten hours later. Ubisoft was already getting a lot of flack for its DRM system from almost every gaming website and DRM websites, and now a lot of the fears people had about the system have come to life. Maybe this will make them rethink the whole idea? Yeah, probably not. Also, the way he worded that comment makes one wonder if the server capacity was overloaded due to ‘exceptional demand’. If so, what’s going to happen when multiple AAA titles are all trying to access these servers at the same time?