Boycott Ubisoft.

Posted on February 21, 2010 at 1:45 am.

This week Ubisoft Entertainment, a French company known for withholding games from publications that give negative reviews, has once again decided to spit in the face of every gamer in the world. They announced that in order to play their games one will be required to be connected to the Internet. Should a connection be dropped for any reason, progress will be lost. This applies to at least three of their upcoming titles.

What this means to you, is that you will not be able to play these games on a plane, without paying for an in-flight connection (assuming one is offered.) You will not be able to play them if a squirrel chews through your cable. You will not be able to play them while you are waiting for the phone company to install your connection after you move to a new house. You will not be able to play them if your wireless is spotty. Of course you will not be able to play them anywhere where there is no wireless. Should your Windows have a networking hiccup, should your kid pull a cable, should there be a power surge... yea, you will lose your progress.

Very soon, you will not be able to play at all, after the authenticating server is taken down. If you think that won't happen, take a hard look at EA, which has taken down servers for a couple of games that are not even two years old. Moreover, should anyone ever carry out something as simple as a DDOS attack against the server, you will be out of luck. With the amount of tech-savvy enemies that Ubisoft is making, this can be a very real possibility.

Oh, in case you are wondering, this is not the first time Ubisoft has been in the middle of a nasty DRM controversy. In 2005 they began shipping StarForce copy protection scheme along with their games. It resulted in an untold amounts of issues, including hardware damage. Yours truly had a DVD-RW drive murdered by StarForce. The outcry was so enormous that a year later Ubisoft backed down and announced that they will no longer use StarForce. Apparently, however, they are incapable of learning from their mistakes.

Some say that this is meant to fight piracy. I say this argument is as pathetic as it is fallacious. We all know that the pirates will simply crack the game and play all they want without having to be connected to anything. An honest paying customer, on the other hand, is going to get shafted for no good reason whatsoever. So far this only affects PC gamers, but if not stopped, this sort of militant cretinism will come to affect those of you who play on consoles as well.

Those of you who know me are well aware of how much I detest piracy. About a month ago I even had an article published in which I implored pirates to change their ways. To me, stealing any of Ubisoft's games is not an option, although I have heard plenty of people say that this is exactly what they will do. What is an option, however, is to not buy any of their games until this idiotic policy is done away with. Do not just boycott it though. Let other people know what's going on. Tell your friends. Post on forums you frequent. If you see someone pick up a Ubisoft title at a store - let them know what they are getting into.

You can also tell Ubisoft directly. There is no e-mail address on their site, but you can call them up and tell them how upset you are over their ridiculous and insulting policy. Tell them you were going to buy their games but have not intention of doing it anymore. This worked five years ago and it will work again today. You have to do it though. All of us do. Personally I own a number of Ubisoft's games, and I hate to see it come to this, but since we are faced with this reality, we must take action to protect our interests.

Ubisoft's phone number in the United States is (415) 547 4000. For numbers and addresses in other countries go to this page.