Comments on: DRM Assassination: Let's send a message to Ubisoft

By: Burton Haynes

Burton Haynes — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:03:43 +0000

Earn money with CELL PHONE!!! i earned in 2 days 30$!

By: Boogle

Boogle — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:32:18 +0000

Wow, now THAT’s a story a gaming website ought to publish. If only there was access to the reviews that were deleted, though. You think they’d be in google’s archives?

By: Boogle

Boogle — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:23:55 +0000

It is wrong to assume that if we don’t buy the game then Ubisoft will take this as a sign that either we don’t want the game on the PC, or that the PC market is not worth publishing in anymore.

If they had a certain amount of sales for previous, similar titles, and now a sequel suddenly has /significantly/ lower sales, people will start to look into why, and I assure you they would not ignore their DRM as a possibility.

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Dropbox Linklist – 23/2/10 « KAECY.US — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:32:28 +0000

[...] SavyGamer have taken up a scheme which, for the cost of 90p shipping and a little bit of time, you can stand up against restrictive DRM. I say bring back Disc [...]

By: Aradiel

Aradiel — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:56:33 +0000

Let’s look at the options we have open to us:

1) Buy the game – it shows that they can get away with this nonsense
2) Pirate the game – it proves they are right
3) Buy it on a console – Shows that we just aren’t interested on the PC, or that PC gamers don’t want it in general.
4) Boycott the game – They will be looking at sales figures and piracy figures, not abstentions.
5) Write a letter – As pointed out above, letters will be ignored or ineffective
6) Go through with Lewie’s idea – Actually registering our disgust in a way that they might pay attention to.

By: Jago

Jago — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:54:01 +0000

The Play.com Nazis have deleted all the reviews for Assassin’s Creed 2 on the PC…

By: K405

K405 — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 07:59:22 +0000

Tesco? Never once heard of them. Might be a good idea to pick something higher profile, like Amazon or Gamestop.

By: MacQ

MacQ — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:30:32 +0000

I don’t think any letter (physical or digital) will matter. They’ll just toss them.

The only thing that matters to these people is the money. They can show the sales from the returns if they want, but in the end they won’t see the money from them. And that will get them thinking more then a letter which they won’t even look at.

By: Rugged Malone

Rugged Malone — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:05:24 +0000

My concern is that the number of returns will be ignored and all your campaign will do is pad the number of sales, proving the DRM has no impact.

A better approach would be to write a (physical) letter to Ubisoft explaining that you would like to buy this game but refuse to because of the DRM.

Do NOT say that you will pirate it, simply state that although you really wanted to buy this game, the DRM is offensive and you refuse to support any company that uses that.

I wasn’t going to buy AC2, but ‘m planning to do this for SH5.

Minimal cost to the individual, but if enough people do this, it can definitely get their attention.

By: Ben Paddon

Ben Paddon — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:49:46 +0000

Brilliant idea. If I still lived in the UK I’d definitely get in on this.

By: ral

ral — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:40:25 +0000

Simply not buying the game on PC only gives Ubi the excuse to say that the PC has become a nonprofitable platform for investment.
The above outlined course of action is a decent one, IMO, with the only major flaw of Ubisoft as a corporation cherry-picking the numbers and statistics that they feel like looking at or reporting. I also think that pre-orders should be canceled at the latest possible date for those of us in the states with less amicable return rules, to potentially stick retailers with far more copies in-warehouse than they planned on. I also think that people should stop buying Ubisoft games on consoles; however, getting console gamers to to do anything for the sake of gaming as a hobby at large is next to impossible if their platform of choice isn’t at risk. Relatedly, I think that if Ubisoft games were suddenly taken off of everyone’s Gamefly queues, it would send a similar message.

By: Mad as hell about Ubisoft’s DRM? Try this| XboxSold.com where you find Everything Xbox| XboxSold.com BLOG

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:54:03 +0000

[...] the protest boils down to buying Assassin’e Creed 2 PC (or Settlers 7) en masse, then returning it for a full refund, loudly making it known that the DRM was the primary reason for the return. Retailers are obligated [...]

By: Jago

Jago — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:31:59 +0000

Check out the customer ratings on Play:

http://www.play.com/Games/PC/4-/9606606/Assassin-Creed-II/Product.html

By: MacQ

MacQ — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:57:20 +0000

I fully support the idea, but I’m not from the UK, and therefore I won’t be ordering a game for which I have to pay like 4 EUR to return.

Don’t they email you when you preorder so that you confirm the order one the game is out? That would be great, ’cause then I could preorder it and cancel the order when I get the email.

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Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:58:52 +0000

By: Mad as hell about Ubisoft’s DRM? Try this

Mad as hell about Ubisoft’s DRM? Try this — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:10:43 +0000

By: DrDark

DrDark — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:32:07 +0000

That’d be a wonderful thing, but unfortunately it’d never happen.

Personally, I’m boycotting all Ubisoft product, not just PC (although I’ll be taking part in this plan of attack). I actually started by boycotting Activision’s stuff late last year, around the same time all their MW2 bullsh*t and related articles all started appearing.

I think all else we can do is an all out assault using Amazon, Tesco, online blogs etc, and just tweeting about how crap it is as much as possible. Although the best case scenario would be that AC2 (and SettlersVII) is released with the DRM, then patched out later and scrapped from future releases, as it’s likely too far along to take it out now.

By: Grubblik

Grubblik — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:28:15 +0000

Lewie is a link? oh you must have meant ‘your’. If you’re gonna flame at least use the correct words, here’s a big fat go learn some grammar.

By: Rich

Rich — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:07:44 +0000

And risk losing the back-handers they get from the publishers to give their big new blockbuster a rave review, regardless of its actual quality? Not likely.

By: Freman

Freman — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:45:01 +0000

Just crack the game, remove the DRM, and play like normal.

By: KBoogle

KBoogle — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:07:28 +0000

Another fight we could put up, and which is perhaps the most drastic of all options, is a psychological attack. We simply ignore Ubisoft. We ignore Assissin’s Creed2, and Settlers, and any game they release. And by we, I mean the PC community as a whole. This will include reviewers and magazines, too. Imagine if all of a sudden everyone but the odd small website and blog starts to completely ignore anything by Ubisoft and completely shuns them. No mention whatsoever, not even of the shunning itself. Now that would be an effective message right there. It would greatly impact them because all these websites and magazines are very important to marketting. And if this pushes them over the edge and they give up with PCs entirely, then as someone has already mentioned; good riddance. Let them take their shite elsewhere.

That’s an unfeasible plan, though. It involves having websites and magazines that make money on these articles and reviews to intentionally reduce their profits. And I don’t know about every website and magazine, but most are run by companies and managed by boards that are just like the game publishers. They’d never agree to something like that.

By: KBoogle

KBoogle — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:47:20 +0000

All these shareholders are usually wealthy market players or hopeful white-collared blokes that went to the wrong advisory agency. The chances that any of them actually give a rat’s arse about the games’ quality is little. What they care about is the return on their investment, their dividends. And so when the chairman of the board shows them a slide explaining how DRM will increase profits by decreasing number of units pirated and, by correlation, increases the units sold, that will be enough for them.
And of course it doesn’t matter that DRM rarely stops piracy, because the board will never show THOSE numbers to the public. And the only truly knowledgeable ones and those that care are just a small minority who’s combined vote is a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of shares.

By: Squirrel

Squirrel — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:25:41 +0000

All these publishers are usually public companies, what kind of say do shareholders get? Is it as easy for an executive to ignore a letter from a shareholder rather than a member of public?

By: KBoogle

KBoogle — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:06:55 +0000

I don’t quite see how user submitted scores on Amazon affect anything, but that’s because I don’t shop for games on Amazon. Phil does bring up a good point that it [i]could[/i] be picked up by some kind of news outlet.

However, I don’t think we should focus on just one venue. We should all do as much as possible to fight back. Tesco, Metacritic, Amazon, anything and everything. The more the better. And by spreading it wide, the effect will loop back onto itself.