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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.