This weekend, following a surge of new game sales thanks to Steam’s always popular summer sale, Ubisoft’s PC gaming service UPlay was brought to its knees – leaving many PC gamers unable to play the new games they’d just bought.
“Sorry for the inconvenience,” a Ubisoft representative said on the Ubisoft forums, adding that “The Uplay PC service should now be up and running properly. Please try logging into your game and let us know if you have any issues” – but not before users generated 27 vitriolic pages of complaints about not being able to play their games.
Uplay – which launched on the PC with Assassin’s Creed II, is a service that tracks in-game achievements, rewarding diligent players with in-game unlocks but, crucially, is also used as a once-off online DRM authentication service- once again highlighting the pitfalls and tribulations of online DRM. You can’t authenticate if you can’t log in. Once again, it’s a case of legitimate users getting the raw end, while pilfering pirates play to their blackened hearts content.
Unfortunately, DRM like this probably won’t be going away; in fact it’ll likely just become worse as more and more games require you to remain online to play single player games.
Last Updated: July 16, 2012
up layed
December 1, 2013 at 20:01
So does this happen every time Steam has a sale? I bought Far Cry: Blood Dragon yesterday, and I still am “unable to reach ubisoft servers”.