Ubisoft to tie in future PC games to Ubi.com online accounts

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Ubisoft to tie in future PC games to Ubi.com online accounts

Posted Jan 26th 2010 8:00AM by John Callaham
Filed under: Biz

A while back Ubisoft announced that it was thinking of ways to make their PC games less susceptible to piracy. Now it appears that their plans for their future PC games have been revealed. According to a GameSpy article, Ubisoft is looking to tie in all of their PC game releases to a player's Ubi.com online account.

That means that before you play any future PC game from the publisher you must first sign into your Ubi.com account. It also means even single player games from the company must have an online connection in order to be played. The upside of this plan is that Ubisoft will allow their PC games to be installed in as many PCs as a player likes. Company exec Brent Wilkinson states, "If you own a hundred PCs, you can install your games on a hundred PCs." Save games will also be stored online much like Valve's Steam Cloud program. Ubisoft will begin their new Ubi.com service with the public beta of The Settlers 7, which began on Monday.

We are sure lots of PC gamers won't like the fact they will have to sign online to play Ubisoft PC games in the future but the promise of unlimited installs and no need to hold onto a game disk once you pay for a game and register it at Ubi.com may be worth it.

Tags: drm, The-Settlers-7-Paths-to-a-Kingdom, ubi.com, ubisoft

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Yet another 'anti-piracy' strategy that will just promote piracy by harming legitimate consumers.

The ONLY way to fight piracy is to make games good enough - and/or cheap enough - that people actually want to buy them.Posted at 8:22AM on Jan 26th 2010 by asfm

I don't kow why people insist on this ridiculous argument about 'just make good games'. Pirates don't steal bad games! If you look at the most pirated games out there, they are the good and most popular games.Posted at 9:46AM on Jan 26th 2010 by ChimpWithAHandgun

At one point I thought getting all my games through Steam would limit the number of separate accounts I would have to maintain for my games, but those days seem to be over. For the games I currently have installed, off the top of my head, I require active accounts with:

Steam
EA
Games for Windows Live
THQ
and soon it appears, Ubisoft too...

This is far from a comprehensive list, and also does not include several accounts that are feature-add only, and unconnected to DRM.

I love playing games on my PC, but this fractured approach to DRM is killing the platform. Back when Steam acted (for me) as a surrogate for other DRM schemes, I thought there was some sanity to the approach. Users could choose a single flavour (eg. D2D, Gamersgate, Impulse, etc) and DRM would be nearly invisible.

Now, I just feel I'm getting kicked around by companies who couldn't care less about the user experience.
Posted at 3:26PM on Jan 26th 2010 by paralipsis

Isn't this basically just like Steam?Posted at 11:59PM on Jan 26th 2010 by Vault Boy

It is worse than Steam because there is no offline mode. If you lose your internet connection, the game pauses until it can reconnect.

Bullshit. Posted at 11:13AM on Jan 27th 2010 by nerdydesi (I do not play with toys)