Long story short: Ubisoft launched From Dust a few weeks ago saying it would not come with the always-online infamous DRM, just a one-time activation during install. But what happened...people preordered the game and found out that the DRM was there anyway. In other words, Ubisoft lied. What followed was, of course, an outcry of people saying they wanted their money back either because of practicality (can't be online all the time) or principle.

So far, there had been rumours of people being refunded but most of them running into the wall of Steam's "no refund" policy. It seems now though that Valve/Steam have begun offering every customer who preordered the game a full refund if they want to. At the "specific request" of Ubisoft, it would appear, but still. It's not Valve's fault that Ubisoft are a bunch of skunking filthy fucking liars. They must be pretty pissed too.

Fuck you Ubisoft, fuck you very much. If you wondered why I'm not buying any of your games anymore, you just gave me another reason.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08 ... from-dust/

Yea, ive been tempted by Splinter Cell conviction and Patrician 4 so many times and everytime i read third party drm i say to myself fuck no.

Yep.... I'd totally jump for the assassin's creed games, except for the DRM. From Dust sounded interesting too, other than the crappy console port and... DRM. To hell with Ubisoft.

Yeah I have love hate relationship with Ubisoft. I love their games, buy so much assassin's creed stuff it's stupid... but even if they never code another console game again I will refuse to buy any pc product they make. They screw them over constantly and it's bloody stupid. You'd think they'd have learnt from Brotherhood with the 24 hour hacking of the server

I'm in agreement here too. I mean I get it, they don't want people copying their games - and for good reason. But I think both UBI and EA need to take a leaf out of the book that EA used for Crysis 2 on console. Give the people that bought it something that the people who copied it can not get, rather than making it so that genuine customers might not be able to play it.

It's pissing me off even more now because it's happening to Console games as-well, with "Activation" keys to be allowed to play multi player. Admittedly, that's not as invasive as Always-On DRM etc, but still the world seems to be going mad with it. THQ are dropping that bomb every once in a while too.

The other option is a new format of disc that is only available to dev/publishers - meaning that they can not be [legally] bought on the market by consumers. This would mean there would be less copies floating around in the first place, and there would be no need for horrible DRM. It's not the best solution as to be sure, there would be people that could get their hands on these discs, and it'd only really work for consoles as people could still mount img's of these discs. Meh...

People can still root consoles too, and throw in their own hard drives, or whatever.

Personally, I think they need to quit wasting money on trying to fight piracy, because it's not working. It's just pissing off your legitimate customers. You want to do something silly like a CD key during installation and a verification that only 1 copy of a CD key is in use for multiplayer, I'm ok with that. Anything more is annoying or worse. I wish they'd just spend the time, effort and money on the game. If it's a good game, people will buy it.

This! How many times have we seen small indie games make massive sales now, offsetting the small dev costs for massive income? There will always be pirates, but they are a negligible force since a pirated virtual copy is not a real loss of money - it's a potential loss of money. But you could wonder whether a pirate would have spent even 5 dollar on a game if he couldn't pirate it. For the vast majority of pirates, I think the answer is: they wouldn't have bought it anyway. And apart from cheap(er) small indie games, there's the "pay anything you want" model that's been proven to be very succesful. So...the problem isn't piracy. The problem is that the industry is more focused on making a lot of money than making great games.

I think the AAA industry should check its pricing models too. As referenced in my above statement, there is reason to believe that you could conceivably make equal or more profit from a smaller base price than 50 dollars or € on a new AAA game. I think we're already seeing these shifts going on though, both in new variations of F2P models and other schemes (like Valve's profitable cosmetic items in TF2).

Anyway, relevant:

Just a footnote; true - but you can't go on-line with them afterwards.