To start this off I am going to talk (rant) about DRM. DRM is Digital Rights Management and is used to combat
piracy. Also known to cause severe headaches for people or rage.
So being a gamer myself I wasn’t immune to the oncoming threat of the Steam summer sale. However I held back
as much as I could and only bought a couple of games. One game in particular was
Heroes VI. I bought this as
I loved the gameplay of Heroes III
and apparently VI was back to the good style of gameplay.
Away I went and made my purchase. I played one game with my young brother and I enjoyed the gameplay, new
graphics, music/sounds and it was good fun, brought back memories of playing Heroes III for endless hours. Then
it came to next day again we wanted to play it but came across a rather annoying surprize. It seemed that we
could not log in our account into Uplay. If you don’t know what Uplay is well its basically a social gaming
client which funnily enough runs inside Steam (another social gaming client). (Inception anyone?)
Well why did that matter? (you ask, with both suspense and curiosity). As it turns out all of our characters
AND our save files were stored online on this Uplay service. Therefore we could not continue our game unless
we started again but then we wouldn’t be able to save it. Even though we had unticked cloud saving it still
went and stored all of our data online.
Now here is where this whole DRM mess gets worse. If anyone bought the game that day it cannot be played until
you login to the Uplay service once. Well with Uplay being down I can imagine anyone who bought the game and
couldn’t play would be very pissed off at Ubisoft. Not just a couple of people, we could be talking thousands
of annoyed customers.
I know that piracy of games is bad. However there has to be a better way to do things… especially for
save files. I can rely on my own PC to always have my save available, relying on this external server/service,
not so much. Every time I start the game I will worry about this service being up or down… its not a good feeling.
We all knew DRM was going to be hell when we saw the start of it being introduced. Sadly this was my first time
experiencing the bad side of DRM. Hopefully in the future we can find some reasonable way to stop piracy of
content but still allow people to enjoy their purchase with the minimum of hassle. [/rant]