valid issues
People always bang on about Piracy and the effects. What Ubisoft has managed to do wonderfully here is push to the front of the debate one of the most valid and real issues on this whole subject. Which of the two, Big publishers or Bittorrent/P2P has actually delivered the game or product or content in a way that the consumer wants it and can enjoy it better?
Another important issue is one of consumer rights. In the U.K at least you have the right to own a backup of something your legitimately own. Now since they insist on adding these odd DRM schemes you’d actually be at fault for trying to bypass them yourselves, so you’re quite entitled download a version where someone else has done this for you. Murky waters would come from then sharing this with people you can’t confirm own the game or not or as it should often be described but isn’t, illegal uploading instead of the over used and mostly false term of iIlegal downloading. But that is another story for another time.
So the point here is now that paying and legit customers actually have the right to choose between the hard copy they paid for or downloading a, well fixed .exe or whatever it they need for this particular game, since they often having the full game means you don’t need to download it from the net, you just need the part that fixes it.
Throw in a few words like Pirate, freetards, thief’s et al and you have a confused and unsure consumer who doesn’t understand what they are entitled to and that this P2P thing can benefit them. As well they should be benefited for supporting a game that they like. This is not much different from when Ubisoft support used a cracked .exe from Reloaded I think for customers who were having problems with the game. People who are genuinely having issues with this DRM should be made aware that they can legitimately benefit from these online backups. And why shouldn’t they get to enjoy what they paid for as they see fit? It’s hardly fair that these apparent Pirates should only be the ones to reap the rewards of a network heavily geared towards delivering content based on the demands and deisres of the users.
I don’t agree with the servers being DDOS’d. The DRM scheme if it would fail should have done so one its own merits and no one should have taken it upon themselves to force the issue. Perhaps it could be viewed as a catalyst of the debate but in this case it wouldn’t be proper to use it against Ubisoft as it wasn’t a naturally occurring result of their DRM but a forced one outside of their control.