The arguments against DRM, especially those forms demanding an internet connection to run a game, can start to feel very theoretical in a world that’s increasingly better connected. While still deeply galling to those in rural communities, less online nations, or in any of the many circumstances where internet access simply isn’t available, for most people most of the time, it’s an objectionable principle rather than an actual impediment. Right up until, that is, it’s the other end of that access that goes down. So it was that over the weekend, when Ubisoft Connect on PC went down, Ubisoft customers say they discovered they couldn’t play their freshly purchased Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, nor indeed any other Ubisoft games.
Starting very early in the morning on Saturday, July 11, players took to Black Flag‘s Steam discussions to report that they were no longer able to start the game. It seemed Connect was temporarily down, and this was preventing games from launching. And as many were quick to point out, this was an issue only affecting legitimate customers—those who had pirated the game, and thus patched out its Connect requirement, were able to continue playing throughout the hour-long outage.
More problematic, as one poster points out, is that Black Flag Resynced‘s FAQ asks the question, “Can I play Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced offline?” and answers it, “Yes. A one-time internet connection is required to download the game. Once downloaded, the full main campaign of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is fully playable offline. However, an online connection will be needed to play live content linked to the Animus Hub (Store, Anomalies, Projects, Vault).”
This particular outage was pretty short, and occurred before most in the U.S. were awake, but even so, a thread on Reddit about the issue still accrued over 15,000 upvotes. It underlines the immediate problems of such online requirements, and of course the larger issue of what happens in the future when the already precariously extant Ubisoft no longer maintains Connect or its servers.
Ubisoft’s bloody-minded insistence on enforcing Connect, even for games bought via Steam, has been a headache for players for many years, right back to when it was called UPlay. I was reporting this exact same story in 2012 on the launch of Far Cry 3, so it’s maddening that this is still the norm for almost every Ubisoft launch. We’ve reached out to Ubisoft to ask why the game was reportedly inaccessible despite the claims made in its FAQ and will update if they respond.