We rag on Ubisoft pretty hard here. But it isn’t without merit. Ubi’s blind love for customer slaying DRM is disgusting and shameful. All the while Ubi goes on proclaiming how great it is for consumers and how much we love it….right. Blizzard on the other hand understands customers (and Ubi’s customers no less) as the company has come forward stating that they will be taking a different approach…
Ubisoft sought out to tackle piracy in the worst way imaginable — take a great game and destroy it with “always-on” DRM. Even if the game doesn’t need a net connection for anything related to gameplay, paranoid Ubi went ahead and decided that they needed to slap the tech in anyway.
Thankfully Blizzard isn’t run by a bunch of morons. With their upcoming StarCraft II, Blizzard will resort to the old one-time key activation method. Yes, piracy will be much easier with such a method. But Blizzard is looking at the bigger picture by trying to develop and market an entire online community/store front of sorts for their games that will make customers want to pay for keys/legit copies of games. Think of Blizzards attempts as a sort of Steam 2 in a way.
This attempt goes by “Battle.net”. Whether or not Battle.net is worth anything, it’s extremely encouraging to see at least one developer not letting the money go straight to their heads and managing to maintain a sliver or two of common sense along the way.
Will other game devs follow suit? We can only hope so.
What do you have to say Ubi?
