Legit customers sometimes cannot install or play a game because of the copy protection. It has happened in the past that a game could not be installed if a virtual DVD drive was installed on the computer.

The most common form of protection nowadays is an online activation that forces a legit buyer to activate the game online. This does mean however that the customer needs to have access to an Internet connection to activate the game. That was, until now, a one-time job.

Ubisoft now decided to up the ante by linking their games to the cloud which essentially means that games can only be played if the user has an online connection. If the connection breaks the game will stop working.

This obviously improves the copy protection of the game but to what costs?

• Games cannot be resold anymore because they are linked to an account (selling the account would work but one would have to create single accounts for every game)
• Users with no Internet connection cannot play the game
• Users with shaky Internet connection will have a mediocre gaming experience
• The game cannot be played if the master server drops (either because of technical problems on the server side, on the user’s Internet connection side or because Ubisoft decides to stop supporting the game or files bankruptcy)
• Users cannot play games while on the go
• Games cannot be lend to friends anymore

The main question here is if the protection will keep piracy at bay. History has shown that this is likely not to be the case. Until now every game has been pirated eventually. It might take a little longer for the first game or so to become available but it will happen eventually. And the score again will be Pirates:1 Legit Customers:0.

What’s your opinion on this always online copy protection? Do you think it is the right step in protecting games from being pirated or do you see it as another fruitless idea that will only punish legit customers of the game?

It is obvious that game developers cannot give credit to warez groups even if their cracks are the perfect solution and that’s probably the reason why no credit was given.

It’s nevertheless highly hypocritical to ban forum members at the official Ubisoft forum for posting links to no-cd cracks while using one of those to fix a game.

I like no-cd cracks because they simplify the gaming experience. I do not have to pick and load a CD or DVD every time I want to play a game and it also saves me from hassles with copy protections.

You can read up on the story at Torrentfreak, Slashdot and the official Ubisoft forum. Props that they have not deleted the topic but only locked it.

Ubisoft decided to make some of their recent games available for free in an ad supported version which can be downloaded exclusively from Fileplanet. The games that can be downloaded are: Rayman Raving Rabbids, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Far Cry and are available for US-Residents only.

You will also need a Fileplanet account to be able to download those games. Those are surely some hassles and I would personally not go through them to play those games but I know that some will do that.

The major difficulty that I have with this releases is that there are zero information regarding the type of advertisement provided by Ubisoft or Filefront.

I did found more information on Darren Gladstone’s blog where he confirms that the ads are only displayed during load and sage operations. That means no ads during gameplay, for now.

All games have a size of one Gigabyte+ which means that it takes some time if you download it from Fileplanet, one of the many download sites that I absolutely do not like and do not intend to use.

Some users reported that you only need a US Ubisoft account to make them work even if you currently live in another country.

Update: Free games supported by ads have not really taken off. It seems that companies like Ubisoft who experimented with free ad supported games have stopped the experiment.