Kopieeer beveiligingen lijken meer de kopende gamer te pesten dan de vele mensen die lijden aan het syndrome van download. Want Ubisoft heeft laten weten dat hun Cloud beveiliging niet speelt als er geen internet verbinding is, en mocht er nu storing op je lijn (of de master servers van Ubisoft) zijn dan stopt je game en kan je niet meer verder spelen.

Wij van Eigenwereld zijn van mening dat je goede games gewoon moet kopen, maar als de game industrie mensen die hun product aanschaffen gaan opschepen met een nu al zinloze beveiliging is het einde zoek. Want iedereen weet dat de Razor 1911 of RELOADED dit binnen de korste tijd zullen kraken en je gewoon offline kan spelen. Maar goed het is nog altijd beter dan die fooking SecuRom die zich gedraagt als een rootkit en bepaalt wat je wel en niet op je eigen systeem mag instaleren.

Assassin's Creed 2 first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers'. The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen - all my progress since it last autosaved was lost.

Even if everyone in the world had perfect internet connections that never dropped out, this would still mean that any time Ubisoft's 'Master servers' are down for any reason, everyone playing a current Ubisoft game is kicked out of it and loses their progress. Even massively multiplayer games aren't so draconian about the internet: you can't play when the server's down, but at least you don't lose anything for getting disconnected.

The only benefit we're being offered is the ability to store our savegames online. Personally, I'm in the rare position of getting to play PC games at work, and even for me this is a fringe benefit. How many normal gamers have two separate gaming machines on which they play the same single-player games? And how many of those don't know about DropBox, Live Mesh or any of the dozens of free services that can already sync your savegames perfectly well?

We've all seen again and again that you can't stop the piracy scene from cracking your game and distributing it, free of DRM. But you can stop the people who love your games from downloading it, and you do that by making the retail experience better - not worse.