I was thinking about the Driver series recently, and it occurred to me that I should buy a copy of San Francisco for a friend who was a big fan of Parallel Lines back in the day. So I went to Steam... and the game's not on Steam. I still own the game, because I bought it back when it was on Steam, but it's been removed from Steam.
So I look on Uplay, and it has been removed from Uplay. At which point I've got my eyebrows raised. So I venture onto Ubisoft's site, and it turns out that the only means to legitimately buy a new copy of this game is through an Amazon digital download, which apparently gives you a Uplay key.
But there's no button add it to the basket. Why is that?
Oh. It's US only because reasons.
So for most of the world, you can't buy this game anymore. I dunno whether tricks like using a VPN would work. (And there are physical boxed copies floating around. Mind you, the limited supply of boxed physical copies are very specifically not shipped outside of America on Amazon because reasons. There might be some grey market keys, too, although those would obviously be in limited supply and overpriced.)
This is not the first time Ubisoft has done something like this. But there's a concerning factor that makes me think about the future of their games and the shifts in the industry as a whole. Driver: San Francisco was extremely close to having always-online DRM. In fact, I think it shipped with always-online DRM. The DRM was changed just after release, I believe, so that it only required authentication on first initialization. For this reason, it was cracked.
I am not encouraging piracy. Buy the game if you can. Support the devs. Do the right thing. But this greatly concerns me. What is going to happen when GR: Breakpoint or Watch Dogs 3 (very likely always online but not confirmed) gets pulled from sale because of some unknown reason like music licensing or something like that? We've come to expect this stuff from MP-only games like MMOs. But these are singleplayer games. Singleplayer games that might not just cease to become available to buy, but never be available for new audiences ever again because the always-online DRM doesn't get cracked. I believe that publishers have the right to fight piracy. But some anti-piracy techniques are irresponsible. They're all about the here and now, with no concern for what happens in a few years. Sure, Ubisoft still run the authentication servers for San Francisco. I think we can trust Ubisoft not to shut down always-online game servers for a very long time, but we can't stop them pulling games. In fact, they can't control whether games get pulled because they often get pulled due to outside legal pressures.
So I look on Uplay, and it has been removed from Uplay. At which point I've got my eyebrows raised. So I venture onto Ubisoft's site, and it turns out that the only means to legitimately buy a new copy of this game is through an Amazon digital download, which apparently gives you a Uplay key.
But there's no button add it to the basket. Why is that?
Oh. It's US only because reasons.
So for most of the world, you can't buy this game anymore. I dunno whether tricks like using a VPN would work. (And there are physical boxed copies floating around. Mind you, the limited supply of boxed physical copies are very specifically not shipped outside of America on Amazon because reasons. There might be some grey market keys, too, although those would obviously be in limited supply and overpriced.)
This is not the first time Ubisoft has done something like this. But there's a concerning factor that makes me think about the future of their games and the shifts in the industry as a whole. Driver: San Francisco was extremely close to having always-online DRM. In fact, I think it shipped with always-online DRM. The DRM was changed just after release, I believe, so that it only required authentication on first initialization. For this reason, it was cracked.
I am not encouraging piracy. Buy the game if you can. Support the devs. Do the right thing. But this greatly concerns me. What is going to happen when GR: Breakpoint or Watch Dogs 3 (very likely always online but not confirmed) gets pulled from sale because of some unknown reason like music licensing or something like that? We've come to expect this stuff from MP-only games like MMOs. But these are singleplayer games. Singleplayer games that might not just cease to become available to buy, but never be available for new audiences ever again because the always-online DRM doesn't get cracked. I believe that publishers have the right to fight piracy. But some anti-piracy techniques are irresponsible. They're all about the here and now, with no concern for what happens in a few years. Sure, Ubisoft still run the authentication servers for San Francisco. I think we can trust Ubisoft not to shut down always-online game servers for a very long time, but we can't stop them pulling games. In fact, they can't control whether games get pulled because they often get pulled due to outside legal pressures.
