Valve, acting on Ubisoft’s behalf, recently began offering refunds for the new god-sim title From Dust, due to numerous complaints concerning the implementation of overzealous DRM.
DRM has never been a popular concept, but gamers often ‘put up’ with it on the grounds that it’s a once-only affair; by which a retail game is ‘activated’ upon its first launch, via the internet, and then remains active indefinitely. After all, the majority of gamers are connected to the internet 24/7, and no-one wants to be branded a pirate, especially when proving otherwise by a one-time activation process is such a simple thing to do.
Many customers bought From Dust on the basis of this one-time activation concept. However, in this instance, they were misled. The game actually requires an active internet connection (to check the game copy is legitimate) each and every time it’s launched. A far cry from the concept of a single, initial registration.
To say that unwitting players were less than impressed by this would be an understatement of gigantic proportions, and rightly so. There’s an age-old argument that legitimate consumers often fare far worse than pirates when it comes to issues of piracy, and DRM is often held up as a shining example of such unbalance.
Although Valve has promised the imminent release of a patch removing the offending DRM code, Ubisoft has still instructed the digital distribution giant to offer refunds through their Steam service, as can be seen from the screenshot below – courtesy of RockPaperShotgun.
It’s all a bit bizarre, and even goes some way towards promoting piracy, in a round-about way. Here, Ubisoft are (inadvertently) offering a new gaming release for free, as there will undoubtedly be a few unscrupulous individuals who, having already played From Dust to death, will request a refund so that they can purchase another title, having already had their fill.
Nonetheless, this is a bold move for Ubisoft to make, particularly as they’ve received similar complaints in the past spanning all manner of other titles. Hopefully future Ubisoft games will launch entirely DRM free as a result, doing away with the seemingly unwritten company policy of launching a game with crippling DRM, only to remove it later following internet-based nerd rage.
Well, we can but hope.
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