Ubisoft has decided to move in a new direction to address issues of PC piracy going forward. Instead of going with disc-based systems such as SecuRom or StarForce that have been met with so many complaints from the PC user community, the company will be going with an Internet-based authentication method.

While we don’t know everything about the new Ubisoft method yet, what we do know is that an Internet connection will be required to authenticate the user to Ubisoft’s server prior to allowing the game to run. This means that should Ubisoft’s servers be down, or if you don’t happen to have Internet connectivity on your laptop, for example, you will not be able to play.

While the company claims that the lack of an offline mode was a difficult decision for the company, it was necessary to address the piracy concerns and allow the company to continue to develop software for the PC platform. One positive, however, is that games will be tied to the user’s Ubisoft account and you can install the game on multiple systems, but can only play it from one system at a time using your Ubisoft account. It is difficult to say how the game will react should you have intermittent Internet connectivity issues, and if you lose connectivity whether that means you will get bumped off the game right away.

The bottom line is that majority of users have Internet connectivity the majority of the time, and the company must think that the handful that don’t have it all of the time are worth losing compared to the amount of money lost to software piracy each year. Given that Valve has been able to get so many users to buy into using Steam, it might not be as big of a deal as some might think. We will just have to wait and see. It could be a step in the right direction getting more developers with piracy concerns back to developing on the PC platform again. Only time will tell.