Ubisoft have finally listened to gamers and pulled the most stupid form of DRM we have seen short of locking the game away and never allowing the player to put it into their computer.
A while back Ubisoft hit on this wizard wheeze of insisting that the game phone its server every time it played. While this sounds like a good idea, the problem was that it stopped those who didn't have an internet connection playing it, even on single player games. If Ubisoft's servers, or there internet went down, then players couldn't play, and they couldn't continue to play in the future if the DRM servers were not maintained.
If you looked on Amazon, you would see reviews which would complain that Ubisoft had created a great unplayable game, with the DRM being the reason it was pants.
Ubisoft Games had introduced this silly DRM system earlier last year with Settlers 7. The bad effects of these periodic online DRM checks is that the game pauses as soon as the internet connection is lost and requires an internet connection to validate the install, each time the game is launched.
Legal owners of the games can download a patch to update the game to this non-DRM version. Ubisoft had earlier announced that they would not be using DRM with their new real time strategy game, RUSE.
It looks like it cost it