Ubisoft DRM snafu reminds us what's wrong with PC gaming
By Ben Kuchera | Published: July 20, 2008 - 10:05PM CT
The PC gaming industry likes to blame piracy for many of its ills, but it's clear that no one has found a cure-all for this particular disease. Various forms of DRM added to the retail versions of PC games are—at the very least—annoying for the gamer who bought a boxed or digital copy of a game. At the very worst, some methods of DRM can make the game unplayable. Ubisoft ran into such a glitch with the CD-check built into the PC version of Rainbow Six Vegas 2; users who downloaded the game from an official source didn't have a disc to pass the check, causing a new patch to break legally downloaded versions of the game. Ubisoft had a novel—not to mention cheap—way to fix this: a crack that allows the game to play without a disc in the drive. The issue? The crack came from the "warez" group Reloaded, with no attribution or notice that third-party code was used to fix the DRM issue.
