Written 06/12/2011. First posted here.

Ubisoft’s latest fallout with PC gamers deserves a lot more attention than this fair website has given it. Sure, there was last weeks Is Ubisoft inherently anti-PC gaming?, but that was less an article than a stream of vitriol and cheap dick jokes. I should know – I wrote it. Spleen-venting soothes the savage hate-on, but it leaves a girl with a lot of unanswered questions.

For starters: why has Ubisoft clung to demonstrably-ineffective DRM for so long?

That’s the money-shot. Ubisoft’s DRM gets cracked, and it usually gets cracked fast. From Dust was cracked in under a day. To their credit, Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 held out a little longer but the wait wasn’t exactly nail-biting. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory takes Best in Show with over 400 days, but StarForce DRM pissed players off so badly Ubisoft dropped it.

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Written 28/11/2011. First posted here.

As every gamer and his or her budgie knows by now, Stanislas Mettra said something a little ill-considered^[¹]. in an interview with incgamers. He was quoted as saying:

We’ve heard loud and clear that PC gamers are bitching about there being no version for them.

But are these people just making noise just because there’s no version or because it’s a game they actually want to play? Would they buy it if we made it?

It’s hard because there’s so much piracy and so few people are paying for PC games that we have to precisely weigh it up against the cost of making it. Perhaps it will only take 12 guys three months to port the game to PC, it’s not a massive cost but it’s still a cost. If only 50,000 people buy the game then it’s not worth it.

His follow-up email can be read here, where he claims ‘I dont think I meant to say ‘the game won’t happen on pc’’. There’s more, but I won’t spoil all the punchlines for you here.

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