Without Steam its becoming increasingly difficult to own PC game software. I have seen the share of the local retail store shrink from dominating the place to being a shadow in a corner in some forgotten place with just classic titles and a smattering of new releases. The used market is cheap because there simply is very little value in an old title on a platform that can easily host piracy. I do not see nearly the same industry in hawking used PC titles as there is for console titles. A single consoles used market dwarfs the PC second hand market.

Ubisoft has a duty as a publicly traded company to only invest in things which it believes will give their shareholders a greater return. So they have an obligation to run the numbers to the point where they believe that if they did X action then Y profit ought to result from it. Furthermore the game industry unlike the music and movie industries has embraced digital distribution wherever applicable. Whats good for the industry is good for the gamer. If piracy cannot be controlled then the big publishers will continue to retreat from releasing content day and date with console releases for fear that if they release at the same time people will simply pirate the games on the consoles.

Currently on a console I can go around to your house, log into my account and download content already bought. Or on the PS3 I can share content with you for free. I doubt they would want to kill the rental market. Digital digistribution makes rental much more feasable as well as episodic gaming where you can download a part if you're unsure of the quality of the whole.

This will be my last post for the same reasons as Khuutra. But before I go I want to comment on the bit I've highlighted; Either you're an industry shill, or one of the most ignorant people on the planet.

The only way the game industry can eliminate piracy is to promote Onlive and eventually have somehing like that be the only option. No way to pirate the game when it's running on a remote server (as long as they can prevent insiders from leaking games out).

Anything else is just a counter-productive waste of time and money, which annoys customers and creates animosity.

When EA was messing around with their DRM, I stopped buying their games, completely.
Now, Ubisoft starting this crap, I will again, vote with my wallet.

I've actually came to like Ubisoft for the last 2 years and I have equivalent of their titles as Nintendo's.

I will stop buying any of their games if they try to push this DRM junk on us.

wow you be soft is going hard on pc gamers WTF

dude I set up my own wow server (nothing illegal, I even had a paid subscription at the time) on the same computer I played it once... and I didn't have to do much to get it running.
Just wanted to see the hidden stuff in the game like the illidan blades and such... and singlehandedly wipe instances clean :p

There is nothing complicated in tricking a program into connecting to a virtual server or to set up that virtual server...

lol this isnt the first time.

Ubisoft's original prince of persia would not play for me because nero installed an imaginary drive.

It said that the game will not launch cause it detected an imaginary drive.

So guess what I did? I downloaded a hacked patch and patched a LEGIT game. how fucking lame.

Reminds me of when I tried to play F.E.A.R and it wouldn't run because I was trying to play it in my burner drive.

I took it one step further. I just don't buy PC games at all anymore. It's too much damn work to keep track of which PC publishers put malware DRM in their games and I just don't want to bother with it. I check out PC games in the store and say to myself, "This game looks pretty interesting, but I have no idea if it will rootkit my computer or tell me to screw myself the third time I go to install it. Let's move on to the console section."

I won't read that, can someone give me a summary?