This is not true. Nowadays there are more laptops being sold than desktop PCs, and the large majority of them don't have an internet connection ready at thand. It will add another explanation as to why AC2 will fail on PC in sales.

Someone will just monitor the packets, crack the data, and have a pirated version within a couple of weeks.  It doesn't stop piracy at all, and considering that the people who do pirate generally couldn't get the game if they had to pay for it a couple of weeks waiting is a minor inconvenience compared to never having it at all.

Not even sure why this wa smae for the PC to begin with. Im not sure about any PC games sales because they arent posted on the site but they mustn't be anywhere near the console versions and its too easy to pirate them. Honestly Im surprised a lot of games are even made for the PC

I never thought of clone servers as piracy. In WoW, the gamecode is freeware. It's the community that you log in and pay for.

With AC2, perhaps, the code could be piratable, but maybe the boss interactions and phase changes would be streamed from their servers.

It might not stop piracy, but it would reduce it by a huge margin.

Also, it's extremely naive to believe that developers will never stop piracy. They could. The question is, how much hardship is the consumer willing to accept due to modern technology, and does it keep things nice and profitable?

One way to prevent piracy, is to send a ninja with every copy of the game sold, to watch you while you play. When you're not playing, the game will be handed back to the Ninja. Once you've beaten it, the Ninja destroys the game, and flys off into the night. You are never left alone with the game, and your computer blows up after it's over.

See, easy. I just stopped piracy. Problem is, not everyone is willing to live with a ninja, and ubisoft can't afford them.

Point is, there is a way to do anything. However, when preventing videogame piracy, publishers are limited by what is financially prudent, and also by what their customers are willing to put up with, in the name of playing their game. You get it?

Ubisoft is pushing the boundries on the latter.

It doesn't matter. What developers want is their games to be successful, and if they have to allow dozens of millions of piratesin order to sell well, they'll do it. Do you really believe that Dragon Age would've sold better if it weren't on PC? Or Left 4 Dead? or...

I can tell you that if I were a developer, I would rather sell 100k and have my game pirated 100 millions, than sell none at all.

That would only mean that they won't be able to game on their laptop while on the go, and only if there really isn't any internet source nearby. And for those moments where they won't be able to play their game, sorry to say but tough luck. There are loads of 360 games you can't play if you only have a PS3, and vica versa.

And i for one won't be suprised if the game actually ends up selling better if the method works, or even funnier: console version sales going up because people who where planning on pirating the game for PC end up buying it lol.

I think you don't get the point here, because it's very likely that a PC version can actually HURT overall sales. Don't you think it's very likely that alot of people will pirate the game for PC instead of buying it on a console? Looking at the total of millions of downloads don't you think that number is way higher than that of 100k copys actually sold?

I've seen them, but they are simply meaningless.  Prototype could have been downloaded a billion times and that doesn't mean piracy had any impact on sales whatsoever.  The number of downloads doesn't have any correlation to the number of legitimate sales potentially lost. We can sit here all day pouring over Gamestop's numbers too, but at the end of the day we can't just say they sold X used games so the devs sold X (or Y) less copies than they could have.  That's simply not how it works.  Just look at MW2, which had more piracy than Prototype's legit sales and pirated sales combined.  Did that massive piracy stop it from being one of the biggest entertainment launches in history?  NOT AT ALL.  That's because success or failure has nothing to do with the avilability of pirated data.  If a company is going to be a success, they'll do so within the realities of the market, not by fighting it.

Piracy, as has been said all too many times, is by and large something done by people who would happily buy legitimate products if they could afford to.  They don't because they can't.  China and Brazil are places where piracy is really rampant, and the cost of a game in those countries is easily twice what it'd cost in the US despite people making only a 10th of what an American makes.  They can't afford it, so they don't buy it.  That's also the leading reason why the PC is the target of the vast majority of piracy - consoles are luxury goods and pirates typically can't afford luxuries (PCs are utility goods).  Any argument about how much harder it is to pirate on a non-PS3 console is coming from someone that has never actually involved themselves with piracy.  It's easy as hell, you just need to be able to afford the hardware in the first place and most pirates can't.

Also, given the fact that pirates can and have worked around the dial-in restriction before by setting up fake authentification servers, what is stopping anyone from settign up a fake save data server on their own PC once a pirate cracks Ubisoft's system?  Absolutely nothing, which is how much impact this will have on piracy.

Personally I prefer always online to play over CD required on PC games.

Who goes anywhere without an internet source? Seriously, it happens occasionally but pretty rare these days. This is a plus for PC games.

I find it funny how the majority of the people complaining about this don't have any PC games listed by their avatar. CD is a bigger pest than being online for most PC gamers.

I have over 50 games bought on Steam, and tomorrow I'm going to buy Psychonauts on Steam for only $2.

Most PCs bought nowadays are laptops, which means there is an expected travel period while being used, and during that time you won't be able to play AC2.