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Ubisoft history of adding damaging DRM´s

Ubisoft has a long history of including damaging DRMs in their games. Ubisoft introduced Starforce onto their games when they released Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory in March 2005. While Starforce initially succeeded in preventing piracy of these games for more than a year, this success came at an enormous cost. Many legitimate game-buying customers noticed within weeks that their burners became inoperative. These gamers were extremely angry with Ubisoft and began having long, fruitless dialogues with them on their forums. Ubisoft at this time issued many now familiar statements trying to cast anyone in opposition to them as pirates and stating that only a minority of gamers (.03 percent) were experiencing an issue with this DRM.

Eventually however, the gamers realised that this dialog was going nowhere. As an alternate method of promoting their issues, sometime in 2005 a user called Analoge created Boycott Starforce. Boycott Starforce provided information on how Starforce caused issues with people's PCs and a selection of information such as how to remove Starforce from your PC.(sound familiar?) Around that time, other gamer sites like Rforce got set up as a form of mutual support in response to the issues that gamers were experiencing. These gamer issues began to receive publicity and Ubisoft asked Soulcommander, one of the most prominent of the gamers to collect data on the issues that gamers were experiencing with Starforce.

Both Starforce and Ubisoft can be perceived as trying to bully and silence their critics by intimidation. Firstly in November 2005, a representative from Starforce threatened a Cnet poster with legal action for calling Starforce a “rootkit”, Starforce followed this up in January 2006 by also threatening BoingBoing with legal action for calling it a rootkit. Finally in March of that year, Ubisoft banned two gamers who had been the most critical of its actions. (13th Hour and Soulcommander from Rforce). When implementing the ban, they accused these gamers of being hackers without any form of proof, and it is clear from the tone of their correspondence that while Ubi cooked up bogus reasons, the real reason for their ban is due to their opposition to Ubisoft's DRM.

Finally in March 2007, a five million dollar class action was lodged against Ubisoft due to Starforce. Ubisoft chose to settle this action out of court in April 2007. They promptly dumped Starforce citing customer complaints, but when choosing an alternate DRM, they went to Securom Version 7, commencing with Heroes of Might and Magic V.

Reading material
http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/561108232/m/2871061083/p/1
http://news.cnet.com/5208-7349-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=11535&messageID=86618&start=-184
http://r-force.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=28
http://forums.ubi.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/1851065692/m/8121095173/p/1
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,1949621,00.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft
http://www.the-prism.com/index.php?topic=1180.msg10599#msg10599

Steam plagued by activation issues over holidays

Steam was plagued by activation issues over the holidays when Tages' authentication servers went down. The full story can be found here.

Our forum 'Prism' is back up and running

ATTENTION: the-Prism, our forum, is now back up and running. A big Thanks goes to Sblade, 13th hour and Midfingr for fixing everything for us.

We are currently investigating new hosting information for both PRISM and RYG and hope to have that sorted out soon.

Thank you for your patience.

The Staff of Prism and RYG

New SecuROM Investigation

Monday, 22 December 2008 13:14
Uh oh, EA! Prepare for another lawsuit soon, as Seeger Weiss LLP are investigating the DRM in Spore. Is there any escape for EA from these lawsuits? Click HERE for Seeger Weiss LLP's page about it.