With the PC version of Assassin’s Creed 2 last year, Ubisoft introduced a new DRM “solution” that became instantly controversial — it required a constant Internet connection to authorize the game as legitimate, and therefore any players who weren’t connected to the Internet couldn’t play their perfectly legally purchased copy. Just less than a year later, though, it seems this experiment is near an end.
BigDownload first reported that it appeared Ubisoft was patching out the always-on Internet authentication from some of its games, including Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction, and Ubisoft today confirmed the change in policy to Joystiq. It’s not a complete abandonment of the DRM policy, though, as Ubisoft said the decision to remove it will be made on a “case by case” basis, and reminded that “from the beginning we said that we might choose to patch out games at some point.”
Furthermore, Big Download noted that an Internet connection is still required to launch the games — the difference now is just that if a player loses their connection while playing, it’ll no longer interrupt their game as it did before (even when only playing a single-player mode). But considering Ubisoft’s R.U.S.E. was already released on the PC later last year without the DRM (using only Steamworks instead), it seems like this may indeed be the end of the policy for all intents and purposes.
