Anno 2070 DRM grudgingly altered as little as possible

Wow, another case of publishers/developers actually encouraging people to pirate a game by making it very difficult to play a game legitimately. DRM doesn't work. I'm glad they changed the restriction but what were they thinking?

"Project Ten Dollar" a lot more palatable and actually "rewards" players for buying new legit copies of games.

"putting them in parity with those who pirated the game"

Get too passive aggressive and your girlfriend will dump you.

Ubisoft seems to be trying as hard as they can to jump to the top of the list of gaming companies who "don't get it".

Corporate Politics.

All the little developers know what works, All the medium developers know what works, the problems occurs when corporate publisher types come into the picture.

The problem is that these corporate publishers are controlled by share owners and the business type, who have no experience with the gaming community at all. They don't listen to them at all, but give massive orders.

A change in command is in order for Ubisoft. They have been trashing most of their IPs, console or PC.

"Customers who legally purchased the game can now switch graphics cards as many times as they want, putting them in parity with those who pirated the game"

Oh you

wow ubisoft drm's keeps getting worse,

I really wanted to buy this game. Oh well

I was fairly interested in this game until I saw the Ubisoft DRM attached to it.

Is Steam not enough for them?

Ubisoft is really trying their best to make sure piracy is the best option to consume their content.

Oh Ubisoft, we all love you. /s

Meh. That's why I don't buy games from Ubisoft (or any company that thinks that its customers are thieves) even if I want to play it.

I know someone who pirated this game so the most ridiculous part of all this is that DRM doesn't even work no matter what they do, it only annoys the hell out of legitimate users. Companies need to find better ways to reach people who pirate instead of pissing off all legitimate users while pretending like their DRM is so great that nobody could possibly be breaking it and that they are doing all they can to stop pirates.

AAaaarrr!!

This is a perfect example of why I no longer get Ubi games on PC. I would LOVE to play the Anno games (and the Settlers games), but I just won't deal with UbiDRM.

I'm deployed to Kuwait and I can't even get past the title screen in Anno because of the Ubisoft DRM connection to their servers. In fact, anything that uses UPlay won't work here. It's a damn shame when you are forced to go about doing the exact thing Ubisoft is trying to stop you from doing just to get their games to work. Here's to you frenchy's for causing more piracy with your anti-piracy drm!

" Ubisoft customer service is available to quickly resolve the situation, and we encourage those customers to contact us directly so that we can ensure they are able to continue to enjoy their game."

...except they don't and refuse to. What prompted Guru3D to post the article they did (initially refusing to review Anno 2070) was that they had contacted Ubisoft when they ran into issues following their third videocard installation, contacted Ubisoft for help, and were told outright that 1) the key would not be renewed ("Sorry, you don't get 7 free games") and 2) they would not revoke the previous three installations. But, such should be expected from a company that lied about always-on DRM in From Dust until people had already bought and installed the game.

Nefarious DRM that limits what machines you can install your game onto and how often is grudgingly tolerable only if the publisher follows through with its promise of customer support. For example, I bought Crysis Warhead, Spore, and Dead Space but was dismayed to find they had limited activations. I was experiencing some OS trouble at the time, and promptly burnt up those activations in a week. With one 5 minute call to EA, I had all of my keys renewed with no questions asked.

Ubisoft, on the other hand, seems intent in completely driving people away from buying their PC games. Always on DRM, limited activations with no support, poor ports...they wonder why their PC sales have been declining year over year since 2008. Piracy couldn't hope to induce even half the amount of damage to Ubisoft's PC bottom line that the company does itself. They don't deserve my money or time.

So let me point out a scenario that isn't far-fetched at all. guy buys the game, installs it (install 1). then he decides to upgrade his video card (install 2), but after a week, it dies and he needs to send it back to get replaced. in the meantime, he goes back to his other card (install 3) while waiting for his replacement. replacement gets there, he puts it in (install 4) and needs to contact ubisoft because he has gone past his activation limit on a single pc.

i've had video cards die nearly out of the box. it's not super-common, but it does happen, and it would be even more annoying after sitting on tech support with company x and them asking you asinine questions for half an hour to then have to call ubi and make them give you more installs for the game you only installed once.

i'm glad they changed it, its a stupid policy.

I own a custom liquid cooled gaming desktop and an ASUS G53SW that I switch between gaming on from time to time and are always changing up the hw in my desktop just for the hell of it.

I actually had this problem years ago before with EA when I bought Crysis warhead, I was testing out a 3 different GPU's, two HD4850's in CF and a 9800GTX+ that was used as a dedicated PhysX card at the time, and just changing configurations of the cards in windows and rebooting actually ran up all of my installs on the first day without changing anything else except the cpu/ram frequency. That process was annoying, I was locked out of the game for about 30 hours until they emailed me back and told me they had given me 5 more activations and in the email it actually said "You can now install on 5 new computers" as if I had been just giving away copies of this game.

Also funny thing is that I bought it on steam, so what's the point of the 5 installs only? Only one PC can be logged in at a time anyway.

Shortly after, I bought FarCry 2 and had the exact same problem and it was then that I made the decision to never buy a game with that type of DRM ever again. It's BS, I could have saved a LOT of time and hassle just pirating the damn games.

i stop buying ubisoft releases period.