As you all must know by now, Ubisoft is implementing a new DRM in all its games that requires a constant internet connection to play. Should you disconnect at any moment, even for a minute because of a power failure, tripping on a cable, restarting your router, or simply going to a room where wireless connection might not be optimal, then you will disconnect and be unable to play. Worse than that, you might lose all your progress since the last save or checkpoint. This covers all games, even single player ones like Assassin Creed 2. And Ubi's servers went down on several occasion so far, because of technical failure but also because of hackers attacking the servers. On top of this, Ubi seems to be charging the players for the DRM implementation, since at 60$ AC2 is 10$ more expensive than the usual 50$ game price. Go read the forums now. They are full of angry customers that get disconnected all the time because they use a laptop for gaming, a shaky wireless connection, or because their ISP is not the best there is. MY QUESTIONS TO UBISOFT ------------------------------------------ 1) Do you realize that pirates will crack and play a DRM / hassle free and more stable version of your games making it useless? 2) Do you realize that your DRM only hurts us, the honest and loyal players? That you are practically punishing us for buying? 3) Do you realize that some people have no stable and constant internet connection? What are they supposed to do? Do you even care about these people? 4) Do you realize that on the medium to long term you alienate your customers and make piracy look good? 5) How can a game company sabotage its own product like this? 6) Don't you think your paying customers deserve better than your abusive DRM? I think it is a sad, sad day when a company places greed above its customers and product quality. Even more sad is that they think that can get away with it. God... they must really think gamers are spineless, push-over idiots if they think we will buy a degraded product, at an increased price, and be punished for it in the end. CALL TO BOYCOTT --------------------------- Until Ubisoft comes to their senses and use a more player-friendly DRM, there is no doubt in my mind that I will NEVER buy a game from them. I will never give my dollar to a company that SABOTAGES and DEGRADES its own games, and puts greed above providing its loyal customers and fans with the usable product they paid for and deserve. Will you? Personally I won't miss Ubisoft in the slightest. As long as Bioware, Bethesda, Blizzard, and so many other good and reasonable companies exist, there is enough quality gaming out there to go around. But most of all we need to make a stand for our right to a usable product, we have to vote with our dollar NOW and say HELL NO to these abusive DRMs before they spread and become the norm.

Gamersgate.com is an online gaming store similar to Steam. It is not as well established, and lacks a few of the key features present on Steam. But its catalog has a few exclusive gems, which makes it worth checking out. PROS ---------- - Wide selection (mostly some underdogs games not present on Steam) - You can add games to wishlist and be notified of price drops (Steam added a wishlist only recently, and has no pricedrop notification feature... you have to keep visiting the store at least twice a week to see sales.) - A "blue points" system that let you earn points for buying game and reviewing them, then you can use these points for price reduction and to buy expansions and addons. Gamersgate CONS -------------------------- - No automatic patching similar to Steam, more of a hassle to keep your games up to date. - You download the installation files instead of installing directly from the net like Steam. Which is a pain if you are low on disk space. - No forum or real community for GGs games. Meaning if you have questions you have to register to every game's official forum individually, which is frankly a pain. REVIEW ====== I have been a Steam guy for a long long time now. It has answered all my needs, from a good selection of games, to good prices and deals/sales, to convenient automatic patching of my games. However after buying most games in my favorite genre on steam (mostly action RPGs and anything science fiction and space), I felt I was running out of options and needed a wider catalog of games. When Steam did not publish the latest expansion for Majesty 2, and failed to keep the game up to date (latest patch has been out for months) I decided to buy the game on Gamersgate for convenience. Since then I had a look at the catalog and discovered many gems that are not present on Steam. These games were Guild 2 (only available on GGs), Majesty 2 Kingmaker (original is available on steam, but not the expansion + as mentioned before Steam has been slow keeping up with recent patches), and right now I am thinking about buying "A Farewell to Dragons", and "Daemonica" both squad RPG games similar to Baldur gate and Arcanum (and the more recent dragon age), all of which I loved immensely. (I'll review all these games very soon, stay tuned.) So it seems Steam's catalog is not as complete as I thought, and there are some great games (mostly underdogs, but gems none the less) out there. Has steam grown too big for some of the smaller, less known games? I think I will get out of my Steam-shell and start exploring other online stores from now on.