Ubisoft server moves will result in downtime for ‘always on’ DRM games

There has been lots of talk revolving around Ubisoft and their inconsistent Digital Rights Management (DRM) choices. One of those choices, namely requiring players to be online to play certain games, is coming around to bite them now that they are forced to do a server migration.

Starting on February 7th, Ubisoft will be migrating data from one third-party server setup to another. During that time, the online functionality of most of their games will be broken. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue as players could just jump into the single player portion of whatever game was offline. Unfortunately, due to the extremely restrictive DRM on some of Ubisoft’s titles, certain games won’t be playable at all during the server migration.

The games that include the “always on” DRM that Ubisoft was so hot on last year on PC were: Tom Clancy’s HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7. On Mac the list of games that won’t work includes: Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell Conviction and The Settlers.

To add insult to injury, there is no word from Ubisoft on exactly how long the server migration will take. That means consumers don’t have access to even the single player portion of the games they rightfully bought for an undetermined amount of time. This begs the question, what would happen if these servers were taken offline all together?

Do you own any of the titles that will be affected? Let us know what you think of this mess in the comments.