French publisher Ubisoft is getting a pretty stern talking-to from its customers. Angry users have taken to Ubi’s official forums to complain that they cannot access their legally purchased games. This is apparently due to outages in the Uplay online service, which verifies the legitimacy of the company’s PC games.
Forum posters are reporting that the Uplay service is giving a “Wrong username or password” error when trying to log into games like Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. This failure is only affecting PC games.
In February, a server transition rendered a handful of Ubisoft titles unplayable for a matter of hours. In that case, however, the publisher provided the public with ample warning.
We’ve contacted Ubisoft to determine the exact nature of this outage.
In the meantime, messages in the aforementioned forum thread suggest that perseverance is the key to overcoming Uplay’s current fickleness. Users are confirming that repeated attempts to log in eventually convince the servers that you have the correct username and password.
Detractors of always-on digital-rights management (an antipiracy solution that requires a constant Internet connection to confirm a game’s authenticity) will likely point to this as more evidence that publishers like Ubisoft are hurting their legitimate customers in the attempt to lock out software pirates. Although, many have made that argument prior to this incident, and this didn’t stop the initial implementation of these security measures.