Dont blame the devs/publishers, if gamers buy this crap, then they prove it's a financially viable route to take.

/sigh i am fed up with ubisoft drm stance on the one hand i am happy they give no drm games to gog to release but then they play silly buggers with drm with their new games.

Dont they have a short memory when the last time games with online drm failed and people could not play them and the backlash they got Do they think we have a short memory.

A line of JT Machinima's "Born into Revolution" (Assassins Creed 3) is Didn't realise Ubisoft intended for that to be true :P

Well I think me and Linus Torvalds are on the same page here

Well said, and I think the proof lies in Blizzard. That's why I was hoping and praying D3 would be a dud, maybe slow the trend down a little. While it got a lot of criticism it still did well enough to let them know they will have an audience and will continue to make money by going in this direction.

Ubisoft has made some interesting titles, so it's sad to see they still want to stalk their users. If this means they invest a majority of money into games like The Division, I'm okay with that because PvP multiplayer games don't entertain me. If it means that they will release Beyond Good and Evil 2 with mandatory co-op or in-game offers of RL purchases, it will be a solid kick into guts.

By the way, do you think that Ubisoft plans to ever release here AC2 or newer Splinter Cells? My inner skeptic tells me that they released here only first episodes because they hoped to allure players into buying sequels with UPlay support elsewhere.

What worries me is that I said I wouldn't buy Uplay titles (unless I can play the pirate edition first). If I, who am kinda up to date and knew Ubi wasn't doing always online anymore, refused to buy their games on oldish grounds; maybe they just thought that since they have the bad PR anyway and it takes too long to convince gamers they've reverted, might as well go all the way and not give a crap.
I fear you are right. I believe they stated they had "all games on Uplay" as a company policy, I read somewhere a Ubi guy wording it in such a way that it was blaming GOG "we must use Uplay, GOG won't let us so we can't release". Something like that.

I really don't know what's going on in their minds.

Odd question
Didnt Ubisoft say they were moving away from that model a while back? (ie dropping the always on drm for their games)

I feel the same way. It isn't like this is the first time big companies felt that all games should be MMOs. Not all of them became such big successes as WoW. I think Ubisoft will see that when people play MMOs, they tend to stick to certain titles for years to come (like WoW), rather than hopping to new MMOs every few weeks like they do with single-player games.

So either they have to start charging monthly for those "persistent online worlds", or actively start killing off their older MMO titles so that people are forced to move on to newer MMOs.

Anyway, I am not _too_ concerned, because I believe that at least on PC and tablets, if some big companies feel they don't want to make offline single-player games at all anymore, there are lots of other studios just happy to fill their boots. I vote with my wallet. I haven't played WoW or Diablo 3 at all, and I don't feel like I've been missing out at all, anymore than I have been missing out for not playing even single PS3 or XBox360 game.

It is all smoke and mirrors, of course. They are just trying different approaches to make it seem acceptable to the buying public. It is obvious they are not calling it DRM anymore (just like Valve doesn't call Steam DRM), they try to make it seem as if the always-online is needed just because of the gameplay, not due to publisher control.

I remember Ubisoft said they are going to releease only F2P games on PC. I wonder if it's still up to date.

I don't think you sound as an elitist snob. I'm also very rarely buy any new games from the big publishers, as there are a very few games that actually interests me. Most of the time I buy indie games I like (although many new indie games are from the adventure genre, which I don't really like, so I don't often buy them, but there are some indie games from other genres which I really like), and good old games. But sadly, I don't like most of today's new AAA games. I also hope they're not forcing this "always online" thing with M&M X: Legacy, as they announced in it's trailer, it has an old school gameplay, but I have a bad feeling they force the requirement for a constant internet connection with this game too.

Indeed, SimCity proved that approach does wonders.

As long as Might & Magic 10 turns out good and they keep putting their old games on GOG I don't really care about Ubi's mainstream line-up

Yes. They said that. No, they didn't mean it. As others have pointed out, saying 'DRM is a failed, dead-end strategy' (quote from EA) just means: "We are re-labeling our DRM and call it a game feature" ... and unfortunately there are many, many customers out there who are stupid enough to buy this crap.

Actually, it's probably more like "We're moving away from digital management of single-player games. Instead we're going to make all our games MMO's"