Is DRM on PC games going too far?

So I've been following the discussion of the DRM in upcoming Ubisoft titles, specifically Assassin's Creed 2 for PC. The PC Gamer blog article on AC2's DRM made me stop cold.

Initial Blog Posting

(snippet)
if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers'. The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen - all my progress since it last autosaved was lost.

Seriously? This just goes too far. Requiring a persistent Internet connection for a single player game is insane. I don't think we'll find anyone in this forum that thinks piracy is not a problem with PC games and that some form of copy protection is necessary, but UBI is giving zero *legal* options to disconnected gamers.

Ubisoft's Response

In the case of a server failure their games will be taken offline, and you'll be unable to play them. "The idea is to avoid that point as much as possible, but we have been clear from the beginning that the game does need an internet connection for you to play. So if it goes down for real for a little while, then yeah, you can't play.??"

Sorry, the authentication servers are down, you can't play either. I also take issue with UBI's statement that they've been clear from the beginning about the connection requirement. Of the sites offering to sell me a (pre-order) copy of AC2, zero of them currently mention the persistent connection requirement.

DRM like this is only going to serve to undermine the legitimate customer's experience. As we see more hyper-intrusive systems like this one, we'll see a lot more first time pirates. It's going to start with legitimate users looking for cracks to make their purchased software work without the obnoxious DRM. Once they're exposed to the underground "warez" world, it's only a short step from downloading cracks to downloading full versions of games.

Here are some thoughts for discussion:

- Are we going too far with DRM for PC games?
- Are we potentially creating more piracy by using hyper-intrusive DRM?
- Is the long term cost really worth it? i.e.: Someone has to buy and maintain that server hardware.

--Ed