One of the most hotly anticipated games of 2010 is Assassin's Creed 2, the sequel to the fun but flawed action title that capitalized on the parkour fad by putting players in control of a medieval hitman who darts across the rooftops of several Middle Eastern cities. In what may be the most absurd attempt to discourage piracy yet, Ubisoft decided to implement a new Digital Rights Management program that has already rendered play for paying customers impossible once and is practically guaranteed to fail again.

The DRM, naturally exclusive to the PC release of the game, requires players to be connected to Ubisoft's network during every single second the program is running. If the player's Internet connection falters for even a moment, the game dumps and the player is required to reconnect and start over from the most recent checkpoint.

On March 7th, just this past Sunday, Ubisoft's servers experienced an unknown technical issue that closed the network to all new connections and thus made playing Assassin's Creed 2 along with other new games impossible. This is just the first in what will likely be a series of other network issues that will make playing Ubisoft games on PC more trouble than it's worth.

Software piracy is certainly a challenge for game developers, but is it really damaging their bottom line? The numbers say no. In 2009, the PC game industry alone profited an estimated $13 billion, which was an overall increase of 3% from the previous year. Today it's all too easy to find pirated copies of the most popular games from 2009 on various Internet sources. Even in a down economy, video games have managed to increase the profits of software developers more or less every single year. Unless they're implementing systems like Ubisoft's disastrous DRM on principle alone, perhaps they ought to consider what alienating their paying customers will do to their net for 2010.

Of course, there's also the fact that no rights management software has remained uncracked for long. It's simply bad business for developers to dump so much resource into anti-piracy measures when the relative loss of revenue from piracy is negligible. Just 24 hours after Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic came out, there were reports online that its DRM had been successfully hacked. The official statement from Ubisoft didn't do much to convince players that the rumor was unfounded. In so many words, it said both that the DRM hadn't been cracked and that cracked copies of the game would experience incomplete content access. That little contradiction is all but a confession that Ubisoft's inconvenient anti-piracy program, like all inconvenient things, had been circumvented almost immediately. Anti-piracy is a losing battle and it's unfortunate that Assassin's Creed 2 has to be one of the casualties.

It remains to be seen whether or not other game developers will implement similar DRM measures, but considering the amount of fan uproar and bad press Ubisoft has experienced following this constant-connection debacle, I doubt the more savvy companies will go down that road. Instead of using a broad system that impedes paying customers, perhaps Ubisoft ought to consider offering incentives for legitimate purchase. As in all things, the soft approach tends to work out better in the long run.