Ubisoft is a Total Wanker Over Heroes of Might and Magic X

Anyone who’s paying attention to gaming news probably isn’t the biggest fan of Ubisoft these days: sure, the whole “sexual harassment scandal” thing from last year was bad, but they’ve done very little in the intervening months to redeem themselves. Employees have gone on record as saying that things haven’t improved and not all guilty parties are held accountable, and outside that Mario + Rabbids sequel, none of their game offerings are particularly arousing either.

But if making games isn’t enough to get them off anyone’s crap list, removing them certainly isn’t going to help either. Such was the case of Heroes of Might and Magic X, a seven-year-old game that Ubisoft decided they didn’t want to support anymore, so last month they shut down its servers. If Heroes of Might and Magic X were a multiplayer game, that’d be a tragedy: however, it was a single-player game, and the only reason it had servers in the first place was as a form of DRM, so… it’s not so much a “tragedy” as much as it is the infuratingly obvious outcome to a stupid, ineffective strategy that was a bad idea even seven years ago.

Now, the good news is that players are endlessly innovative, so fans of the game were able to fashion a workaround that allowed them to continue to enjoy this — I repeat, single-player game — without needing to log into the non-existent server anymore. Ubisoft saw this and instead of being inspired by their fans' dedication to the game, or releasing an official workaround… decided to remove the game from storefronts entirely.

There are two maddening things about this reaction: the first is that Ubisoft is being incredibly salty about allowing people to play the game they paid for, and secondly, this report reveals the fact that Ubisoft didn’t stop selling the game immediately after the servers shut down, which must have meant they were hoping people would still buy it even though it literally didn’t work anymore.

Ubisoft sucks, people. They suck bad.