It has just been revealed that Far Cry 2 is now available via Steam in most European countries along with Australia and New Zealand. This is the first time a Ubisoft product has been made available in these regions, will it be the start of a new initiative from Ubisoft to expand it’s presence on Steam? I guess we will have to wait a week or so to see if any other games from them appear on Valve’s digital distribution service.

The game is available for $49.99 for UK customers which is pretty competitive with shops if it wasn’t for the inclusion of Vat on top of that price.

In further great news for Steam it has been revealed that Fallout 3 is available for pre-order on Steam ahead of its release at the end of the month. This is another massive game to appear on Steam and most importantly for some it is available in the UK other non-US countries.

All praise Steam!

In the past Ubisoft have earned a name for themselves as being ones to blame the woes of the PC squarely at the feet of video game pirates. So it comes as no surprise to read that Far Cry 2 will be using the same DRM as found in Spore, Red Alert 3 and other recent EA titles. Ubisoft forum manager bukowski113 has posted the details of the DRM on the Far Cry 2 forums.

-You have 5 activations per machine on 3 separate PCs.

- The 3 machine activations can be concurrent, but you must have the disc in the drive to run the game

- Uninstalling the game “refunds” an activation. This process is called “revoke”, so as long as you complete proper uninstall you will be able to install the game an unlimited number of times on 3 systems.

- You can upgrade your computer as many time as you want (using our revoke system)

- Ubisoft is committed to the support of our games, and additional activations can be provided.

- Ubisoft is committed to the long term support of our games: you’ll always be able to play Far Cry 2.

While I obviously am not best pleased to see constrictive DRM methods used in this game, I will still be buying it. However I fear that this is going to lead to a similar backlash as to what happened with Spore with many people refusing to purchase the game due to the DRM. In fact I think that the DRM will do more harm than good and we will see more people pirate it as there will likely be a non-DRM version of the game on the usual suspects soon.

Furthermore EA CEO John Riccitiello has commented (as reported by Yahoo) on the use of DRM in EA games.

“We’re still working out the kinks. We implemented a form of DRM and it’s something that 99.8 percent of users wouldn’t notice. But for the other .2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it. I personally don’t like DRM. It interrupts the user experience. We would like to get around that. But there is this problem called piracy out there.”

We have a policy at work, if we see a product on the shelf that we wouldn’t buy ourselves then we remove it from display. It is something which should apply for a whole lot of other businesses too. If the CEO of EA doesn’t like DRM then why of why would he insist on it being implemented in his games? He may have a point that only a minority of people will actually be impacted greatly by DRM, but even this is too much. It is more the fact that people shouldn’t be affected by the actions of the pirates. Hell I already know that people go out and pirate non-DRM versions of games that have it. These are people that had pre-orders in place or were just waiting for the game to be released before purchasing it. Due to the DRM they went and pirated it.

The game companies should realise that DRM is doing more harm than good and is contributing to the (overblown) problem of piracy on the PC.

This time though they are talking about EndWar. Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Michael de Plater told Videogaming 247 that they aren’t releasing the PC version of the game at the same time as the console version due to rampant PC piracy.

“To be honest, if PC wasn’t pirated to hell and back, there’d probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two.”

“But at the moment, if you release the PC version, essentially what you’re doing is letting people have a free version that they rip off instead of a purchased version. Piracy’s basically killing PC.”

I don’t want to take the same line that I did when tackling Cliffy B’s piracy comments so I will simply link to what John Walker wrote over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

John takes the view that unless we get hard evidence regarding the impact of piracy on sales of PC games then these comments are just rumour-mongering and doing untold damage to the reputation of the PC. Damn right, tell us the truth devs and stop tarnishing the image of the PC.

According to this GI.biz interview with Yves Guillemot Europe is now a bigger territory than the US. Yves claims that turnover in Europe is more than 5% higher than turnover in the US.

Q: Europe as a market has developed a lot in the past five years - how do you assess the territory’s importance on the global stage now?

Yves Guillemot: First, our money - the pound or the euro - is very strong and because of that the turnover from those countries is heavier than they used to be. So for Ubisoft turnover Europe is actually more important than the US now, and by more than 5 per cent. It’s become a very strong market for us.

I think there are lots of customers that want to play - because in Europe we love to play - the only problem we had was that the games were becoming more and more difficult to play. Now that there’s more accessibility, some accessories that are helping people to have fun, I think this market has no limit in the growth it can have if we can make sure that the people that are coming in are staying.

It makes me wonder then who is in charge of Ubisoft’s digital distribution efforts. Ubisoft titles on Steam are limited to North American customers, they are not available to any European gamers. I find it odd that they would declare that Europe is now a bigger market than the US, yet they still exclude it on Steam.

I think someone at Ubisoft has to go and sort things out, Steam may not be perfect, but if European sales are constantly on the up, then what better way to help drive this than to let people buy their products on Steam. Sort it out Ubi.

For those of you not in the know, BOGOF stands for Buy One Get One Free, and while working in the retail industry it is a phrase that I am…well sick and tired of hearing at times. However upon hearing that BOGOF is coming to Steam I was delighted, then disappointed.

I was delighted to see that Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway was coming to Steam in September and as an added bonus and pre-orders via Steam would result in BOGOF being applied as Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 was going to be thrown in for free.

However dismay soon struck as I realised this was not going to be open to any non-US residents. It is that damn Ubisoft limiting the distribution of the game. Damn them to Hell’s Highway.