Ubisoft Offers Customers Vacation From Gaming

PC gamers hoping to spend next week with their favorite Ubisoft titles might want to make other plans.  In a stated attempt to “deliver better uptime and greatly improved services” to their customers, the publisher has announced that the anti-piracy servers used to grant customers access to their games will be taken offline beginning this Tuesday.

Starting February 7, Ubisoft will be transitioning the hosting of many of its online services from a third-party data center to a new facility. During the transition, some Ubisoft services and online games will not be available. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience. This move ultimately will help us improve the maintenance of our infrastructure and deliver better uptime and greatly improved services for our customers.

The full notice here does not specify when customers can expect full service to be resumed.  PC versions of The Settlers 7, H.A.W.X. 2, and Might and Magic: Heroes VI are listed as being completely unplayable for the duration, and most other Ubisoft-published titles will be impacted to varying degrees.  This entails the loss of online modes for some, but even the single-player versions of others may be affected by the loss of any perks or extra content reliant on a user’s uPlay profile.

Any Ubisoft PC game that is not already fully installed on a user’s computer will be locked out until the outage ends.  This includes a handful of recent titles listed as being otherwise unaffected by the service interruption, including Anno 2070, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, and Driver: San Francisco.  The 360 version of Just Dance 3 is also said to remain fully playable.

This server migration comes approximately one month after the publisher’s servers experienced two unannounced failures, once shutting out Heroes VI players a day after the game was featured a high profile Steam sale, and another the following weekend that locked down nearly every Ubisoft title released in over the last few years.

Ubisoft invites customers denied access to their games to follow the server migration progress on their Twitter account once the process begins this Tuesday.

See below for our list of partners and affiliates: