While watching the live stream of CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast, I lost the ability to form a coherent sentence for about 10 minutes. That’s when I learned of Ubisoft’s new digital rights management (DRM) strategy for PC games. In case you’re not familiar with the term, DRM refers to any sort of copyright protection designed to prevent piracy. The hosts cited a story in PC Gamer (via Slashdot) about how the new DRM scheme affects Ubisoft PC games.

Ubisoft has chosen a particularly restrictive DRM model for games like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Settlers VII. To verify that you are playing a legally-purchased copy of the game, you’ll have to be connected to the Internet. The game will contact Ubisoft’s Web servers to verify that your game is authorized and it stays connected throughout your entire gaming session. According to PC Gamer, if you lose connectivity for any reason, your game will end and you’ll lose any progress you’ve made beyond the game’s last checkpoint.

That means if your router fails, your Internet service drops or if Ubisoft’s servers go down, you can’t play the game you purchased. If the game relied on an online world like an MMORPG, this would be understandable. But these games don’t rely on persistent online worlds — everything you need to play the game is theoretically included on the game’s disc. While you would still need the Internet to access multiplayer options, you should be able to play these games without Internet access.

But you can’t. Ubisoft’s model makes it impossible to play these games if you don’t have Internet access. Want to take the game with you on a laptop and play wherever you go? You’d better hope you’ll have Internet access.

CNET’s Molly Wood, Tom Merritt and Donald Bell made a good point in the Buzz Out Loud podcast: Ubisoft is selling a broken game. You can only play under certain conditions, some of which are beyond your control. This just encourages people to find ways to hack the game to get around the DRM so that they can play whenever and wherever they want. It also creates a market for pirated games that don’t have the DRM. In other words, by employing this DRM strategy, Ubisoft is creating the very market they want to eliminate.

The answer to the piracy problem isn’t to make your games harder to play legally. That just pushes gamers away from buying the product. It looks like Ubisoft didn’t learn any lessons from EA from the whole Spore debacle (which Marshall Brain covered here). I hope Ubisoft will reconsider its DRM approach. I don’t think it’s going to help the company in the long run.