Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Remastered Highlights the Risks of Digital Ownership
Over the past few weeks, conversations about digital ownership have been louder than usual, sparked by PlayStation’s move to drop optical discs in 2028. For many players, the underlying question is simple: if physical copies are fading away, what guarantees do we have that the digital versions we buy are truly ours—especially if something goes wrong with the services that run them?
That concern hit home this weekend when a DRM-related problem made a major PC release effectively unplayable. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced was the one caught in the spotlight.
Ubisoft DRM Made Black Flag Resynced Unplayable
During the weekend, Ubisoft Connect reportedly experienced an outage. With the service unavailable, Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced—and essentially every Ubisoft PC game tied to that ecosystem—could not be played. To make the situation even more frustrating, the impact reportedly landed on legitimate buyers, while players who had pirated the title were unaffected.
Despite the problems, Black Flag is still remembered as one of the best entries in the Assassin’s Creed series—now more than a decade after its original release.
This outcome is especially notable because Ubisoft’s own messaging has suggested a more comfortable ownership model. The company’s position has been that you only need an internet connection to install the game, and that once installed, it should be playable offline. With Ubisoft Connect going down, that promise proved hollow in practice, serving as yet another reminder that when publishers say games “belong” to players, the reality can depend on whether the supporting services are online.
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Digital ownership has become a bigger deal for players, and while some people are turning toward PC in an effort to avoid platform shifts like PlayStation’s disc retirement, the PC ecosystem isn’t automatically free of problems. DRM and account-dependent access can still create situations where the game you bought becomes difficult or impossible to play if the required infrastructure fails.
