No, Ubisoft may still be right. It's quite common to spread your checks throughout gameplay. For example, there were actually several copy protection checks in

No, Ubisoft may still be right. It's quite common to spread your checks throughout gameplay. For example, there were actually several copy protection checks in the old Karateka game. One triggered later in the level and made the eagle unbeatable. This caused the cracker group to have to re-release it. This kind of in-game check led to the practice of cracking "100%". This means the cracker played the entire game through and verified everything worked properly. They'd often add "trainers" (eternal life patches) to make this process go quicker. With a fully online system as Ubisoft claimed to have, you can just store the level code/data on the server. In this case, EVERY crack will be limited as you can always download new protection code with level N+1. It remains to be seen how well they adopted this approach to updating their protection, but you can see it work in fully online games like WoW. We designed the Blu-ray protection scheme to have the same renewable property, it's just that the disc itself is the transport channel since your player is not guaranteed to be online. A PC-only environment can make that kind of requirement, and an online-only system is easier to protect.