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The annual Steam Summer Sale event is currently ticking along quite nicely, that is for anyone who didn't buy a UbiDRM protected game.

A 30 page (and still growing) thread on the Ubisoft forums is full of angry paying customers complaining that their recently purchased single player game cannot be used because the online authentication service, Uplay, had crashed.

The overload and subsequent crash of the UbiDRM servers was the result of Steam's summer sales event, where lots of Ubisoft's games are put on as daily and bundled specials. These sales usually attract a huge number of buyers, often hundreds of even thousands of times the normal number of daily buyers, and it seems Ubisoft's servers were not equipped to deal with such a sudden surge in gamers. For many budget conscious gamers, this may have been the first time they've had to deal with Ubisoft's Uplay service as well, which might explain why there were so many new complaints. Many also often use Steam sale events to "upgrade" the pirated version of favourite games. 

Ironically, those that chose to pirate these on sale games, which are often older games that have been cracked and downloaded thousands of times already, remain unaffected. It's only those that chose to do the right thing that gets punished by Ubisoft. 

User Mikkel.Ahrendt posts on the forum: "Now i am downloading a crack for a game i actually spent money on and have a CD key and everything!!! Crappy system, and crappy service!"

"You guys really just don't give a **** about us do you?" posted user Skrip037. "Uplay is a joke", posted another.

Uplay services have now resumed normal operations, according to a statement posted by Ubisoft in the forum thread.