Almost one month after the initial release of Assassin's Creed II the game has apparently been fully cracked by a P2P group EMU-SPiRE (See: RLSLOG post). Although the Ubisoft DRM servers experienced outages due to supposed attacks in early March that left approximately 5% of players unable to play AC2, Ubisoft justified their use of the controversial 'always online' DRM in a statement saying:

Ubisoft statement Wrote:We also confirm that, at this time [March 8], no valid cracked version of either Silent Hunter 5 or Assassin’s Creed II are available.

So once again it looks like the only people who have suffered here just happen to be Ubisoft's source of income. Now to be fair, Ubisoft did compensate the affected users, giving them free codes to enable extra missions in the game. On the other hand, games such as Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins seem to be doing fine with simple serial/disk check protection (or at least they're releasing expansions and developing sequels).

On a side note: I've been working my way through FF13, and one thing that really annoyed me was that two of the voice actors have annoying Australian + American + British hybrid accents (mainly Australian so it's even worse or... wehrss?... skewl?... -_-). On a more positive note, the two characters with the Australian accents turn out to be from a planet that all humans (on the other planet) consider to be hell. So whoever casted those voice actors has a pretty good definition of hell, imo.

From doing a little research it seems AC2 has yet to be properly cracked. The P2P group just used a workaround where they emulated the DRM server. I also see from reading the comments that the emulator posted on RLSLOG has mass errors and at most lets you play for only a couple minutes. Need to wait for a scene release really that's probably what Ubisoft meant.

Command & Conquer 4 had this 'always online' DRM as well, and reloaded simply made a classy launcher that sets up a DRM server on localhost, which works great.

SKiDROW seem to have released a full working version that emulates the DRM servers, and apparently they even fixed an issue that legitimate game users are experiencing:

The NFO Wrote:This fix is for users who have problems with settings getting saved properly. It's a problem even the bought edition has.
If you don't have problems, then you don't need this fix.

So I suppose Ubisoft are correct: There is no fully "cracked" working version, but the couter-argument - The game is "partially" cracked, and the workaround for the always-online method was to somehow virtualize the DRM server, so you really only delayed the inevitable and caused more problems for your customers - seems to hold more merit.

I was considering buying this game (the XBOX 360 version), but there's no way I'm going to support these under-handed DRM methods. I guess I just won't play it. If you make a quality product, people will buy it. DRM probably adds to the game's price as well, because often the protection comes from a third party, or requires you to keep servers on-line that constantly monitor players. So this really doesn't encourage anyone to buy.

Source: RLSLOG.net

I think SKiDROW have a new one out that removes the DRM completely, no server emulation needed.

I cant imagine any DRM that could work, I mean as I understand it 'cracking' involves reverse engineering the games exe and removing the code that initiates the DRM checks.

So it doesn't matter what code you put in there, it will eventually get found and removed.

I think that the goal is generally to delay the game being leaked on the internet before the release date -- some protections are sucessful in this.

GTAIV was one example

Then surely it would be a good idea for the company producing the games to remove the DRM shortly after release, or once a cracked copy had been confirmed?
While I do know that a few games have removed their DRM some time after release its usually after the game has been out for over a year or so, (Bioshock is the only example i can think of right now) I would think that the practice of removing the DRM from a game after release would be alot more common if early leaks were what they were worried about, especially considering how many problems various forms of DRM can and have caused

Well maybe they should be focusing on implementing more restrictions on their own employees, who are providing the leaks.

Maybe they should focus on making their games better and cheaper so that they can sell more of them