Just an observation - I saw an announcement from the Amazon Games account on Twitter that Assassin's Creed II for the PC is on sale for $15 "while supplies last". That is, of course, an absurdly low price for a triple-A title that came out less than 5 months ago and reviewed extremely well. It's the sort of thing you might expect to see in a Steam seasonal sale, except that this is a boxed copy, not a digital one. The platform-specific nature of the sale is also interesting. Let's take a look at the listings for each platform for a moment.
Here's the XBOX 360 version of the game:
The PS3 version:
And the PC version:
You may recall that back before the game came out on the PC I wrote about Ubisoft's anti-consumer DRM scheme - how I felt it was going to give Ubi's legitimate customers a worse deal than the pirates they were ostensibly fighting. As a commenter noted below that post, there were many reports of the DRM doing exactly what I thought it would after the game released, locking out paying customers and preventing them from enjoying the game they bought.
Now, a deep sale on a recently released game isn't solid proof of anything, but notice that the PC version of Assassin's Creed II enjoys only a 1.5 star rating on Amazon, while the two console versions each have ratings of 4.5. It's a great game, and there's no difference at all between the PC and console versions except for the DRM on the PC (though the PS3 version was noted in some reviews to have performance problems compared to the X360 one). In fact, the PC version has the DLC from the console versions built-in, so it's otherwise a slightly better deal even if the price were the same. That low rating is 100% due to the DRM; reading just one or two of the user reviews bears that out. And a 1.5 star rating probably isn't too great for sales. And now, after less than half a year on shelves, ACII is $15 on the PC while its 360 console counterpart still sits happily at more than twice that, even though it's been out 4 months longer.
Unfortunately I fully suspect that if any lesson is taken from this by Ubisoft, it will be only that it isn't worth making PC versions of their games at all anymore. On the other hand, though, if this was the only way we were going to get them? We're better off without.