Thousands of PC gamers around the world went out and purchased Assassin’s Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5 this weekend, only to find out when they got home that booting up and installing the games was not going to be a straight forward affair.

Much has already been made of Ubisoft’s new DRM policy, which will require gamers to maintain a continuous internet connection when playing new games. It would appear than in order to install and play the games, as well as save and load progress, gamers are required to maintain a connection to Ubisoft’s cloud servers.

The announcement caused a major upset when it was made a few weeks back, with many astute onlookers pointing out that in fact this requirement would only affect legitimate customers, and those who pirate it will still have unbridled access to the game. This assessment was confirmed when it came to light that Silent Hunter 5’s DRM had been cracked, and a torrent began circulating, effectively allowing anyone to download and play it for free without having to worry about maintaining internet connectivity.

Ubisoft denied that the game had been cracked, but a quick torrent search shows that it is in fact available on international torrent sites.

As bad as things were, they were made so much worse when Ubisoft’s authentication servers crashed over the weekend as thousands of gamers began installing and running their legitimate store bought copies of Assassin’s Creed 2.

At the time, Ubisoft declared that the server downtime was due to heavy load, but a recent tweet from the publisher reveals that there may be a little more to the story.

“Apologies to anyone who couldn’t play ACII or SH5 yesterday. Servers were attacked which limited service from 2:30pm to 9pm Paris time.”

It would seem as though the attacks were most probably orchestrated by angry PC gamers, and this hardly comes as a surprise given the massive negative backlash that resulted from Ubisoft’s contentious announcement.