New Ubisoft DRM requires internet ALL the time

Wow -- does the gaming industry seriously not realize that they are killing off their own sales by implementing weird requirements ? We've had the DRM discussions, the copy protection discussions, the root kit discussions and now UBISOFT ups it another notch by making a requirement that is just ridiculous.

My former colleagues at PC Gamer found out that while testing review copies of the PC port of Assassin's Creed 2 they got kicked out of playing the game whenever they lost their internet connection. Which simply means your game quits and you lose any progress --  with single player missions.

We've just received Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII for review, and verified with Ubisoft that the DRM is the same as the boxed product. If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected.

The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers'. The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen - all my progress since it last autosaved was lost.

Why do software houses consistently find methods to seriously agitate end-users ? I'm sure this again is a privacy breach on so many levels ... UbiSoft .. seriously, I do not want you guys hogging my Internet bandwith. or what if I want to play the game I bought on a laptop with no WiFi available ?

What do you think ?