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Ubisoft Working On a New Anti-Piracy Tool
Ubisoft recently revealed that their game sales have seen a 50% drop over the past quarter, blaming the overall market slowdown and piracy (particularly on the DS) for the low numbers. They also announced that four of their games, including Splinter Cell: Conviction and Red Steel 2, would be delayed until 2010. The company's CEO, Yves Guillemot, now says they are working on a new anti-piracy tool that should be ready by the end of 2009. He didn't offer any details about how it would be implemented.
Ubisoft: Your development budget is better spent on developing good games (I am not saying your current games are bad - I have no experience with them), than yet another copyright scheme that will be broken.
At first I misread the title as Anti-privacy tool, on second reading i realized this might be close to the truth.
In other news, hackers are working on breaking Ubisoft's new anti-piracy tool. They expect it to be cracked by the end of 2009 plus one day.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
They could start offering free porn. Everyone knows that illegal downloading of games and so on is just an excuse for downloading porn of Usenet.
Will be a gun that they point at their feet and shoot themselves with.
He didn't offer any details about how it would be implemented.
Because he doesn't know, obviously. Oh, and there is no copy protection that won't be cracked on release day. Again, there is one and only one method I've seen so far that worked: make the server you control essential to gameplay, see WoW. (Oh, and Blizzard actually releases their client without copy protection whatsoever.)
You don't control my computer, and you deserve to go bankrupt for trying.
I don't pirate ubisoft games. Their products are not worth the price of FREE.
They make crappy knockoff copys of good games. or buy a good game dev and ruin it.
Fuck you ubisoft. It's not piracy hurting your profits. It's producing endless numbers of shitty buggy ass games.
But you go ahead and waste a few million developing your new anti-piracy tool. And i'll bet you it will be cracked within 6 months anyway.
Here's your best anti-piracy tool: Drop the price on new PC games to $40, and ffs, stop treating your customers like thieves.
When will they learn that lack of sales != piracy? Lack of sales implies that people are not willing to pay the price you want for what you have to offer. This may be a direct cause of a tanked economy or your product sucks. There are plenty of reasons why your product will not sell piracy is not one of them.
insert inflammatory comment here!
If they keep delaying their titles that will surely teach the pirates a lesson. Look at Duke Nukem Forever, no-one has cracked that one yet!
...FarCry, Unreal, heroes of might & magic, & Prince of Persia.
All these had their day and now are as dead as Duke Nukem. The Rest of Ubisoft's vaunted arsenal of games are either unplayable or so bad that using them as coffee coasters seem an insult to the coffee.
Ubisoft's CEO seems to have his head so far up his a$$ that he gets high on his own "perfume".
Instead of blaming his company's utter failure to produce good, replayable games with deep themes and good graphics, he blames an outside factor that his beyond his ability to control.
What makes him think he will succeed where the Evil Empire Sony's SecuROM and other hundreds of copy-protection have failed?
His Capitalism 2 doesn't play on Windows 7 64-bit. When asked, his company's cold reply was that i switch back to Windows XP.
Uru was a rockin' failure and a complete insult to Myst.
As usual, corporate CEOs are so far removed from reality that they can continue to fool stockholders every single day with more fairy tales of their own.
I would start shorting Ubisoft's stock from today, if i can.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Repeat with me, there is no such thing as an anti-piracy tool for offline gaming.
After 30 years of gaming, I was hopping that maybe they will get it.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
For less than the cost of a single DS game (and they're only about $30), you can buy a cartridge and microSD card that can hold all the games you could ever want and then some *and* lets you play old school [s]nes/gameboy games. No juggling or losing cartridges, it's all just there.
Why would I want to participate in the for-pay DS economy when the pirate experience is far superior?
..offer your products at very reasonable prices and make them available for easy download.
I do not need a box for a game, nor do I like going to the stores for one. I want a free preview download with one level and if I like it I will buy it when the price is right. EA got it right in my eyes, I got a free trial of C&C and then went and bought it through their online store. My download went at 1.2MB/s filling up my 10Mbps connection. The price was also slightly less than getting the boxed set in a local store.
Brought to you by the same assholes that loved Starforce (until they were sued for their crippleware).
Guess SecuROM isn't intrusive enough for them.
For less than the price of a car (and they're only about $10,000) I can buy a crowbar and learn to hotwire which lets you steal any car you could ever want and then some *and* lets you live games like GTA in real life. No weekly repayments or repossessions, it's all just there.
Why would I want to participate in the for-pay car economy when the thief experience is far superior?
... consoles that have a ROM chip with the game on it, that can only be played on that particular instance. The console would be hooked to the TV, and that's it. You have to buy the whole thing if you want to play. Not that consumers would care or anything. They don't now, and why would they?
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
As usual, corporate CEOs are so far removed from reality that they can continue to fool stockholders every single day with more fairy tales of their own.
I would start shorting Ubisoft's stock from today, if i can.
Oh but they do! Until the company goes under that is...
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
that the games they have released were crap and they are delaying Splinter Cell yet again..
There are two ways to combat piracy.
The first is to try and limit the (re)distribution of programs. That's almost impossible because they generally need to have all the instructions laid out in memory to execute quickly, thus they're prone to examination by other programs - i can easily imagine Xen being of tremendous use here. It doesn't matter if it gets encrypted or not - the only requirement for piracy is that whatever it is can be saved, duplicated and given to someone else to use.
The other is to make the correct operation of the game dependant on something that can't be so easily examined. A tamper resistant USB fob, for example, that contains part of the executable image. The impediment here is the cost of these. But the key is to not put just data on the fob, but to also have the fob *do* something that is more than a "yes" or "no". What if the fob were to render the scene or implements the core logic that govens how "you" interact with your environment? So long as you can't get the extra instructions off the fob, it doesn't matter if you can duplicate the DVD/CD, it is useless without the fob.
The best antipiracy tool is to make something that is good enough that people are willing to spend money on it. Quality. That's your best antipiracy tool.
.. I won't shed a tear. As pointed out not, they have no games of worth. I enjoyed Assassin's Creed enough that'll I get the squeal. But they have no other titles of worth. Stop making games for the PC if you're worried about Piracy. But it's your lack of a good product that will be the death of you not the cold steal of the Pirate.
The only type of copy protection that won't be cracked is the one protecting something nobody gives a shit about.
Chineese writing can be more compact, but dude, unless you do a 7hr course, most laymen will go WTF are you
writing this 1970s crap for.
Lobby intel to put regex in the cpu next in microcode.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Who has a leaked copy?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
*facepalm*
Stealing a car is illegal, reading a game from an SD card is not.
Mr. Guillemot, be sure that I'd be there to crack it. See ya!
Just take a huge dump in every box you ship that way pirates will get messy hands.
Your customers will understand.
I believe this is a metaphor
This analogy doesn't work as well as you seem to think. In the case of stealing a car, you are much more likely to get caught. You also are depriving someone of property that is theirs. In the case of pirating games, did you actually deprive someone of playing the game? The difference is pretty obvious, and it gets pointed out every time anyone brings up this strawman argument, so please stop.
The better way to argue against piracy is:
If everyone did it, the people who make the games that we love would be out of work. It is getting too easy to pirate games via torrents that include collections of every game you could ever want to play + programs that make it dead easy to install custom applications to play these games on your DS. This combination is clearly a bad thing, and we need a better solution.
Again, there is one and only one method I've seen so far that worked: make the server you control essential to gameplay, see WoW.
The summary mentions games for Nintendo DS, which are often played miles away from Wi-Fi hotspots. Bundling a 3G to Wi-Fi adapter (such as MiFi) and 3G data service with your game is cost prohibitive.
They're already losing sales because of a bad market of bad competitiveness, and their answer to that is to lose even more sales by reducing the free advertisement piracy provides and make their users angry, thus committing suicide?
Are they out of their minds?
A company will sell 3 times as many games at $20 than at $50. It also helps to make the game actually worth the $20 in the first place.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Because that is NOT a superior experience. You have to drive without a window or an screwed up door, you have the risk of getting beat down by the owner or the police, and there are a host of other problems (most notably convenience, the main factor cited above). The thief experience is, in most cases, not superior. People who take the thief road usually choose it if it because it can be lucrative, at the convenience/comfort level it is usually called petty larceny.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Most of the people who create their own 'backups' and want to run from their hard-drives most probably got their copies from a warez site or a friend of theirs own a copy and they want one too.
Even if "most" have pirated the game, some have purchased a lawfully made copy and want to run it on a smaller laptop, and smaller laptops happen not to have a built-in optical drive and a battery to support an external optical drive. And if a friend owns a copy, then perhaps the other people are trying to simulate the "spawn installations" of the original Starcraft and the "DS Download Play" of Tetris DS, which don't need a pirated copy in order to become player 2, 3, or 4 on a LAN. Make legitimate ways for these to buy your product for a reasonable price (that is, not $200 for a family of four or $200 for a DVD-ROM drive and an extra battery), and they'll stop pirating.
I realise that, I was (partly) joking. The "I pirate because X" crew really are frustrating, as each time whatever their gripe is (DRM, need disk to play, etc. etc.) is fixed they shift the goalposts ("Okay, the game no longer needs the disk to play, now I want them cheaper"). The argument is a strawman, it's been refuted to the point of inanity and its frustrating that you can't skip past it on DVDs, but it does help to give people who (claim that they) pirate because pirating grants them a feature they don't have a little perspective.
My 64 year old mother has Acekard's for both her DS's and my 68 year old Dad bannerbombed his Wii.
The only console I've never compromised is my 360, I don't want to get banned from live. It isn't price that has driven me, it's the depth of the online experience I get from the 360 that not only keeps me from pirating, but keeps me paying MS $50 per year.
Stealing a car is illegal, reading a game from an SD card is not.
It is if the DS Game Card interface is patented.
For less than the cost of a single DS game (and they're only about $30), you can buy a cartridge and microSD card that can hold all the games you could ever want
For less than the price of a car (and they're only about $10,000) I can buy a crowbar and learn to hotwire which lets you steal any car you could ever want
Who said steal? My DS homebrew setup lets me run MoonShell, DSOrganize, and homemade games such as MegaETk, Lockjaw, and Setsuzoku no Puzzle. Exactly what am I "stealing" by running homebrew instead of commercial games?
Really? You couldn't do 3 seconds of research? Aside from essentially the entire Tom Clancy catalog of games (which is easily one of the most valuable IPs in the game industry), Ubisoft owns Assassin's Creed (potentially huge IP), Brothers In Arms (pretty big IP), and Beyond Good & Evil (great game, "meh" IP). When you combine those IPs (that's not all of them, but that's what 3 seconds of research got me) with your previously mentioned FarCry IP and Prince of Persia IPs, maybe you'll begin to realize that Ubisoft, as a developer, is still one of the top-tier powerhouses in the industry, right alongside Blizzard and Valve.
<p>That's just as a developer, too; as a publisher, they rival Microsoft Game Studios, EA, Activision Blizzard, Valve, and Bethesda (amongst others). Simply put, Ubisoft is a monster, and is one of the biggest players in the industry - I'm pretty sure that their CEO isn't fooling those stockholders.</p>
<p>*Sigh*. Sometimes I wish there was a -1, Misinformed mod. </p>
My download went at 1.2MB/s filling up my 10Mbps connection.
Good for you, but downloading a big PC game from an online store is not for everyone. In some places, the two options for high-speed Internet access aren't cable and DSL but instead satellite and 3G, and these usually have monthly usage caps between 5 GB and 8 GB. If you had such a cap on your Internet connection, would you still download from the publisher's online store?
Why would I want to participate in the for-pay DS economy when the pirate experience is far superior?
Because you like the game, and want to support the developer creating more of those in the future?
Just a wild guess here...
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
... consoles that have a ROM chip with the game on it, that can only be played on that particular instance.
Desolder, dump, copy over the Internet, and emulate.
The console would be hooked to the TV, and that's it. You have to buy the whole thing if you want to play. Not that consumers would care or anything.
Such handheld TV games tend to have NES- or Sega Genesis-quality graphics, not even the GameCube-quality graphics that Wii players expect.
You guys are kind of missing the point. There making new anti-piracy systems, for xbox 360 and wii games. The wii is easy to pirate on, sure, but it can be quite a hassle on the 360 from what Ive seen (please correct me if I am wrong). They are worried about piracy? They need to be worried about used games sales instead, that has to be a much much much higher % of sales lost then piracy. start converting THOSE customers.
How about you lazy Ubisoft shitheads fix the UI bugs in Chessmaster that have plagued the software since release instead of worrying about preventing pirated copies of the next Imagine Babiez?
Oh man I sure love being in Academy mode, moving a chess piece as the tutorial requests in a drill, and then getting stuck in the tutorial because moving a piece made it suddenly think I'm in Game Edit mode, which isn't supposed to happen when you're in a tutorial.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
... the first ones to leak sdk's and other things to pirates, so it is funny to see this. It is kind of cynical.
It's also pretty risky too. I used to work at a factory, the 360 was fairly popular with the hourly guys there and I'd say roughly half of them had hacked their DVD drives to be able to play pirate games. But, every big release resulted in one or two of them getting banned from Live too.
Their ability to force you to spend cash.
Because you enjoy supporting good game publishers and development companies that release awesome content for $30 (instead of $50+) and buying affordable games that price drop quickly used because of the huge DS market?
They blame piracy for their awful shovelware DS games not selling? Are they crazy? I think the market has just hit the limit of how many ANIMAL/ACTIVITY-z (like Catz,Babiez,etc) titles it can take.
I forget what big titles Ubisoft came out with recently.. but I remember a discussion in my forums where most people were saying they didn't give a shit how good the game was.. They wouldn't buy it because of the DRM. I gotta admit that I'm now in the same boat.. The vast majority of pc gamers in my forums were saying the DRM would prevent them from buying the game.. PC Gamers aren't retarded console gamers.. They do their research on the game AND the DRM that comes with it..
I have been told I had to buy an internal cdrom drive because my external usb wasn't valid.. (wtf) because of drm issues.. I have been told to 'wait until the Tages servers are back up' before I can play.. I've had cd keys just all of a sudden no longer validate. And, I've had games install all sorts of crappy software on my 64bit windows xp that weren't made for 64bit.. so it causes problems.
Brothers In Arms (pretty big IP)
lol
Ubisoft, as a developer, is still one of the top-tier powerhouses in the industry, right alongside Blizzard and Valve.
lolol
Entertainment sales dropping during a continued recession isn't exactly a surprise. People have less money, so they buy less.
That's why I thought Time Magazine's conclusions last year were just ludicrous, as they predicted that entertainment sales would go up.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Excessive DRM is the reason why I haven't touched a single Ubisoft game since Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and the whole Starforce DRM debacle surrounding that.
because, you know, with a global recession and all, a decline in sales of luxury items... hmm... I guess if I hadn't taken economics in school, I might be able to see a co-relation between the two. Now all I can think of is two lines on a graph, with one moving left, the other moving down, and companies like Ubisoft trying to keep P higher than it should be. So it goes...
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
It might be they have already done it, but the two last time i did NOT buy a Ubisoft game was because it wasnt avaible on steam in Europe (Assassins Creed and the new Prince of Persia). Stupid marketing choices i would say.
I realise that, I was (partly) joking. The "I pirate because X" crew really are frustrating, as each time whatever their gripe is (DRM, need disk to play, etc. etc.) is fixed they shift the goalposts ("Okay, the game no longer needs the disk to play, now I want them cheaper"). The argument is a strawman, it's been refuted to the point of inanity and its frustrating that you can't skip past it on DVDs, but it does help to give people who (claim that they) pirate because pirating grants them a feature they don't have a little perspective.
Exsept as far as I know none of these problems, such as DRM, have ever been officially fixed. In the very rare case where a game has little in the way of intrusive features and is generally playable (i.e. not bug infested) I have no problem paying and have done so many times. I will not however pay for any cripple ware or buggy ass games. I will still pirate it because I'd like a taste of the game, but I have no desire to give the company that made it any of my money, because they don't deserve it. The idea is to hurt them, to make understand I will not buy your game as it's currently set up. If this cause some, or even most companies to go bankrupt or pull out all together I couldn't careless. Honestly the games I truly like and will support financially I already do.
Eh, you can say what you like about me. You can claim that I'm just a freeloader or that I think I'm being a rebel, yada, yada,yada. The point is they would never ever see my money regardless of how effective or ineffective there anti-piracy measures are. If I never end up playing the game, then I never play it, ether way if the game is shit, or buggy, or DRM ridden They'll never see my money. It's that simple. There have been a few times where I have pirated a game, found it to be superb and found out that ether the DRM has been drooped and I've gone out and bought said game. It's exceptionally rare, in fact I think it's only happened once in recent memory (Elder Scrolls IV). Don't think you know the mind of a pirate because you don't. Piracy hasn't change the gaming market, idiocy has.
Bah, what ever my rants over :p
I have to disagree with Tom Clancy being one of the most valuable IPs in the game. They made some games that a very popular writer from the 90's put his name to. We are now getting closer to when you say "Tom Clancy" the game players will say "Tom who?"
"as each time whatever their gripe is (DRM, need disk to play, etc. etc.) is fixed they shift the goalposts"
When has this happened? I only see DRM getting more and more draconian.
"but it does help to give people who (claim that they) pirate because pirating grants them a feature they don't have a little perspective."
I don't know about you, but I definitely consider a game NOT bricking my OS to a be a good feature. I would also consider it a good feature to be able to reinstall the game I legally purchased without having to be locked into a physical disc or having to hold onto a 20 digit key, or having to "phone home" to the distributor ever time I want to play. None of these things affect pirates. None of these things prevent pirates from cracking the game and putting it online. The only people they effect are PAYING CUSTOMERS!! The game industry is the biggest proponent of piracy going, and you are a fool if you can't see that.
Oh, and your previous post about the car gets an F-. Piracy != theft. I would explain it to you, but if you don't understand it by now, I don't think that there is too much hope for you.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Ubisoft's CEO seems to have his head so far up his a$$ that he gets high on his own "perfume".
Well he is French, where do you think his head would be?
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
I was taking a look at Ubisoft's game catalog & aside from Beyond Good & Evil, Far Cry, & the Heroes of Might & Magic series (which has been run completely into the ground), none of their games interest me in the least. The only reason I even have Far Cry is because it was like $5 at NewEgg.
There is a war going on for your mind.
For less than the cost of a single Porsche Boxter car (and they're only about $64,900 ), you can buy a Universal Auto Lockout kit and a tennis ball that can get you all the cars you could ever want and then some *and* lets you play with old school cars. No juggling or losing keys , it's all just there.
Why would I want to participate in the for-pay Car economy when the pirate experience is far superior?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
whoops... seems I am late in the car analogy queue!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
It's a really crappy metaphor.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Playing a game you've illegally downloaded is.
"blaming the overall market slowdown and piracy (particularly on the DS) for the low numbers."
I'm certain the globally fucked economy has nothing to do with people buying fewer $50 games.
Game sales dropped due to crappy games, nothing else.
Nearly all games I have played recently, I've downloaded through torrents.
The reasons are plentiful:
- New stuff is available to me quicker this way (I'm european, we sometimes still get later releases for whatever reason...)
- No trip to the store (doesn't happen much lately anyway)
- No additional delivery time if bought online (I buy plenty from play.com)
- DRM crap removed before released to P2P (and if you use proper sites, no worries about potential malware)
- I can actually see what the game is like (unlike in unrepresentative and/or crippled demos)
And guess what? Every single game that I liked, I bought... Even multiple times in some cases. To illustrate (older examples, but still): I own Fallout 1 and 2 4 times each (for Fallout 1: 2x box copies, 1x budget collection edition and 1x digital). Diablo, Ground Control & Exp twice each, and so on. It's not that I'm a cheap bastard not willing to spend some money for good games (hell, I'm happy with simply DECENT games nowadays since standards do seem to be dropping).
My Steam account is pretty full, so you can't say I'm radically against DRM. I don't mind DRM much if it works and if it benefits me on some level. Steam does just that and in my eyes provides more upsides than downsides. But draconian stuff like SecuROM and StarFARCE just rubs me the wrong way. I'll never buy a game knowing that it has that protection. I did once by accident because I didn't know though... It really should be noted on the box what kind of crummy DRM it uses if it's as intrusive as those.
Correctly managed, pirating can be great advertising. If wrongly used, DRM can kill your game, destroy your publishing reputation and alienate your target audience.
Take your pick, Ubisoft.
Except that the pirates actually clean the boxes before handing the out to the people robin hood style...
Yeah, good move publishers, real good move...
I've been trying too play Fear2 now for 2 months (since I joined up on att's edge network), but all it does is download updates from steam, and then won't allow me too play it. I'm sure it's a copy protection scheme from steam.... So because I have a slow internet connection I can't even play the game, it won't let me play in offline mode. I wish somebody would file a class action lawsuit against these monopolies for stealing all our money under the guise of copy protection. I'm gonna just quit buying games I guess....since you need a high speed internet connection too play them now.......???
maybe because you understand that games arent delivered by faeries, but by people who work (fucking hard) for years to make them, and you gvi a damn about more games being made in future?
Ones that are not purely evony style micro-transaction hell-holes or online only WoW clones...
Of course that requires medium term thinking, or empathy.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
All TFA says is "piracy solution" and Mr. Ubisoft says, "We see it coming country by country. We see when we put other things with the product (people) go and buy the game. We need to make sure that the value is better when they buy the box then when they download (the game) from the Internet." which... is actually sensible.
Playing a game you've illegally downloaded is [illegal].
[citation needed]
Best Anti Piracy Tool out there... EA and others have been successfully using it for years....
I use a cycloDS. All my games are played from that. However, all of the ROMs were ripped directly (and personally) from my own carts and those files are kept in my sole possession. I keep all the carts too.
I buy the games so that there could be the chance of more games that I like (and thus will probably buy).
(The other big advantage of a flash cart is you can carry and play GBA games without the cart protruding from the lite.)
bullshit.
Tom Clancy - fucked it up
Assassin's Creed - buggy as shit
Brothers In Arms - buggy as shit and virtually unknown
Beyond Good & Evil - buggy as shit and unknown
see a trend ? valuable my ass.
Hey now, I still play UT99, and UT2004. They were so good, I purchased them.
and I thought unreal was by Epic Games and Digital Extremes?
perhaps the 'surge' in piracy is related to general economic woes? blaming piracy for lost money is baseless speculation. there is no basis for determining what a person would or would not buy simply because they pirate it, and playing a game in itself does not mean that a person would have purchased it. imagine if in the nes days when you bought a cartridge it would only be playable on the nes with a serial number programmed into the cartridge! then suddenly it costs money to buy the game AND to pay for the technology and labor behind ensuring that game only works on that cartridge. games are becoming more expensive not because of piracy, but because of speculative fiction being held as truth. that's not good business management. that's like investing in books because you think authors create reality after reading 'the number of the beast' by robert heinlein.
Hardly a commercial failure. Nintendo still gets your money for the hardware, and the vendors still get your money for the rom cart and micro SD card. :P
That a lot of DS games are gimicky crap, front-ends for a collection of gimicky minigames, or just plain shovelware is another matter. I'll gladly pay money for a good DS game that I'm guaranteed to get 25+ hours out of... that's a list of maybe three or four titles a year, none of which are produced by Ubisoft.
Look guys, all you gotta do is make sure everytime you wanna start your game, you got to call the new customer service number(a 900 number off course) that will give you a 28 number and letter code that you will have to imput with the keys (no stylus gimmick) with an awfully slow cursor and no way to know what numbers/letters you already imputted before so that you just give up trying to start the game and charge you 20 bucks a call.... FREE games! but 20$ calls to try to start their games...
The only people that are hurt by your copy protection are the legitimate consumers. This comes in the form of
1. Hammering my CD/DVD drive during each and every game. If I can't find the CD, i'm screwed. Pirate copies don't face this limitation (and can often run the game better via a virtual drive)
2. Insisting I type in a silly codes of some sort. If I lose the reference to the code, i'm screwed. Pirate copies don't face this limitation
3. Making me connect online. If I don't have internet access, or my access goes down, i'm screwed. Pirate copies do face this limitation
Where's the benefit for being a legitimate consumer? I often buy the game and install the crack - leaving me susceptible to all of the usual viruses/trojans, potential crashes (are they due to the crack or just plain buggy software by OEMs), frustrating upgrade paths, etc.
If you insist on protection, can you please avoid something that falls into the category of 1. to 3. above?
If you're going to use an online installer approach, please ensure that there's a backup system - in case you go bankrupt and I want to re-install the game in 5 years.
AC
Here's a great idea. Produce games that people really want to play, and sell them at a price people want to pay.
If your game advertises 5ish hours of gameplay, with a $50+ pricetag, I'm not going to pay for it.
If the gameplay is just another rehash of the same kind of crap I played last year, and the year before, and the year before that - I'm not going to pay for it.
If it is only available on one or two pieces of hardware that I don't own, I'm not going to pay for it.
Frankly, I'm not impressed with the titles that Ubisoft is turning out lately. I haven't played anything they've released in years. If they want my money they're going to have to do more than develop better DRM.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Because the "pirate experience" is illegal?
Trying to use some common sense, if I wanted more revenue of my games than I would try to figure out what causes all that piracy and modify my market strategy to give the gamers a reason to buy.
Screwing over the paying customers by crippling the software with these so called protection schemes that hurt them more than the copyright infringers would be somewhere at the bottom of the list.. actually not at all.
Anyway, they already managed to lower my interest in games to zero with all this crap, so I don't care much any-more.
So who has the patents to key-based car ignitions?
Unlike copyrights and trademarks, patents expire.[1] And unlike solid-state data storage interfaces, key systems on cars other than luxury cars haven't changed much in decades. So perhaps the inventor of the ignition lock made a killing decades ago, but that's over.
[1] In the United States, registered trademarks can be renewed, and copyrights have periodic legislative extensions. Patents, on the other hand, expire 20 years after filing, or slightly longer in the case of drugs and other inventions that need government approval before marketing.
I haven't played a ubi soft title since the original ghost games. I tried a few of the later games but they sucked.
If they would make better games i would spend the money.
It sounds like ubisoft is on there way out of business. Especially when these guys complain about piracy.
Lets see If my prediction holds up.
I'm not sure I've ever even played an Ubisoft game. They seem to make nothing but things I don't care about playing.
That and I have enough things to do, what with a pair of EVE accounts, movies to watch, an iPhone to play with, books to read, and a girlfriend.
Maybe instead of piracy they should blame the fact that people have other things to do with their time, or that their games aren't any fun. Also, the economy is in the toilet.
Question everything
Oh, we're not ripping them off. We're sticking it to teh €€vu£ corpera$hun'$!!!!
(See what I did there, with the currency symbols? Am I like totally awesome or what?)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You don't know how much I would actually LOVE LOVE LOVE to buy the movies I like on DVD. I don't because I CAN'T WATCH THEM! I'm an American (region 1) living in Japan (region 2). I travel enough between the two countries that no matter which region I buy, I'm screwed out of watching my legally purchased DVD. Sure, I could research into finding a portable DVD player that ignores region encoding, but that wouldn't change the fact that I'm buying an inferior product to me renting a DVD and stripping the encoding. I won't buy a DVD unless it's region free. I'd never rent and burn again if all DVDs were region free.
Ended up cracked -years- later.
Not 95. The commercial life of a copyrighted work can be longer than its first run: see "Disney vault".
After the SNES had ended its production run for the most part.
But before the Wii and Virtual Console started their production run.
The DS is unique in the fact that its going to be hard to truly emulate the experience of having a real DS on a computer.
Some games don't really use both screens, like Tetris DS which uses only the bottom screen in most modes, or Mario Kart DS which uses only the top screen once the menus have disappeared. And once Microsoft relaxes the ULCPC requirements for Windows licensing, netbooks will gain touch screens.
So no spawn features does not stop piracy.
For the nth time: The goal is not to stop piracy; the goal is to increase sales. Spawn to netbooks and spawn to players 2, 3, and 4 would help open up these markets.
A quick look at the sales statistics will show that the DS is not a commercial failure (not sure what else your post's topic could mean, so feel free to clarify). However, that's not the issue I'm arguing...
I am going to set aside the "you wouldn't steal a car" argument lampooned in an earlier post because I don't see the validity of that statement. Instead, I will point to two counter-arguments: one regarding the DS and one using another device. First, the Nintendo DS was developed to play DS games. Although I am not against home-brew per se, I am against pirating actual DS games. A simple Kantian argument is all that is needed: if everyone were to only copy DS games and not give Nintendo a dime, then Nintendo will decide that building a hand-held device and licensing/developing games for it is just not cost-effective and will discontinue the practice. Then, you will not have any games to pirate. Plus, if nobody buys the game, exactly where is the original copy going to come from? Gamers will find themselves in an arms race to steal the first copy unless someone "takes one for the team" and buys it. But who would make that investment? Probably nobody.
As for home-brew, there is a more cost-effective and convenient way to do that. If you buy a DS simply to home-brew, then you're sinking about $100 - $150 (plus the $30 for a microSD to DS cartridge adapter, plus $10 - $20 for a big enough microSD card) into a piece of hardware that you have to hack in order to run unlicensed software on it. Buy a GP2x for about the same price, maybe less if you can get a good deal, and you have a fully open system that you don't have to hack, so you can run all the home-brew and emulated games you want. BTW, don't tell me that you'd prefer the DS over the GP2x because it gives you the option of using a legit DS game, because you specifically argued that you don't want to "participate in the for-pay DS economy".
I didn't know you could backup DS games and hadn't really thought about it. I'll have to look into that. Thanks for the update!
The two Ubisoft games I've played recently (Assassins Creed and Prince of Persia) were both beautiful to look at but incredibly repetitive and not all that fun to play after an hour or so. Since then, on more than one occasion I've seen an awesome trailer that made me think "damn I need to go get that game"...until the Ubisoft logo comes up and I think "nevermind...there are better things to spend my $60 on"...I imagine that has more to do with their sales lag than piracy does...it's not like piracy rates have suddenly shot through the roof.
I think we can point blame here and there all day. I've seen Ubisofts buildings, and they are huge. If game devs back themselves into this corporate corner, it may backlash because they are trapped a financial snare in which they have to make choices they fans disagree with, which undermines the companies reputation, inevitably ruining their own business.
When I decide whether or not I should watch a movie I have found that the performance at the BoxOffice is a much more reliable indicator of whether or not the movie is worth seeing. Money talks and surveys are frequently submitted by the fans, i.e. the population surveyed is biased.
The movie "Children of men" is a good example. Look it up in IMDB and you'll see that it is in the top 250. Look at the BoxOffice and you'll see that it flopped. And it is a really bad movie.
So I think that the game industry is overestimating the reliability of the surveys and instead should use their sales figures as measurements of how well the games they produce are perceived in the public.
Pirates are causing poor quality games. Basic economics says fraud has consequences. Don't blame the game maker for selling low grade junk software. We are seeing an explosion of low quality movies, games, books etc. because the originator has reduced incentives.
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
The bigest issue with piracy is that games are simply too expensive.
If the game I encounter in the store costs me 5 euros, I wouldn't have bothered that much with buying it. Instead, games start out at about 50 euros or more.
At 5 euros I don't care that much if the game isn't perfect or doesn't last that long, but with 50 euros or more, I do care. As a result I download games and judge them if they are worth the money. And, no, demos usually don't last long enough to determine whether I want to buy a game or not.
Sadly, most of the games are of such low quality these days, that almost none are worth my money. So, if Ubisoft wants me to buy their games, they have to make their games fun first.
Sadly, it's graphics, sound and physics that are more important these days, instead of fun gameplay.
I purchased a copy of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory a few years ago from these ass clowns. It came with a capitalistic malware infestation called Starforce. I do not appreciate these fuckers installing hidden device drivers on my PC. I will thus never purchase another Ubisoft game as long as I live.
A wile after this happened, Ubisoft was sued for using Starforce and they dropped it. They did not remove it from our legally purchased games though. Why should they? They got our money and that's all corporations care about.
Ubi, you had an honest customer and you screwed me. You do not deserve ANY customers and I would love to see your company go out of business!
Any survey about how much anti piracy tools, copy protection or DRM decrease sales?
Or perhaps the game makers should perform concerts to earn money, instead of the created product.
That is what music pirates say artists should do to make money instead of enforcing ownership law.
The young, naive pirates, but experts on marketing, have the solution. Game makers can have game playoffs, held in huge stadiums. Everyone's console all wired up in the bleachers.
Game companies make money by performing, not creating. Home consoles are banned. All games are performed in stadiums or on street corners. Then all pirates can be arrested and jailed in mass, as they exit the stadium.
Or society can simply enforce ownership law. It works flawless for banks.
* yes, it is sarcasm :-) *
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
Well he is French, where do you think his head would be?
Facing the British Isles?
Your problem is that you define it as a singular "crew". There are different levels of frustration and price points that every person will put up with. DRM is a killer for most of my game purchases, as well as the $50-$60 price points. If games were $20 or so, I'd be more willing to buy them even if they sucked. At this price, I'm not gonna pay unless I'm damn sure I'm going to like it. Other people, it may be $40 as the price point. Or just a less onerous DRM. Maybe it needs to work on Linux, so they crack the game because the DRM is the only thing preventing that. My point is that painting everyone that pirates games with a broad brush is a surefire way to fail in addressing the issue.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Fritz?
Far better, anyway ;) And the old versions can be had for cheap...
The following WIKI page lists all of Ubisofts games, I challenge folks to find any great games that were released in the past year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ubisoft_games
I know that I didn't pick up Assassins Creed as I played it at a buddies house and was disappointed, Splinter Cell games bore the hell out of me, and honestly are frustrating at a lot of points. Brothers in Arms? no thanks. Far Cry 2? Well after the decision by the developers not to patch Crysis anymore I kind of stopped buying their games. . .
I mean seriously, there's a pile of cluster fucks in that list of games, the ones I mentioned were the "popular" games, but there's piles of shit in there.
Who the hell wants to play Caesar Milan's The Dog Whisperer? I mean. . . really? (okay maybe some people liked it, poor wretched souls they are)
Well there's a few reasons that the pirates and the sympathizers do their thing. Some people hate DRM, some people don't have cash, some people believe that they should be able to "try before they buy", and then some people just want shit for free. Unless you remove all DRM, and pretty much put games on the honor system in terms of paying for them, you will always have someone complaining because everyone has different expectations. Its not that they are hypocritical or shifting their stance, you are just coming into contact with different individuals with different motivations.
For me, the DRM argument makes a lot of sense, although its not really a reason to not buy the game as much as it is an argument to get a pirated copy. In other words, by removing the DRM, the pirates have actually improved the game. There's nothing keeping you from owning a legitimate copy and using the pirated version for convenience or for the safety of your computing environment. Of course, the reality of that situation is "why bother"? when it comes to buying the game, so there is a certain amount of idealism required for you to get a pirated copy and then go to the effort of buying an actual copy.
As for people with limited budgets, I think that piracy is a huge boon for game companies that make excellent games, and a disaster for companies who make substandard games. I remember having people bring in copies of Half-Life for us to play on the LAN or online. I didn't even own a PC at the time. Years later, I have bought HL1, HL2, the episodes and of course Portal with the Orange Box. Would I have bought those if I hadn't played HL1? Quite possibly, but at the same time, there was never any question that I would when they came out, because I knew HL1 and had played it. I knew it was a good game, and I knew I would have a better shot of getting a better game from the sequels than most.
I know piracy can result in lost sales, it only stands to reason that this is going to be true. However, the piracy and lost sales are not linked inextricably. Indeed, if developers play their cards right, and most importantly, make an excellent game with a lot of good will behind it, those pirate sites turn into distribution networks for getting their game into people's hands. From there, they may or may not gain sales, but the game now has a larger audience, and the bigger an audience, even a slight monetization of that edge (sequels, DLCs, server content) can turn a tidy profit.
There is no question that piracy is a risk for the software business that other industries don't have. You can't pirate a car, or a drug or your dinner. On the other hand, it also benefits from the same things that make piracy possible, notably a much smaller need to maintain tools and inventories in comparison to other industries that deal in non-software goods. Therefore, trying to treat software like it is a physical commodity is a misguided concept which has been inevitably put to the test by software piracy.
Ubisoft released a game called "Unreal" in 1990, which was unrelated to the Unreal series. The Unreal series was owned by Atari, until they were more recently bought by Midway.
Your sales are not down do to piracy, your service sucks, your servers are always down and your in-game networking is unstable in all games you've made since the by-out.
Put funding into development and stability and U will then see an increase of sales
Uploading it may be, downloading it likely isn't in most jurisdictions. Simply having a copy that you don't distribute certainly isn't.
The goalposts aren't being moved, there are simply as many goalposts as there are people and things to pirate.
For me, the general goalpost is that if the pirated version is superior, I'll pirate and more specifically to an item I have a price I'm willing to pay, and if the publisher doesn't want to take it on my terms it's not my problem.
The more difficult you make it to pay you, the less likely people are to do so.
If I want to pay for a new DS game, I have to drive to the store, browse through whatever they happen to stock, and pony up my $30.
Then I get a cartridge that I don't want, and I have to download the pirated version.
Nintendo makes little or nothing (or negative) from the basic hardware, and nothing from the Chinese factories that make the SD cartridges. Given that they're about $5, I doubt there's much profit even to them.
I suppose Kingston made some profit on the $20 8GB microSD card.
I *want* to pay for good games, but developers have to meet me part way if they want my money.
If you force me to pirate the game for functional reasons, you're eating into the goodwill that would otherwise get me to open my wallet and you're eroding my reason to buy. If I already have what I want, and you put up a roadblock to me giving you money in the first place, there's going to have to be a *lot* of goodwill for me to give you money anyway.
BTW, does Democracy work under wine yet? I *want* to buy your games...
Unreal was never touched by UbiSoft. Don't tarnish Unreal's image by trying to associate it with UbISoft. Also, Unreal had very little copy protection.
> The DS is unique in the fact that its going to be hard to truly emulate the experience of having a real DS on a computer.
I take it you've never heard of no$gba, then?
Granted, there are still many challenges (and more than a few bugs). Also, the paid version is much better because you don't have to adjust the save type for every single NDS game.
it has stronger DRM I think - is that so?
The immediate goal of the system described in the article is to reduce piracy. But ultimately, reducing piracy is a means to an end, namely return on investment. If making a game more attractive to legitimate customers has a better return on investment than intrusive DRM that turns off legitimate customers, why invest in the intrusive DRM?
But who would make that investment? Probably nobody.
Why? If there was a game I (and my friends) liked but to get it we had to buy a single copy, we would just split the costs and buy a single copy for all of us, then we would make copies for each of us. At least that is what we did before high speed internet became available (but after I bought a cd burner).
There's no point even thinking in those terms.
People will pirate simply to make sure there's an archival copy available, and there will always be people who's maximum price is lower than the one you set (and plenty with a maximum price of $0).
Why would you care at all about people who aren't willing to pay you? Worry about the people who would, but don't. Spend your anti-piracy efforts on reducing or eliminating the barriers to those people giving you money.
Dude you missed Splinter Cell 1 and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.
Chaos Theory is one of the greatest games ever.
The atmosphere and the coolness of stealthing people is great.
I still regularly play it with a friend co-op.
However it was had to crack. And there was no crack for ages (before you ask I bought a copy. One cool side effect is that when playing at a LAN you could start the game with the disc in the drive then once it was running press eject and start the game on the 2nd PC).
If they could bring back Conviction with the same atmosphere and coolness (Amon Tobin's soundtrack was exceptional) then I would buy it in a heartbeat.
And you don't have a Girlfriend because?? ....... LOL
Myst franchise, Rainbow Six franchise...
the bulk of the ds games that ubisoft puts out are the "imagine" series of games- that is imagine: figure skater, imagine: babysitter, imagine: makeup artist and all other types of drivel- they need to be happy that someone is even spending the 5 megs a pop to pirate these glorified flash games for 10 year old girls because they wouldn't sell too well in the first place....
put out better games and more people might pay for them
...each time whatever their gripe is (DRM, need disk to play, etc. etc.) is fixed they shift the goalposts...
That's what their major gripe is at any given time. Just because they're not actively complaining about, say, cd-keys at any given time doesn't mean that they don't mind them - it just means that they mind something else more.
The goalposts are pretty clear: the game companies have to deliver a product that is as good as that delivered by the pirates. And that's still a long way off.
If Ubisoft's logic's sound, then Microsoft should have died long long ago right? Every version of Windows got pirated up the yin yang but yet the company grows larger and larger.
.
Get a good business model, and make good games. Ignore the pirates and hug the peeps that buy your games. Whether Windows is "good" is another thread, but the plan worked!
.
In other news, the Soviet Russia announced today they are working on a nice anti-crime tool that should be ready by the end of 2009. The Motherland didn't offer any details about how it would be implemented.
Everything has an opportunity cost, including measures to prevent copyright infringement. If measures A, B, and C would improve a company's the bottom line measurably better than various measures to prevent copyright infringement, why do companies concentrate on measures to prevent copyright infringement rather than measures A, B, and C?
No, getting the game maybe is. Playing isn't.
I had heard that the new Prince of Persia was DRM-free. But I also had less-than-wonderful experiences with the two previous games in the series. Since I was on the fence about this game, I downloaded a torrent. Played it beginning to end, and it really is the best PoP game since Sands of Time. The copy that I bought online arrived today. Piracy helped to sell this game to me.
Now, if what Ubi is planning is some sort of Steam-like DRM system that requires me to ask permission to play a copy of a game that I own, I really don't care how good the game is (I'll play it anyway, on my terms), I'm not buying it. Hey, you know what, I'm not a huge fan of Valve, but I can't argue that The Orange Box is well worth the money... except that it's got Steam all over it. Good games, I did enjoy a once-through with them... and I'd like to go legit and give Gabe and friends some money for a real copy, but Steam is a deal breaker, sorry. The value proposition of DRM is this: you can either pay money, play the game, and not really own a copy, or you can not pay money, play the game, and not really own a copy. Why would anyone, from a pragmatic standpoint, choose the former? I only buy games that I know I can play 10 years down the line, off the CD, without having to resort to cracks. If I don't have that assurance, then there's really no point in owning a copy, it's just a few ounces of paper and plastic that costs $50.
If the goal of the publishers is to now rent their games to consumers, they should be looking at services like GameTap, GameFly, or any number of Asian business models. Not that I would necessarily subscribe to rental services like this, but at least the value proposition makes sense. $50 is a purchase price, not a rental price. If I can't play the game on my own schedule in the long-term, then all it really is is a rental, so a rental price is what I'd be willing to pay. If the publishers hope to rent out their games instead of selling them, they had better drop revenue projections by about 99%.