Slashdot Mirror
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?
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!
...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.
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.
Stealing a car is illegal, reading a game from an SD card is not.
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.
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.
Actually, the 1970s crap is much faster to input and eyeball-parse, and this is supposed to be a geek site, where people know about vi, perl and/or sed. Not to mention this is a text post.
It's like arguing against Chinese writing in China.
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?
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.
Their ability to force you to spend cash.
solution: put the "server" on a chip, inside the game cartridge :-)
They tried that in the Super NES era, with the "DSP" and "Super FX" and "SA-1" and "SDD-1" coprocessors. All ended up cracked.
That's the reason why I don't buy Ubisoft games anymore (and EA for that matter). They have a long track record of using various intrusive DRM layers. I want to play games without having to spend a lot of time getting rid of some stupid DRM that has infested my OS.
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.
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
Playing a game you've illegally downloaded is.
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.
Ended up cracked -years- later. After the SNES had ended its production run for the most part. Plus, back then to "pirate" a game you bought the game from some shady guy for $5, today that wouldn't fly, we want our games for free if we are going to pirate them. Today what people do is simply place them on a flash cart and go. 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. So all they need to do is release a chip with the games and stop most casual piracy. Will it be cracked? Of course, will it happen after the game is profitable, yes.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Or possibly they are just out of new, innovative, and fun ideas. Or that the economy is in the toilet and all businesses are suffering, especially the "luxury entertainment" sector.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Actually, bands (I manage a couple) make a hell of a lot more money by performing than they do by selling CDs which they get less than 10% of the take on. A band can play one show and earn (depending on venue and turnout) $150-$1000, plus whatever merch they manage to sell. To make say $500 on CD sales, they would need to sell about 500 CDs. So in that case, the pirates are absolutely right. You see, when a band plays live, they don't have to give 90% of the profits to their music label, they generally get to keep most of it (minus the manager's and the booker's cuts). Talk to any bands. They will be the first to tell you that they would rather have you come pay for a live show and download all their music free than to buy all of their CDs. Labels make money from selling CDs, bands make money by touring. How do you think the Ramones did it for over 20 years? It wasn't by getting airplay and selling CDs, it was by constant touring and selling T-shirts at shows.
"But this one goes to 11!"