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Future Ubisoft Games To Require Constant Internet Access
Following up on our discussion yesterday of annoying game distribution platforms, Ubisoft has announced the details of their Online Services Platform, which they will use to distribute and administer future PC game releases. The platform will require internet access in order to play installed games, saved games will be stored remotely, and the game you're playing will even pause and try to reconnect if your connection is lost during play. Quoting Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
"This seems like such a bizarre, bewildering backward step. Of course we haven't experienced it yet, but based on Ubi’s own description of the system so many concerns arise. Yes, certainly, most people have the internet all the time on their PCs. But not all people. So already a percentage of the audience is lost. Then comes those who own gaming laptops, who now will not be able to play games on trains, buses, in the park, or anywhere they may not be able to find a WiFi connection (something that’s rarely free in the UK, of course – fancy paying the £10/hour in the airport to play your Ubisoft game?). Then there's the day your internet is down, and the engineers can’t come out to fix it until tomorrow. No game for you. Or any of the dozens of other situations when the internet is not available to a player. But further, there are people who do not wish to let a publisher know their private gaming habits. People who do not wish to report in to a company they’ve no affiliation with, nor accountability to, whenever they play a game they’ve legally bought. People who don’t want their save data stored remotely. This new system renders all customers beholden to Ubisoft in perpetuity whenever they buy their games."
How can this even remotely be considered a good idea? I do understand the burning desire for customer dependency, demographic information and all that, but seriously...I'd be very irritated if I were in a tricky spot, my network dropped briefly, and the game responded in such a fashion. Probably irritated enough to return it, if I hadn't been aware of the issue beforehand.
I'm sure there are lots of people who don't have reasonably priced internet access all the time. For example, people who travel on business. It's a while since I did that, but I wouldn't fancy paying ten bucks a night extra just so I can play my games.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Geez, I thought Steam had shown the way and we'd got over this idea of needing a permenant internet connection for single player games. Obviously not then...
Pirated games are simply superior.
Pirated games treat me like admin of my own computer.
Legitimate game do not.
I really do not need any other reason to refuse to use anything but pirated games.
It is MY hardware, not ubisoft / Ea / etc
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
It's as though somebody managed to take everything that sucks about cloud computing and combine it with everything that sucks about local client computing.
All of the high system requirements and per-machine installation(and probably a dozen background processes and some kernel-mode driver that breaks your DVD drive) of a local application, combined with all the vendor lock-in, violation of First Sale, and high connectivity requirements and costs of a cloud app. Good work, guys.
I suggest a slogan. "Ubisoft: We make single-player games that require more internet access than Gmail, for fuck's sake."
This is either stupidity or an intentionally over the top "announcement" designed to soften people up so that when they release the actual platform people are relieved that it only phones home every hour instead of continuously.
Very few people are going to accept requiring 24/7 connectivity to play their games; given the number of times a day that I lose connection to Steam for a couple of minutes for whatever reason, if it had a system like this I'd never be able to play any of my games without interruption. And God help you if you're playing a multiplayer game and you lose connection to Ubisoft but not to the server you're playing on; forget blaming lag, you can just blame the fact that your game was paused for 30 seconds while it re-established a connection to Ubi.
Oh and we're sorry we deleted all your save games, but these things happen and the agreement you signed means we don't have any responsibility to protect your data while it's sitting on our servers. Again, Steam has it right here with their cloud settings, you *sync* the information with the local machine, you don't store it all remotely.
And who is "legally bound" to patch the games if Ubisoft ceased to exist?
But this won't stop piracy since only legit customers are going to be subject to this shafting.
I for one would prefer to wait for the cracked version to be made available over P2P. I have never pirated any game before, but if they do this I certainly won't be buying their locked-down version.
This isn't really about piracy though, it is about ownership - you don't own their game, you only rent it and they can kick you off whenerver they want and make you play the newer more expensive game... Well screw them!
I'm not the first to say this, and I certainly won't be the last, but this sort of copy protection nonsense is just another reason I'll be cracking games that I've paid for. Services constantly running on your computer are not acceptable. Punishing people who give you money because not everyone who plays your game gives you money is not acceptable. It's not as though there will ever be a magical, uncrackable copy protection system. Furthermore, this will push some people who would have actually bought the game to download a pirated version instead.
That'll keep those damn crackers away from your profit margins!
I sometimes wonder if the major publishers Technical Advisor for content protection is actually just a guy with a speaking ET toy.
"Phoooone hoooooome."
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
It's impossible to stop piracy. Why are you still trying? Do you think the third world will pay double, triple or quadruple to play WoW or anything? If it's not fair, then people will find a way to make it fair like it or not.
I blame this ridiculous "Cloud computing" craze. If it worked poorly in the 60s, why in the hell would we want to go back to it? The move towards thick clients is the only reason all the security breaches and viruses haven't been as bad as they could have. Storing all your eggs in one basket is just a stupid, stupid idea given the current situation of the world today.
Oh, and no more Ubisoft games for me. I don't support stupid ideas.
Or, if 80-90% of your potential customers are willing to expend the effort of piracy rather than purchase your product, perhaps your product is overpriced. You may not feel it is. You may feel entitled to greater pay for your work. The market cares not.
Actually, since the save games are stored remotely, it's going to require way more elaborate hacks to get these running offline. I have full confidence that it will be done, but at the very least, it's going to give games a launch window that is free of piracy.
On the other hand, this pretty much guarantees that I'll never buy another Ubisoft PC game again. While I am usually hooked to the net, it's kind of flakey at times and I hate the idea of not being able to back up my save games or play on my laptop, which usually isn't connected to the net to save battery power.
Congratulations, Ubi... You've lost yet another customer.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
To Not Appear In My Home. :(
Like I noted, this system has some parts of the code (savegames, possible game objects, etc) and requires ubisoft account login to play. It will require complete rewrite of those missing parts into the game and creating local equivalents to them. And no, you don't get to use c++ for this; you do it in assembly. That is a lot harder than merely removing protection. It will either take months to code those parts or it wont happen at all. Even if there becomes some version available many months later on some of the biggest titles, most sales will happen on the first months from release.
System like this actually has quite good changes in stopping piracy, unlike the previous ones.
Screw that. I'm not buying any game that requires a connection for single player.
But, of course, if enough people think like me, and sales go down, that'll be blamed on "piracy" as well.
Seriously, take a stand. If it works for them then all other publishers will do the same. Stop buying their games _now_.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
What if Ubisoft decides not run these online services in the future? Will my game stop working?
Ubisoft is committed to being a forerunner in providing new exciting online service. If any service is stopped, we will create a patch for the game so that the core game play will not be affected.
So will RELOADED.
I refuse to use
Now you will have even more people pirating your games because they will be bothered by your antipiracy measures, even though they bought titles legally.
Just like everyone who buys legal dvd needs to watch fbi warning, despite the fact he didn't do anything bad. That's ingenious.
Why don't they just use the old "dongle" approach?
If part of the game is inside a usb-stick, with some added cryptography to spice it up a little, it can be just as safe.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
It seems to me, that some big shot looked at Steam's success story, decided "hey, we can cut out the middle man (Steam), place even more draconian restrictions on gameplay and make more money!" without considering any of the real issues involved.
The corner of a round room
If these pirating customers can be converted into paying customers, it's possible the price goes down for everyone.
The market doesn't need to care. But then they shouldn't pirate it either. That's not an answer to an overpriced product, the answer is to play some other game or use some other product.
As a long term PC gamer and both purchaser and pirater of said games, I have to say that Steam has pretty much single-handedly ended the pirate side of my gaming experience. While I will still occasionally give in and download pirated copies of games where they're available in advance of the official release, I still end up buying them (and usually pre-ordering them).
Over christmas, during Steam's insanely cheap sale, I must have spent close to £100 on all kind of games that I probably would never have played otherwise - frankly, for £3 or £4 even if you only play the game once you haven't really lost anything. I know Steam has its issues (Most notably the first sale ones), but I also think it's the way forward for games distribution in that it's very relaxed about how, when and where you play your games. I can install Steam anywhere at any time, download any of my games and play them without worrying about having discs or activiation limits (with the exception of a few retarded publishers who still insist on SecuRom or Games For Windows Live on their Steam distributed games) and if you plan ahead, you don't need an internet connection either.
I know others will inevitably try and emulate Steam, but if they do it in stupidly restrictive ways, like Ubi appear to be doing, they're only going to succeed in failing and they'll have nobody to blame but themselves (although they'll obviously try and place all the blame on the pirates).
I hope they will put this requirement clearly on the boxes of any DVD/CD media, so I can avoid them.
Yes, I'm one of those people who still prefer to buy games as dvd/cd, mainly because I want to avoid giving out credit card/PayPal information, when I do not have to.
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!
I honestly don't think that too many users will care. We here on slashdot obviously do, but we're minority.
...when my connection is down.
When I have the net, I usually surf the net. My connection isn't very good. I get outages once-twice a week. This is when I launch a game. I have the content offline, and I don't need the connection to enjoy it.
I'm not concerned with Ubisoft's move. I'll just make sure never to buy their originals. I'm pretty sure the cracks will remove the necessity for network connection. OTOH, I will keep purchasing games that don't require network connection to run.
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Let's see...
Legally bought: can only play it at home or wherever I manage to find a free and reliable internet connection that does not suck (which is a minority of them)
Cracked: can play it at home, in the backseat of a car, on the bus, on the train, on the plane, in the park, at the airport, ANYWHERE.
And the best part is that the cracked version is free! Why waste money on an inferior product, then?
The only downside is that the cracked version is only released about a week after the official version.
QFT
What if I want to play on a laptop on the go? What if my internet connection is down? What if I don't have/want an internet connection?
So they're doing this because of pirated games. Right... You know, they're just legitimizing cracking their own games. Unless the actual game is HOSTED on their servers, just using the net to substitute the countless "CD protection" methods is pretty damn lame.
Another thing, just while I'm at it. I think a better option than locking people down using a multitude of creative methods - make them want to pay for stuff. MMOGs have accomplished that. I spent at least 15-25 USD a month for the last 2-3 years on those.
Ubisoft, wtf?
o hai
I think the article missed one of the possible sources of annoyance, in that the games will not only need an active connection to the interwebs on your side, but also a listening Ubisoft server on the other side. What happens if Ubisoft's servers don't run, or happen to "not find" a savegame, or it gets corrupted or anything? Can we then blame Ubisoft and demand reparation? This strikes as such a bad idea on so many levels that it's hard to believe any company would go down that path. So, no more Ubisoft games for me, I suppose. (Oh, wait, the last PC game I bought must be at least 5 years old, and I much prefer playing table-top games (you know, the ones with social gaming built-in right from the start? ;-) ), or console stuff if it "has" to be electronic, so I guess I shouldn't feel concerned too much :-) )
I think this can be blamed for the rampant PC game piracy (almost 80-90%) somewhat.
FTFY
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
i am all for the big players moving to the consoles if the pc market is too hard for them. By their attempts to gain total control they will destroy all benefits of pc gaming - mods, user created content, ease of multiplaying on lan, dedicated servers and what not.
music industry behemots had to admit that unrestricted product sells better, it's time for the game industry to do the same. I see paying for digital stuff as an absolutely voluntary act of rewarding creators' efforts in case their product is excellent. Paying in advance is asking to be scammed with the worthless piece of shit. No amount of drm would force me to pay if i didn't like what i saw.
Blizzard was an exception in my case, i bought almost every game up to 1st WoW. I knew they attract players with the quality alone because their copy protection was trivial to circumvent and yet millions were willing to pay - unfortunately they chose the same path of tightening the grip in case of upcoming Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, removing offline lan, requiring internet during install even when there is no multiplayer available without their servers (single player will be hacked in 1 day either way).
1) The figure of 80-90% piracy is generated by the industry, and since it is largely unmeasurable it is an estimate (i.e. made up) I suspect no-one has any real idea how much is pirated
2) This is yet another layer of security, that the pirates will get round, and make easy for any one who wants to to get round
3) The only people this will annoy is the legitimate paying customers..... however many are left
This and similar anti-piracy schemes are why I stopped buying games (and playing them), it took too much effort to get the game working so I gave up, many people gave up and got the pirated version with all this stuff stripped out which meant that it "just worked" ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
I think the rampant PC game piracy (almost 80-90%) can be blamed for this somewhat.
Source? The recently released Call of Duty MW2 sold 15 million units. If that figure represents only 10% of the copies in existence, with the other 90% being pirated and not counted as sales, that means there are 150 million people playing the game. I'm convinced that the video game market is expanding, and will have increased social acceptance in the future, but I'm finding 150 million people a bit hard to believe. Furthermore, the same has sold more copies than it's predecessor, which only sold approx 14 million copies. More people are buying games.
Infinity Ward certainly doesn't seem to be suffering from rampant piracy. Perhaps people aren't buying Ubisoft's games not so they can pirate them, but because their products suck and treat customers like slaves.
I'm sure they'll whip out quick patches, just like they have promised to fix bugs in current games but never do (ex: Far Cry 2)
The ex-directors of the company can still be sued.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
A while ago I decided that I'll switch to PC only gaming.
This was for one reason: I will always be able to play the games I own.
Consoles break, hardware can become irreplaceable, chips can burn out, backup batteries die, ROMs have questionable copyright.
But PC's will be forever.
I can even play some older games on QEMU right now. In 50 years I will be able to play today's games on an emulated system with an emulated GPU & CPU.
Many (if not most) of today's games have the multi-player component as a critical part of game-play. Playing them on a non-networked computer would be virtually pointless. The benefit of this setup is that I could go to an internet cafe, a friends house or work and start up a game, while being in exactly the same place in the game as at home. But haven't some games had that ability for many years?
Either way, without stand-alone gameplay - I'm not interested. I want to make sure that someday (in the far future) I will be able to play the games I play today with my great-grand-kids, instead of receiving a message like "Sorry, Can't connect to server", "ipv9 not supported", or "Gameplay not available, server offline since 2011".
"If any service is stopped, we will create a patch for the game so that the core game play will not be affected."
If Ubisoft can create an "offline" patch, then so can crackers, and I'll bet they do a better job of it too.
This is *exactly* the line of bullshit that made me buy a console. There is simply less of it there for now: compare GTA IV on PC and Xbox 360. PC is just a stupid situation. So, already bonehead decisions by stupid out-of-touch executives have already stopped me from purchasing PC games. Please don't extend that to the consoles because then I'd have to stop purchasing games altogether. Notice I said purchasing, I'm sure there will be versions available that aren't stupid. Way to go Ubisoft: you just connected yourself with "bullshit" in *my* mind, so *my* money is forever out of your grasp until you become less stupid.
Shh.
My dartboard/shuriken target needs a new hate-face. Does anyone have a decent photo of Ubisoft's current CEO? Preferably smiling slimily but grinning inanely will also do. Must be headshot sized.
Remember when Amiga died in large part due to piracy, and all the gaming moved to PC?
Do you believe consoles won't become the next piracy wars platform once PC is out of the equation?
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The game sold 15 millions units overall, not just on PC. It probably sold more on 360+PS3 than on PC. And with MW2 the multiplayer aspect is a big part, which requires pirates to buy it too to play online.
Ubisoft can kiss any ideas about tapping into the african market goodbye.. South Africa, which has one of the more "advanced" telecommunication networks in Africa has less than 10% of its population on Internet, and most of those are dial-ups. The rest of Africa is so far in the dark that the countries finally embracing the world of Internet are bypassing fixed lines and going straight for cellphones.. I can hardly see them jumping on this idea soon.. Long story short : Permanent internet requirement == no 3rd World users
So Ubisoft is going mandate ridiculous DRM measures. Ubisoft. This is the company/publisher who, as far as I can tell, has barely produced one game that didn't suck in a long time. And that's just because compared to Assassin's Creed 1, it'd be hard for 2 not to look good. Yeah. So long Ubisoft, I can't say it was fun.
Maybe this is a good thing, though. Someone like Blizzard doing this would have people grumbling and moaning and everyone would still put up with it because they need their WoW or Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2 or whatever. If someone like Ubisoft does it, and it's just one more reason for people not to buy their crap, and they go under, maybe it will make other companies think twice before trying similar stupidity. Maybe.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Great to see that Ubisoft continues the time honoured tradition of screwing over the actual customers. Who ever thought they could make a system even more obnoxious than the code wheel? I'm not going to ask for permission to play my games so blow it out your posterior Ubisoft.
Yes, internet connections sometimes go down. Yes, some people have gaming laptops.
Ubisoft know this. They know a portion of their player base doesn't have always on internet. They have market research people who determine how much this is going to cost them. They already know and have decided the benefits are greater than the cost.
Game review websites and magazines ought to unite on this issue and give games failing scores if they do not allow for offline play when in self-contained single player mode.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Like I noted, this system has some parts of the code (savegames, possible game objects, etc) and requires ubisoft account login to play. It will require complete rewrite of those missing parts into the game and creating local equivalents to them. And no, you don't get to use c++ for this; you do it in assembly.
At first glance that is totally the wrong way to go. Rather than writing new routines for the games in assembly, you write an emulator for evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com in a modern interpreted language and add a line to your hosts file to point to 127.0.0.1. A modern interpreted language is way faster to develop for, and if it runs slow, who cares you've got 100s of ms of "internet" latency to work around. I imagine there'll be a CPAN perl module for this within perhaps a week of the release.
They could try to crypto sign the traffic between evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com and the game. Now, the crypto auth part of the game executable is where you go back to the old skool tradition of binary patching machine language branches into jumps and nops.
Bonus is you can use the evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com emulator for presumably all their games not just one, plus you can trivially integrate in a nice savegame editor, savegame backup system, etc.
This all seems terribly obvious to me, ergo I must be caffeine deficient at this early hour. All I'm really seeing is UBI wasting a lot of money to lose sales without affecting piracy? And they're creating yet another "big content" ecosystem where yet again, the "pirated" product actually provides a better end user experience than the "pay" product, aside from economic costs? Since this will tank UBI, I'm not predicting other marketing conglomerates copying UBIs idea, other than the usual tongue in cheek "I strongly encourage my competitors to also shoot themselves in their feet".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Its actually not as hard as you might think.
The easiest way to do this is to write an app that intercepts connections to the server and just responds to them the same as the server does. I expect they will be using encryption and things(but the encryption can be figured out through disassembly) but it's certainly not as hard as finding unused areas of the PE and compiling in these features directly into the executable.
The profit margins could be really improved if it was impossible to pirate games, resulting in better and more games.
There's virtually no piracy in the PS3 platform. Do we really have better and more games for PS3? There's more indie games for PS3? I don't think so...
And what about price? In my country, PS3 games are almost 2x more expensive than Wii or PC games.
I think the logic here must be the inverse. Make more, better and cheaper games, and piracy will be weakened.
Ah ninja'd with a much superior sibling post.
That figure ($15M) is for all the versions of MW2. The PC version only accounts for a very small portion of that. The Xbox version sold 9 million units, the PS3 version 6 million and the rest is the PC version...
Mada mada dane.
I own at least 1 game from Ubisoft: Chessmaster X. And it came with the annoying "feature" of having to insert the game CD each time you wanted to play (online or offline). In addition to this, it had the typical activation code (to play on-line).
They realized this measure was stupid because they launched (months after) a patch which disabled this protecction measure.
May be it is reasonable to require any sort of on-line checking, when you are trying to play on-line (e.g. CS or Quake-like shooter game). But it's absurd if the game may be intended to play off-line (imagine you just want to analyze a chess game).
Anyway. People would avoid all the cumbersome cracks (and associated viruses and trojans), if they had the chance to get their games (or software) for a reasonable price. More in the case of games, where a great part of user base is made of young people with a reduced budget.
Most current intellectual property "defenders" start from a false premise: people would buy your product if they could not get it for free. In that case, it is obvious that people would consume less products (and therefore authors would get less money either way).
What most current intellectual property "defenders" are trying to do, is making of the "intellectual property rights" a business on itself, and trying to milk the inviting Internet "cow".
Yet another example of a company attempting to make life difficult for pirates but managing only to annoy and inconvenience legitimate users. People who actually buy the game are going to be faced with restrictions that will, at some point, hinder their ability to use the copy of the game they legally bought while pirates will find a way to crack the system in less than a week and will then be able to use their ill-gotten goods the way they want.
I understand major media companies consider piracy to be a major problem. I understand we're not likely to ever change that opinion. But. It would be nice if they got everything in perspective and realized that they should not hinder legitimate customers in their war against pirates. All that will do is either drive those legitimate customers away or, worse, turn them in to pirates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft#Controversies
- use of the StarForce copy protection
- ceased to provide his games to a magazine that had negative reviews of their games
- admit to release low quality games that need additional promotion to be sold
im not going to buy a game if i need to connected to the net an absolute rubbish idea, unless im playing multiplayer of course :)
Or, if 80-90% of your potential customers are willing to expend the effort of piracy rather than purchase your product
Because the pirated version is BETTER because it doesn't have all the copy protection in the way of the game experience. Gaming is getting pretty weird psychologically, one minute you're having a blast playing something scientifically designed to be fun because you paid money and the game designers love you, next minute you're suffering through copy protection because the game designers hate the folks whom pay them money. Makes you wonder about the average non-pirate gamers sex life (if any)
perhaps your product is overpriced. You may not feel it is. You may feel entitled to greater pay for your work. The market cares not.
The stereotypical $1000 video card gamer doesn't care about the game price. Looking at the economics of it, I don't think price is why pirates pirate. Now cellphone gamers, they have a reasonable economic reason to pirate because cell phones are cheap. I've never pirated a game that doesn't have copy protection / CD checks / printed manual questions / etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Blame *greed*.
Linking to an article that that quotes the same made up number without any backing doesn't add anything except more FUD.
I think the rampant PC game piracy (almost 80-90%) can be blamed for this somewhat.
No, the idea that piracy matters is to blame for this. Caring about piracy is bad business. Two things matter when designing a good business plan:
The entire purpose of your sales and marketing strategy is to move people from the second category into the first. Some pirates are in a third category: people who definitely won't buy your product. Any money spent on this market segment is wasted. If they won't buy your product whatever you do, then it doesn't matter if they pirate it or just go without. It's frustrating, but that's an emotional issue and basing corporate decisions on emotions is rarely a good idea.
Some of the pirates are in the category of people who might buy your product. How do you turn them into people who will buy your product? There are several ways, but making your product worse, and making it comparatively worse than the pirated version, are not on the list. And yet, for some reason, they are the two strategies that most people involved in The War on Piracy seem to be choosing. Oddly enough, they are having about as much success as their counterparts in the wars on terror and drugs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Blame piracy? I blame greed. Piracy is being used as an EXCUSE for what will certainly be a massive data mining effort which Ubisoft will sell either themselves or to third parties.
The only people punished by draconian schemes like this are legitimate customers. The game will be cracked and the "feature" bypassed probably before it reaches retail, so the argument that this and other DRM schemes will stop piracy is moot.
Definitely won't be buying Ubisoft in the future.
Corporatism != Free Market
They're the ones using it.
They did create some very good games, but I'm not buying anything with SecuROM in it, no matter how good the game. Now they want to add 'needs permanent net access'? If I wasn't already blocking them on my shopping list, I'd be doing it now...l
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Um, no, I don't. I remember when the Amiga died in large part due to mismanagement by Commodore. Did it die more than once? 'Cause I totally missed the piracy death.
Remember when the Apple ][ died in large part due to piracy? No? There was at least as much game piracy on that platform. Maybe piracy isn't a big contributing factor.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
of ubisoft games.
Let n = required access to internet (so constant access = n->infiniti)
f(n) = 1/((e^n)^n)
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
Why is Ubisoft forcing their loyal customers to sign up for a Ubisoft account when they don't want to give their private data and only play single player games?
We hope that customers will feel as we do, that signing up for an account will offer them exceptional gameplay and services that are not available otherwise.
"services not available otherwise"
Yes, I'm sure customers will feel that.
(just like jumping onto a bike without a seat)
The profit margins could be really improved if it was impossible to pirate games, resulting in better and more games.
Such wishful thinking. The industry has consolidated the point that nothing will shake up the way games are currently made unless the big players collapse.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Hoist the black and white flag matey! Argh.
There are other ways to prevent software piracy without requiring constant internet access. Look up "Software Piracy" at the patent application section of the patent office. I have at least one proposal of my own. There are others. For one thing, having to go on line prevents parents with multiple children from enjoying multi-computer games with them. Allowing Big Brother to monitor what parents are doing with their children, or allowing what their children do, cannot be the right way to do this.
The easiest way to do this is to write an app that intercepts connections to the server and just responds to them the same as the server does.
And the funniest part is the UBI guys have to write and build a server farm to scale to "millions of users" and instant response to keep total system latency down and interoperate with multiple versions of multiple games. However, the pirates only have to scale to a whopping one user and since it's local there is no transmission latency so there is plenty of time for slow simple unoptimized code, and only interoperate with the one version of one game that its distributed with... Also the UBI guys are small in number to develop their complicated proprietary server compared to the resources of the whole pirate community sharing a semi-openly developed server emulator.
Epic fail for UBI.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If you want to take a stand, simply do not buy their games. Boycotts never work unfortunately, but all you can do to hurt them, is not give them your money.
I expect this will just lead to massive pirating of Ubisoft games. Of course... I've never owned a Ubisoft game because most of them are garbage anyways.
Steam is very nice, and they have great deals etc. I find Steam to be the best compromise we the gamer can possibly put up with.
I hope Steam does not change.
The game sold 15 millions units overall, not just on PC. It probably sold more on 360+PS3 than on PC.
You do appear to be correct on the breakup of sales figures. If you believe Torrentfreak's numbers, you might be right on the piracy stats as well. The piracy figures for the x360 version are also quite interesting, but of course you run the risk of getting banned by MS.
So I do concede that you may in fact be correct on 80-90% figure, although I still argue that Ubisoft isn't helping matters any. I just have a thing about verifiable sources ;) .
I literally don't want just these publisher's games cracked and released to the masses but I want these companies to suffer and go out of business entirely.
I wonder if their Bankruptcy game will be realistic.
I never really played much if any of Ubisoft's games. That being said, if other game companies follow through with more crazy design ideas like that I'm just going to toss out Windows gaming all together from my list of things to do. These days people aren't building games that are worth all that hassle. Hell between Wine + older games that don't work on Win7 and the game selection in Ubuntu's software manager I can get enough games to keep me occupied.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
There's no guarantee a pirate would buy a game if he couldn't pirate the game in the first place. You have no real data to back up your claims. It's all just misguided speculation based on preconceived notions of the effect of piracy on the game industry.
I think maybe piracy is perhaps one of the reasons for the huge quantity of web-based flash games around. It's probably just so much easier to generate a revenue stream, not to mention it's easy to wing adverts on to flash game sites.
It's unfortunate I feel since flash games are not so bad but I'd rather play a decent highly graphical game that takes full advantage of my hardware, rather than running in javascript in a browser window...
Someone somewhere else in this page suggests that anyone who feels that a game is overpriced, the ethical stance is simply to not play it, rather than download it, and in theory I agree with that. There again, I feel such a position is a little like espousing communism. The 'tragedy of the commons' tends to win out I feel. If you're the only person not downloading, only you are missing out, and it's not like your money, on its own, is going to be the difference between a games company living and dying.
So the end result is lots of flash games, Facebook games, and MMOGs. Which are cool, but still, I really enjoyed for example "The World Ends with You", admittedly not a PC game, but nevertheless a standalone game; and I feel it would be a shame if such games are not created in the future.
If there is some way to make it possible for companies to make money from non-mmog, non-flash games, I feel that is good for the variety of games.
There again, as someone in this story has pointed out, Ubisoft has committed to provide a patch if and when they shut down the online servers for a game. If Ubisoft can create such a patch, surely pirates can create a very similar patch rather more pre-emptively?
Carmel recounted seeing torrents with upwards of "500 seeders and 300 leechers" and receiving emails from some who bought the title after pirating it, but flat-out said that "the piracy rate was about 90" percent. "We're doing ok, though," Carmel said in stride. "We're getting good sales through WiiWare, Steam, and our website. Not going bankrupt just yet."
Seems to be they don't mind too much and openly admit that piracy makes up a portion of the people who eventually bought the game. I still don't see how they can come up with this rate of 90%, it has to be an estimate there is no way to 100% know how many pirated copies are out there or being played. People could be downloading the game to try it and saying Not for me, others go out and but it. I'd bet the way they come up with 90% is by saying "Ok, we should sell 10000 copies of the game", then X time frame later they say we only sold 1000 copies, there must be 9000 pirated copies out there that's a 90% piracy rate.
You are so incredibly delusional. What makes you think pirates would actually buy the game if they couldn't pirate it? People don't have infinite amounts of money. Why do you think piracy is so rampant in China? People don't legitimately have any money to spend. They can't justify spending money on entertainment when they have to feed their families.
Piracy is a fact of life on the PC. If crackers can (and do) strip out copy protection mechanism they can (and will) strip out continuous online verification. The best way for a manufacturer to maximize number of legal copies is to make games affordable, to offer great support (patches, new features etc.), to build up an online community, provide a compelling multiplayer (where possible) or online features like leaderboards, trophies etc. Notice that many of these things are online anyway which means they can run verification checks when the user utilizes them rather than pissing off the user by requiring constant network connectivity.
What are you talking about? Cell phones that can play reasonable games are expensive as all heck. More than any netbook, that's for sure. The high price is exactly why pirates pirate. They just don't have the money for all those games. You think someone with hundreds of gigabytes of songs would have really bought all those songs if he couldn't pirate? Or a person with 2 TB of games would actually purchase all those games if he couldn't pirate?
A week ago, I nearly picked up a copy of CitiesXL, being a big fan of Sim-City type games. I decided not to, and to read a few **USER** reviews first (don't get me started on professional games reviews). Definitely was a good move.
The game includes an subscription model if you want to play online, along with a free standalone mode. Unfortunately, certain vital elements such as public transport are not available to non-subscribers, meaning your £30 game is next to useless unless you want to subscribe. To me, that is just appalling.
I'm not against subscription gaming WOW-style where what you're buying is known from the off. But tricking people into buying a subscription game when they think they're buying a full-price standalone game is blantantly dishonest. Very few user reviews gave the game more than 1 out of 10 (or whatever the lowest possible score was).
Yeah, because paying lawyers to sue a bankrupt corporation because my video game quit working is a totally viable option that fixes the issue at hand.
The plural of anecdote is not data ...
"...500 seeders and 300 leechers..." this means that the majority of people who wanted it already have it (seeders > leechers) and that only accounts for 800 copies ...If this is 9 times the copies sold then the top games list is really really odd ...
How are they deriving the 90% figure, from looking at torrent sites occasionally? ...this is a meaningless snapshot, it does not include many copies and includes copies that may never be played?
It does not mean that these are people who actually want the game (Just hosting)
It does not mean that these are people who would consider buying it
It does not mean that these are people who have not already bought it for one platform and are pirating it for a second one
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Bullshit, you do it in python, write your own local http server doing it, and then make the game access that one.
"Crack" => make sure that either the URL is changed or that the access is redirected at the OS level. Should they decide to do https, and check certificates, well, then you need to patch the certificate too.
In some ways it makes the "crack" harder because you need to implement and provide services to the game, OTOH, the binary level patching gets easier.
yacc
Stereotypes are usually wrong. This would be one of the cases.
Dilbert RSS feed
/signed
Unlike every other form of DRM, steam actually offers me useful features as part of the compromise.
"His name was James Damore."
... I can summarize the comments here rather succinctly. Fuck Ubisoft and fuck their games.
Well, initially I thought that sucked, and then it occurred to me that 10% of all downloads being remunerated downloads is actually pretty decent I feel.
World of Goo got excellent marketing exposure I feel, it's very well known. The total number of downloads must be massive, so 10% of that is probably pretty decent.
Would World of Goo have got so much exposure if it hadn't been downloaded by many for free? Difficult to quantify...
To reiterate my original point: 10% of all World of Goo downloads being remunerated is I feel probably quite decent numbers. Are there many people on Slashdot who have *not* played World of Goo?
It doesn't *have* to be assembly. For instance, you can do runtime patching with python:
http://www.google.com/search?q=adder-0.3.3-win32.zip
The first link is the most interesting one:
http://marc.info/?l=bugtraq&m=108077268919124&w=2
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Well, I know many non-geeks that play in their beefy laptops (they don't have desktops) outside their homes (school, vacations, etc). They will care.
Dilbert RSS feed
So we go from the current situation:
Sales: x units.
Piracy: 4x units.
And instead we have:
Sales: 0.0000000000001x[1] units.
Piracy: 0 units.
The words "Pyrrhic" and "victory" spring to mind.
[1] I'm sure somebody, somewhere, will buy it - if only by mistake.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well no doubt about, the pirated versions of ubi games will be ridiculously superior to the actually buying the game from ubi
However, i don't really like to download pirated software for security reasons, so I guess I'll just NEVER AGAIN BUY AN UBI SOFT GAME.
Between the choice of paying ubi to screw me and not playing their games, it's a no-brainer decision.
Have a look at this for an interesting view of the same game.
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
There will always be people who are time-rich and cash-poor and these people will always go out of their way to get something for nothing because it only costs them the resource they have in abundance. Then there are people who are cash-rich and time-poor, this is the end of the market games companies should target. Just accept the people with too much time on their hands who couldn't afford your game even if they couldn't pirate it are not and never will be your customers, but if you stop treating everyone so badly they could be your advertisers. Meanwhile people with jobs and families pay money because they don't want to dick around with config files and server connections and copy protection just to play a game, do not punish these people for trying to hand over their money in return for your product. The only thing driving the anti-piracy movement is greed, they see raw figures and they want a slice of a pie that likely just doesn't exist.
If you Ignore that Commodore mismanaged it.
Also Ignore the IBM-PC clones dropped the price of a PC to lower than an Amiga.
Even the loathed PC-jr was cheaper and had more business software available for it.
The number of dealers to go and buy an Amiga from were very low. Even if you wanted to have them in your business it was easier to get a IBM or apple.
So if the 5% effect of Piracy killed the Amiga, you stacked it on the top of the list and pointed at it as the cause......
Yeah, piracy killed the amiga....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> and It's only going to get worse.
IMO, it will eventually stabilize at a the point where competition from other types of entertainment is making the game maker lose money. I hope it won't take them too long to figure this out (as opposed to approaching Congress to get some kind of kick-backs because of "revenues lost to piracy").
If technological progress will make it less capital intensive to produce professional games, one can hope that there will be rogue game production companies who produce games with less onerous DRM.
Which other retailers use the RRP? NOBODY. Other retailers typically discount by 20-40%. Thus a game selling on Steam costs 50 when it can be had, including P&P for possibly 30 from Play.com. Even bricks and mortar stores are typically cheaper than Steam.
Around about now somebody is usually thinking "the publishers set the prices not Steam". Except of course even Valve's own games are cheaper to purchase in a physical format than they are from Steam. Left 4 Dead 2 costs 35 on Play.com and 49.99 on Steam. A physical game that had to be manufactured, packaged with a printed manual, shipped, sent to a wholesaler, then a retailer, all of whom took their cut still worked out 30% cheaper than the download.
If the likes of Steam is the solution to piracy, one has to wonder why prices are not lower than physical rather than grossly higher. Even during a "sale" you still have to look closely at the prices since they're often no better and sometimes still worse than physical.
One more lost...and maybe I won't buy anymore Ubisoft games for PS3 as well...
I concur with your analysis. I was thinking of exactly the same methodology.
I suppose the issue with DRM, the reason it gets included anyway is some combination of:
- there are no obvious figures for or against DRM
- in the absence of doubt, probably 'no-one ever got fired for adding DRM to their product'
From the point of view of the product manager, probably it's not his/her money being spent on the DRM, and if he/she doesn't do it and then there's lots of piracy, it's difficult to justify to management. If they implement DRM, and there's lots of piracy, they can just say 'See! If we hadn't added drm there'd be *even more* piracy!'
Ultimately it does seem a bit of a gun meets foot exercise though. A little like those annoying trailers on purchased videos telling you why you shouldn't view pirated videos...
Perhaps the only way to solve the problem would be to do some controlled experiments on this. Maybe a project for some phd sociologists?
Maybe one could study the release of two games, one in English and one in French, for example: ... then compare sales, between games, and between languages.
- in the first game, one releases it with DRM in English, and without DRM in French
- the other game is released without DRM in the English version, and with DRM in the French version
If one did this experiment enough times, the results might start to be statistically significant.
I'm one of the people who are actually a "useful, contributing part of society" by your metric, I buy maybe two, sometimes three games a month (I don't have as much free time to play as I'd like or it would be more), yet I was forced to abandon the PC as a platform for gaming because so many games just wouldn't work, the copy protection would stop them loading or crash at some random point during the game, or some combination of drivers/config settings would have the same result. When it takes as much time to set up and legitimately play a game as it does to pirate and play (not to mention the games that just wouldn't work at all due to copy protection that probably would have worked had I gone down the pirate route) then things have just gone too far. I do not have time, I have money, that's why I am PAYING for this product, don't make me jump through fifty hoops first.
In the end, after two weeks of trying to get Oblivion to run on my system, chasing up every possible lead on obscure forums, installing and removing patches, even wiping my OS and starting from scratch I went out and bought a 360 and I've had no problems of this kind since. I guess, ultimately, that's what the game companies would prefer - developing for a closed system is much easier for them so they're happy to see the PC market shrink so long as those customers are migrating to other systems they develop for, but make no mistake, if PC gaming dies it won't be due to piracy (which has always existed since PC year zero), it will be due to idiocy and greed on behalf of the people making the games.
Wow, Ubisoft is really a visionary company! They make decisions that would make sense 20 years from now, as far as Internet connection availability is concerned....
The more annoying the copy protection, the faster it gets hacked. Now I'm not going to start the whole "piracy" argument (I am sure it has begun already). I will merely state that even owners of legitimate copies will be downloading the "crack" to remove this feature.
I can't see any possible way how this would boost sales, however. Before you used to have to look very hard to find these things. Today everyone knows where to get the cracks (and the whole program) instantly (ok so it takes a while to download 7GB). In fact the single biggest factor affecting sales will probably be whether the pirates only distribute the crack bundled with the program only, or stand alone.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The funny part is I preordered World of Goo from them specifically because it was basically real time bridge builder and they didn't include any of the DRM BS present in most titles.
As for them pulling the number out of their ass, the game does phone home in response to a certain feature being used: There's a sort of freeform "tower building" mode that uses the gooballs you saved in the normal levels, and it phones home to do a sort of automatic scoreboard (It puts markers from other users near your height on signs in the air near your tower). So they could look at the disparity between the number of sales and the number of names on the scorechart and get a vague estimate.
You make a good point but I think the way to go to battle piracy is with the lenslok. Due to manufacturing difficulties and crappy games it never really got a chance to shine. UBI can take rise to the challenge.
Behold: Lenslok http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok
Absolutely the truth!!!!
I bought Far Cry 2 for PS3 because of reviews and ads, but then after 5 minutes I remove the BD from PS3 and put it into its own cover. Since then I lent the game to my friend, and he returned it immediatly.
If only I could have had it pirated, I'd tried it and then not buy!!! Instead my GF spent 35 GBP on it!!!
Arrggghhhhh!!!!
Um, no, I don't. I remember when the Amiga died in large part due to mismanagement by Commodore. Did it die more than once? 'Cause I totally missed the piracy death.
Not to mention the lack of a real upgrade path at a time when upgradable computers were starting to take off (buy a new computer every 18 months just to keep up? No thanks...) and cheap consoles quickly surpassed the quality of the games while adding the convenience and "cool" qualities of a non-computer form factor.
I mean that from 2 points-of-view: 1. Goodbye from me as a paying customer, you will never get me to buy a game infested with this crap. 2. Goodbye Ubisoft, you are literally shooting yourself in the foot with this braindead idea. Pull your head out of your arse before it's too late.
"ERROR: In order to better accomodate our users' needs, we occasionally collect system specifications and demographic information.
This process has been temporarily obstructed and gameplay will be paused until it is allowed to continue. If the problem persists, please reinstall.
Err code 7uck3d: Bonzai Buddy helper object not found."
I really have to wonder what the analysis looks like at these companies. It does not affect companies one way or the other if someone pirates their games - only if they pirate them instead of buying them. Reducing piracy does jack unless it also increases sales.
I agree entirely on the launch prices of Steam games, they are too high most of the time.
That's why there are class-action suits. Also, you are suing the ex-directors, not the bankrupt company.
If the Internet Connection is unable to resume you can continue the game from where you left off or from the last saved game.
for how long?
also then should make that window a little bigger more like a week of no Internet.
I pirated Goo. Played it, put a copy on my mom's computer and let her and my sister check it out. Then I bought three copies. First game in a long time I felt that was worth the money I spent. Piracy does not equal a lost sale 100% of the time by any means.
Hell, I don't buy their games now & they haven't had anything I've even been remotely interested in since Beyond Good & Evil in 2003.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I think the rampant PC game piracy (almost 80-90%) can be blamed for this somewhat.
The truth is no one really knows what the real percentage is regarding pirate games since, as far as we know, it has never been properly studied. Also, piracy does not matter nearly as much as lost sales. The 11 year old kid who has no money (and other similar groups) is not a lost sale and the gaming industry should not care about them too much. We're totally in the dark regarding lost sales since the gaming industry no idea what this number is. Either the gaming industry execs don't enough care to know what the number is, or they know the real numbers and believe it is more effective to spout fictional lost sales numbers. For myself, either answer is completely deplorable.
Brain dead measures such as the ones Ubisoft is apparently enacting will likely only cause them greater expense (infrastructure and DRM costs) and drive more people to pirate their games. It's a shame really, I used to really like some of the games they published.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
I'm not saying they all will be converted to paying customers, obviously that would never work. But lets be honest here, there are also many people who pirate it just because they can. Any person with a job has disposable income - they just need to prioritize it. Now they're just pirating the games for free because they can.
Ubisoft has been ridiculously hostile to PC gamers in the fairly recent past. You can't even play the ending to one of their games on the PC because of the piracy bogeyman. It's well within the realm of possibility that Ubisoft would take it one step further. Maybe this will encourage them to start releasing DLC for their PC games. But I doubt it.
Rob
Has anyone ever successfully (or even attempted to) sued a shrink-wrap software company for failing to support a product once the company has suffered spontaneous existence failure? Even more so for games. (Yeah I know the shrink-wrap term is archaic, but I couldnt think of a term to describe consumer-grade downloaded software and off the shelf together. Anyhow I know companies get sued for failing to support custom systems all the time.)
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
It was covered on Slashdot too. Here's their article about it
first, and most importantly, how we came up with this number: the game allows players to have their high scores reported to our server (it’s an optional checkbox). we record each score and the IP from which it came. we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources by the total number of unique IPs in our database, and came up with about 0.1. that’s how we came up with 90%.
it’s just an estimate though there are factors that we couldn’t account for that would make the actual piracy rate lower than our estimate:
some people install the game on more than one machine
most people have dynamic IP addresses that change from time to time
there are also factors that would make the actual piracy rate higher than our estimate:
more than one installation behind the same router/firewall (would be common in an office environment)
not everyone opts to have their scores submitted
for simplicity’s sake, we just assumed those would balance out. so take take the 90% as a rough estimate.
What if Ubisoft decides not run these online services in the future? Will my game stop working?
Ubisoft is committed to being a forerunner in providing new exciting online service. If any service is stopped, we will create a patch for the game so that the core game play will not be affected.
I doubt that they will. If the service is stopped, it means they were losing money on it. Why would they spend even more money to create a patch to free people from the service? Some sense of customer loyalty? Obviously they don't have any if they are considering this path.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
They didn't calculate it based on torrent sites, but by copies of games that submitted high scores to top lists (opt-in option, stupid pirates). Here is their article about it, here slashdot coverage.
Also, that 500 seeders, 300 leechers is just one torrent, not combined total.
Either way, without stand-alone gameplay - I'm not interested.
Another convert to games from smaller publishers, I take it.
In the UK, it's happened plenty of times. Don't know about the USA.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I am not ready to pay $30-$50 for any Ubisoft game, that I can play forever. I don't play their game at all, though.
Yet, I pay $30 for 2 EVE online accounts. Every month.
Hasn't anyone learned from EA's mistakes? Wasn't Spore like the most pirated game of 2009? These publishers need to quit being greedy. Make a good game, rid it of ANY DRM, and sell it. You'll get your money.
In the beginning, there was null.
I doubt they'll do a better job at it. All Ubisoft has to do is "#define NO_DRM" while hackers have to rewrite a bunch of code, either in assembly, or a saner alternative, make their own server that you run locally. Either way Ubisoft can't possibly bug it unless they are tools, but the hackers can. I wouldn't want to lose my saves to this, and this is why I'm angry about this regardless of cracks.
Game review websites and magazines ought to unite on this issue and give games failing scores if they do not allow for offline play when in self-contained single player mode.
Then watch publishers of PC games remove the "self-contained single player mode" from the gold version and add it back as DLC after all the reviews have gone to press. A reviewer who failed, say, Blizzard's World of Warcraft for not including such a "self-contained single player mode" would have lost credibility.
WoW does not have a true single player mode, anonymous asshat.
There's NO piracy for the PlayStation 3, actually - not yet, anyway.
But, if there is something I've learned for the Modern Warfare 2 release, it's that people who are unhappy about aspects of it still BUY THE GAME. The reality is that for all the righteous indignation bandied around on forums and so forth, it still means a very minor percentage of people will actually put their big words into action. So, like it or not, they can get away with it. Remember all the woe of WoW users? So few of them quit. As I say, like it not, people can be exploited. If you have hype and you can get away with a lot of naughty stuff.
I wager this will result in a crescendo of personal affirmations of how you've never bowed down in such a situation. Well, that's great. You are in the minority.
I record my sleeptalking
Ubisoft are not the first company to do this. My previous employers, Jagex, launched a games portal about two years ago where all the games required a continuous internet connection... including the single player games.
I'm not going to compare and contrast the technical details, as I don't know Ubisoft's secrets and I'm still bound by a confidentiality clause from Jagex. The social effects, however, are discoverable from publicly available information from multiple online game providers, not just Jagex, and are therefore not something I have to keep silent about :)
So I really don't understand why Ubisoft thinks I'm going to buy a non-MMO game from them that I'll never be able to play.
if you want something you can count on, pirate it
This is apparently where they got the figures from.... Although they got 80% piracy?
The comment from one of the developers is significant
2D BOY’s Ron Carmel : “by the way, just in case it’s not 100% clear, we’re not angry about piracy, we still think that DRM is a waste of time and money, we don’t think that we’re losing sales due to piracy, and we have no intention of trying to fight it.”
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
As they point out on the linked page. This method wouldn't account for multiple ligit copies of games being played behind a router using NAT, or dynamic IP address, possibly a combination. It also doesn't account for people who might have unchecked the box. It also wouldn't account for if I installed the game on my laptop and traveled from my home to my parents, in laws, cousins, friends place, which would make the piracy rate seem much much higher. They assume it would balance out, but it is IMHO a very inaccurate estimate and proves nothing.
Fair enough. This might be enough to make them think twice about screwing people over. Though I suppose this hasnt stopped other companies.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
What happens when I find my old game and want to play it say 10 or 20 years from now and they don't have their server up or the company doesn't exist anymore?
I think a lack of dedicated servers and a decent possibility for modding didn't help its PC sales either. This might be the kind of thing that people have been conditioned to expect from consoles, but the PC market doesn't taking steps backwards in technology.
I second, third, forth, fifth, and sixth this! ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
I reserve the right to have a physical object so I can sell it later, and recover my money.
And if you would had read the complete article, you would know they answered what you said. Here's a paste for your convenience
UPDATE (and nerd alert): a lot of smart people have been questioning the accuracy of our 90% estimate, and with good reason, it’s a very rough estimate and the measurements are flawed. so we did some more digging to see if we might have missed the mark by a significant amount. here’s what we found:
based on the number of unique IPs and unique player IDs, we found that on average, there are 1.3 unique IP addresses per player (there is 1 player id for each profile created on any installation that submits scores to our server)
76% of players have contacted the server from 1 IP
13% from 2 IPs
5% from 3 IPs
3% from 4 IPs
1% from 5 IPs
1% from 6 IPs
1% from more than 6
this tells us that the dynamic IP issue is a relatively small factor in this calculation
we also looked at how many players IDs were created (rather than used) from each IP address. given that the vast majority of player IDs are associated with only a single IP, this is a fairly accurate measure of how many profiles the average user created. on average, a player has 1.15 profiles per installation.
when we take the total number of player IDs (which is smaller than the number of unique IPs from which leaderboard entries came) and divide it by 1.15 (the average number of profiles per installation) the number of estimated unique installations drops by about 35% as compared to the estimate based on unique IPs. let us further say that the average user installs the game on 1.25 computers with different IPs (i.e. not behind the same router), which i think is a high estimate. that lowers the estimated unique installations by another 20%. after factoring both of these in, the piracy rate would still be 82%, and we should keep in mind that this number doesn’t include those who never opted to submit scores to the leaderboard (it’s an option that’s off by default). so while it’s possible that the actual piracy rate is lower than 90%, it’s unlikely that it’s significantly lower. 2d boy hopes this satisfies the more rigorous number crunchers out there :)
oh, and yes, these numbers are exclusive of the demo those scores are submitted to a different server entirely.
There's nothing bizarre or bewildering, It's just greed at work, they wanna make sure games have a 'best played before date'. They pull the plug on the server after couple years and launch the 'new' version of the game force people to buy their new crap which is the old stuff which has been slightly redone with more boobs explosions and walky talkies as guns..
It amazes me how some of you can rationalize pirating. Just because they have some shitty DRM system that is a reason to pirate......no.....it is a reason to avoid the game all together. Piracy = theft. Someone had to write the code for these games and that takes time and we all know, Time = Money. I often get disgusted with the slashdot community when it comes to issues like this. Piracy is wrong, it is that simple. If you can not afford a car, you do not go and steal one, you just do not have a car. If you cannot afford a game title you should not go steal the game. It is pretty much the same thing, theft is theft.
we don't think that we're losing sales due to piracy, and we have no intention of trying to fight it.
Huzzah! Someone was hit by sense instead of marketing for once!
I reserve the right to have a physical object so I can sell it later, and recover my money.
So buy it on play.com, and use steam when there's a deal.
Also, watch for packages. There's a big one for $99 that includes:
Half Life 1+2, plus the HL2 extra episodes
Team Fortress
DoD
Left 4 Dead 1+2
(a bunch of other little addons etc)
At Xmas that was on sale for $75. Not back for all the games you get.
You guys that are thinking that this has anything to do with piracy are dwelling in the last decade. MMO's have changed everything. The current game needs to be online only, needs to bar unauthorized mods, and needs to be released in episodic portions. This is the only way a game company is willing to compete, because the MMO model has proven to be ridiculously better, for the game company, than the 'first sale' model ever was.
This means Ubisoft, EA, and every other game company everywhere. This will migrate to the Xbox, PlayStation, and Wii. There's just no compelling reason for a games company to skip out on perpetual revenue.
As for the 'sometimes I am not connected' position, I can speak to that. My crappy cable internet goes down constantly, and I can't play anything when that happens. Or, rather, I can, but everything I have is old and boring by then. I can't download anything, I can't surf Facebook, I can't read, I can't use fully 90% of what I normally use my computer to do. The industry types know this. They know that if my internet is down I'll be screaming at someone other than the game company about not being able to play.
They could support the 'on the train to school' customer. However, their market research probably tells them that you are more interested in using your iPhone, netbook, or similar device in that situation than a full-powered laptop. Half of you don't have good enough batteries to make the whole trip anyway.
In short if you're jumping to 'OMG PIRATES' as the excuse of the day, you're just blind to how much we are changing as a society.
I apoligize I only read down to the line after the first section and didn't notice the "UPDATE" section. However
a lot of smart people have been questioning the accuracy of our 90% estimate, and with good reason, it’s a very rough estimate and the measurements are flawed.
Sounds like they still agree with me. This is one of the easiest arguments I've ever had, I have to commend you on finding and pointing out all the great resources that support my argument. The argument being:
I still don't see how they can come up with this rate of 90%, it has to be an estimate there is no way to 100% know how many pirated copies are out there or being played.
Why does everyone assume this is about piracy? Software companies have been eyeing the used game market as lost sales for a long time...
If you were a company and there were two sources of perceived loss of revenue, which one would you focus on?
The one that is technically 'illegal' and where the "potential" lost customers willingness to pay money for your product is extremely hard to quantify?
or:
The one that is technically 'legal' but has hard and fast numbers and displays concrete percentages of people who are willing to purchase your product at a discount.
Of course as a company tackling something people consider as a 'right', you are probably smart to pretend your system is in place to prevent the first option, as opposed to your real goal of stopping the 'evil' bastards who are competing with your full priced games with their used 'discounted' copies...
I was an early adopter of Steam. If you are like me, and have not been a habitual pirate, Steam is awesome. I don't have to have boxes of games and manuals lying around, no more swapping CDs, my computers install all of their games on their own...Steam has made games so cheap I find myself buying some and never playing them. I'm collecting them like baseball cards, or candy.
The point of all of this is I am the customer the gaming industry wants. I'm the one buying their games, and buying games for my wife and kids. They cannot afford to piss people like me off. Here is the part that everyone who works in the gaming industry should read:
IF I HAVE ONE MORE EXPERIENCE LIKE I HAD YESTERDAY WITH MASS EFFECT 2, I'LL TURN PIRATE, AND NEVER LOOK BACK. I paid full price for a game, so I can listen to my buddies who pirated it talk about it for days before I get to play it, and when I finally go to unlock the game already installed on my HD, I can't play it because EA's auth servers can't handle the load THAT ALL OF THE PRE-ORDER SALES FIGURES INFORMED THEM WAS COMING. I personally view this as incompetence or indifference on a criminal scale. As a paying customer, for the first time I felt abused, and I'm not going to put up with that again.
Clean up your act, EA. Come back to reality, Ubisoft. You are killing the golden goose.
Dear Ubisoft,
you are now the first developer on my avoidance list because of your archaic copyright controls. And this at a time where some developers/publisher start to see the light.
This will only piss off paying customers because your protection will be cracked eventually, probably within a few days after a game release. To the average pirate it will be just another NO-CD/No-Internet patch to others it will be cause frustration.
Thank you very much, fuck you.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
Are you completely sure those parts are actually missing? I would think the developers would have been testing the game long before any server system is setup and would have an implementation for local saves. I would think then they also would have left it in there for the inevitable day when the servers get shutdown, because they will, and they would hopefully not shaft their customers and just let them save locally. While it would be a bitch to track down and use the functions, theres no reason to think they arent in there.
That's like comparing Windows to Google Search. No one complains that you need a constant internet connect to use Google, but a lot of people would be pissed if MS said you need a constant internet connect so Windows 7 knew it was a legitimate copy.
If I'm playing an online game I expect to need the internet. If I want to buy Splinter Cell and just play the single player version why would I need a constant connection? The two just aren't similar.
How could you continue to play with the internet connect? You save your game to their servers. I guess they could make temporary local save, but isn't that just like doing half the work for the crackers?
Um no.
A) Most gamers don't own 1000$ worth of video cards. If a software company regulated themselves to that market, it would shrink to something like 1%.
B) If you are arguing against the premise of Pirates being cheap, well if they are, they won't be buying 1000$ worth of video card anyway, let alone some game, and finally
C) I just bought an iPhone, and it costs about 700$, most lap tops are cheaper these days, so no they are not "cheap". I ONLY paid 250$ up front, but by the time you add in all the costs of signing up for a 3 year contract, etc... Believe me, nothing is "free" you are paying for it somewhere. They just don't care if that's because the phone is over priced or the data plan, or whatever, so long as they get paid.
The idea that a decrease in piracy will lead to a decrease in price is incredibly naïve. Even if pirates decided they were going to actually buy games all of the sudden, prices wouldn't change in the slightest. Like it or not, in our economic system, the overwhelming goal is to make money and lots of it. Prices will never go down. The genie is out of the bottle. Publishers have found that they can routinely charge $50 for a brand new game, and they're working their up to $60. Look at Modern Warfare 2. Personally, I find your sentiment manipulative, but you are entitled to your opinion.
Ubisoft has actually been doing this for years, and people started complaining and null routing their spyware servers, so now they're pissy and making it mandatory. Assassin's Creed would connect to montreal.ubisoft.com every 5 seconds. During that time, the game would freeze up SOLID until it got a reply, or the connection attempt timed out. But, it wasn't mandatory. If you pulled out your network cable, it would go into offline mode and not try to report your playing habits, and no more freezing issues! Assassin's Creed is also the game that turned them way off from PC releases. Because of the other thing they did to combat piracy: They leaked a version of it on pirate bay, that was defective, so about 1/3 of the way through, it would crash to the desktop, and you couldn't complete the game. But, Ubisoft's other policy is to not give out copies of the game to mags that don't agree to give them 90% before they get them. So, they found out the hard way that most magazines and websites that haven't completely and utterly sold out, fucking pirate it so they can review it before it's out. So, they were shocked and amazed to discover most independent reviewers were giving it "0, crashes a few hours in and is unplayable, happens on every machine, don't buy, it's awful." OOPS. But at least it got high marks from places like IGN and PC Gamer who were paid off! Only, people don't listen to those pieces of shit websites because they love everything they get paid to love, and they absolutely detest good games. So they go by word of mouth, and the word of mouth is, it's unplayable due to showstopper bugs that almost everybody encounters.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I notice the quote is for "Stopped" not "Crippled"...
Customer Support: "Why yes the server is up and running. It is currently being hosted by a 286 on a 2400baud modem in Russia. It just has the max 4 players on it right now, just keep trying to connect..."
This is dissapointing because UbiSoft are one of the few remaining PC games companies that haven't been bought by EA. Ubisoft truly missed an opportunity to differnetiate and scoop sales from EA by NOT using any DRM. I guess Ubisoft will fold soon because no-one at all is stupid enough to buy anything with this amount of restrictions.
I guess the UbiSoft execs are using piracy as a convenient excuse for poor sales, when in fact most Ubisoft titles are mostly crap to begin with. As far as I can remember, there really has only ever been one really good UbiSoft game (Far Cry).
Its very ironic that DRM this restrictive will ensure piracy of Ubisoft games becomes the norm so the Ubisoft execs will be proved right in one sense, that piracy of their products is so high that it indeed justifies their excuse to have DRM. Their own self-righteousness will ensure they never accept that they actually made it happen.
Oh, yeah! That's what I want - coupons off of the next game that I buy. Seriously, does anyone get anything from class-action suits? Apart from the lawyers, of course, and sometimes the company itself. You see, I was involved in one class action suit, and all I got for it was a coupon off my next purchase of a ZIP drive. I mean, really, I got burned once, Iomega. Why would I buy your crap again?
I actually know someone who has a cabin off the grid and out of even phone service coverage, his main reason for his generator is to run his Gaming PC. I think it's funny as hell myself, but it's true. He spends thousands on his computer, upgrading regularly. He enjoys his remoteness, despite dust and heat being regular issues for his equipment failures. I wouldn't mind being able to do the same, but I'd need a good internet connection. Guess he won't be an Ubisoft customer.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
The same way Microsoft figures your copy of Windows (WGA) or Office (OGA) will suddenly become illegitimate.
Maybe after Steam gave an online mode to allow the military to use their stuff while deployed, the cheese eating surrender monkeys (it is a French company) decided to strike back by making an even worse arrangement for those who serve.
Sig under construction since 1998.
I sincerely cannot imagine this system lasting long. If UbiSoft have even remotely anticipated the number of gamers that will be playing Settlers 7 and Assassin's Creed 2, they'll know that this will place an extreme load on the servers. We're not just talking about one-time activation. We're talking a constant stream of packets. The traffic will be horrendous.
Of course, there are legal considerations as well. Of all the companies that have made use of Digital Restrictions Management, most have 'promised' to release a patch that neutralises the DRM some day but absolutely NONE have enshrined this in their EULA or any binding agreement. That's right. Zilch, zero, nada. Strange, innit?
In any case, I do not buy any games contaminated with DRM. These will be no exception.
Between the constant refresh releases of Tom Clancy titles, PoP and shitty movie tie-ins, Ubisoft hasn't exactly released anything I want to buy/play anyway. Now with this BS, fuck 'em I say.
No sig for you!!
...but with all the stuff these companies are pulling I do believe it is time to go back to dungeons and dragons with a bunch of friends, a pizza or three, and a lot of soda. These big game developers are so out of touch and it has all become about profit.
It works with online features that are truly integral to the game. Running World of Warcraft offline would be pointless but something like Assassin's Creed could only artificially include online features and pirates are good at stripping those out.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
That quote just shows how completely stupid it was to say 90%.
The last sentence could be rewritten to: "For simplicities sake, we just assumed that 90% of people would pirate it since none of the methods we measured could actually be used to determine anything other than people who use the internet have an IP address."
I've seen this trend coming for a long time, but wondered who would be the first to implement it. This is the only way to effectively slow down (if not stop) piracy. It is a great business decision. As we have seen time and again, the number of people who claims they will refuse to buy X in protest is only a fraction of those who actually do so.
In spite of that... it's a sad day. We *will* see this mechanism become commonplace over the next several years, far beyond Ubisoft. While it's good for the gaming industry, it is very bad for their legitimate paying customers.
I think you have it backwards - most piracy is caused by DRM / online requirements for single player games. I know I never pirated a game before DRM started making it so that I had to rely on the whims of a company to buy a game I paid for. I also know many others who are just like me and used to always buy games until DRM came about to take away our rights.
As for MMO's, the reason those are successful with online activation and such is because due to the nature of the game, you HAVE to be online. If you have to be online just to play the game because it's multi-player only, then no, people aren't going to care if you have to authenticate online because without internet, you can't play the game anyways, even if it didn't have DRM.
It will never be impossible to pirate games and the industry is only losing more money by trying. The majority of people are perfectly willing to pay for games, especially a good one. However, many of them don't buy (whether it's a boycott or pirating) due to DRM. I'm guessing it's in the hundreds of thousands for companies to license DRM for a game, and since DRM has been proven completely ineffective at stopping the pirates who just don't want to pay AND it has driven away paying customers, DRM does nothing but lose money for the companies.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
In general, I like the concept of Steam. However, since they still control your ability to get to your game in the future, that's a deal breaker for me. If they would allow you to download your game with a cd-key tied to your Steam account (so that it would prevent people from giving away their non-DRM'd offline copies) to use as a backup, then I'd be perfectly fine with using Steam. I refuse to pay money to a company that maintains control over my property, since it means that they can take away my right to use what I paid for at any time and without warning.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
"This new system renders all customers beholden to Ubisoft in perpetuity whenever they buy their games."
And Ubisoft management says, "You say that like it's a *bad* thing."
The irony is that the percentage of pirated games (if 80-90% is actually right) would probably be much lower if the DRM wasn't so extensive. A huge number of legitimate customers admit to using cracks on games they bought legally just to get around the annoyances that DRM introduces. I don't advocate piracy, but I do fall into that "cracked legal" category. There needs to be another approach to the issue, because so far all attempts to stop it have only made it worse.
We should not forget the flip side to all of this. At any time someone wants, they can DOS all players of the game by DOSing the auth server. Maybe during the product launch, for instance? Not that I would ever advocate such a course of action of course...
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
I've tried explaining this to many people and so many of them don't get it. Once I buy an item, it becomes mine - that's how property rights work. The company still has the copyrights / distribution rights to the game, so I cannot legally give away or sell copies of the game, but I own the copy that they sold me and can do whatever I want with it for my own use.
No other industry is allowed to get away with trying to claim ownership of a product once it has been sold and it's completely ridiculous.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Once they do this, it's a small step to streaming in-game advertising.
Are they trying to discourage or encourage piracy?
Steam is hardly perfect. I also bought up big at Christmas, but didn't do my research carefully enough and bought gra 4. Do you know you can't save the game without creating a rockstar social account? Yes, I could download a crack, but one of the reasons I get stuff on steam is it 'just works'. This does not and was not disclosed. I want a refund.
meh
While your other text was insightful, I don't really agree to this. Making a system to support this won't be much work for a software company. The system will most likely be something that only needs to ping every 60 seconds or around that, so there won't be any latency issued in the game itself. And somewhere else in the discussion was that it's more costs for them - but what is some extra $500-1000 per month for auth servers for a company that is size of Ubisoft, if they can get much more sales from casual people because of it?
Have you actually done code development? There are language options and if's for exactly this purpose. Based on parameters, some code will be build to the exe and some will be not. It can still exist in the source files, but compiler will ignore it.
That's not Steams fault, it's Rockstar's fault.
Now continue reading a little bit more and you see that
after factoring both of these in, the piracy rate would still be 82%, and we should keep in mind that this number doesn’t include those who never opted to submit scores to the leaderboard (it’s an option that’s off by default). so while it’s possible that the actual piracy rate is lower than 90%, it’s unlikely that it’s significantly lower.
But I'm off for the night. Laters!
It is steam's fault. They choose what to sell. They should also let me know this before I buy so I can make an informed decision.
I still want my money back.
meh
They do let you know before sale. If you look at the sales page, it lists the extra components needed.
Besides that, while I also think it was somewhat inconvenient, did it really bother that much? I know the slippery slope thing and all, but I was fine with it. As long as it doesn't become a trend.
I won't accept their estimates based on A) they don't believe their estimates are correct
and with good reason, it’s a very rough estimate and the measurements are flawed.
and B) I don't agree with their methods, there are way too many uncontrolled variables and assumptions being made in order to claim a high rate. I don't doubt piracy exist, I just think companies are "playing it up" to get what they want (guilt people into buying products instead of pirating something they probably wouldn't have bought anyway, get more government regulation on their side, etc..).
You're still wrong and you've still only reinforced my point.
It did not. It said requires activation. It says online play requires windows live and rockstar social. It does not say single player play requires that crap. I want my money back.
meh
okay now I cant say anything else than /cry
I also do not agree with their methods, but that is completely against why you do not. There are probably many pirates who did not check that "submit scores" check box. And they didn't even account into that, they just looked at the pure stats on their servers.
And this is an indie company. They have stated they have no interest suing the players who pirate it but want to gather statistics about the how much pirates there are compared to customers. They have no reason to lie about the stats. And from my experience, these stats are close to any other game other than MMO's.
Anyhow, you are free to have your opinion even if I think you're trolling/like to act as a pro-piracy. I'm done with the discussion.
Saving games on something I don't control (and religiously backup) is not something I would do. I'm not putting any time into a game that my progress could be lost. Big companies don't back up like they should the Microsoft Sidekick fiasco was a perfect example of that. Plus Ubisoft has been known to release really buggy software so I don't have any faith that backups (or working backups) wouldn't be in their "fix later" file.
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They *hate* that.
This is not a convenience issue. From the install details, this is used for passing back achievements and videos. I don't want to spend my whole time running network logging software to see what sort of crap gets sent back. Not having to deal with that sort of thing is the reason I use steam: convenience + peace of mind.
I accept that valve can sell this sort of thing, but they need to notify you that single player requires this. This is *not* activation. This is something else entirely. Valve screwed up and that should refund the cost of the game.
meh
Yes I have, and yes alot of people use ifs to remove code including me, but judging from recent things like hot coffee it sure looks like alot of development houses are retarded enough to not #if out code that would get them in trouble, let alone #if'ing out save options that they would almost certainly use in the future.
I don't pirate games, I buy maybe 2 or 3 new games and a handful of used ones from eBay over the course of a year - otherwise I'm revisiting old titles from my collection, installing mods, updated engines, etc. I'm currently having a great time replaying Duke Nukem 3D and additional episodes with eduke32, runs nice on Windows & Linux...
However, copy protection isn't just about piracy, piracy just gives the games companies an excuse to foist the protection on everyone.
In reality, this is because a whole heap of very rich people don't like the fact that you or I *own* stuff, they'd much rather we *rent* stuff, set up a nice bank debit to pay them some money each month and threaten to stop the stuff working if we stop paying them.
The games companies are now also starting to hate the PC. The combinations of different hardware and OSes make games more difficult to produce than on a "same the world over" console, plus the fact that the PC is an open platform means you can install all manner of applications to crack their games open.
It's quite obvious that the current strategy is to make life as uncomfortable as possible for PC gamers so that they give up PC gaming, buy consoles and get their games fix on those instead.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
No, the Dreamcast died because Sega was an expert on sabotaging its own products and success. Sega was its own worst enemy. The PS2 didn't help either.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
So, greater demand leads to lower prices?
I think the rampant PC game piracy (almost 80-90%) can be blamed for this somewhat.
No, the idea that piracy matters is to blame for this. Caring about piracy is bad business. Two things matter when designing a good business plan:
The entire purpose of your sales and marketing strategy is to move people from the second category into the first. Some pirates are in a third category: people who definitely won't buy your product. Any money spent on this market segment is wasted. If they won't buy your product whatever you do, then it doesn't matter if they pirate it or just go without. It's frustrating, but that's an emotional issue and basing corporate decisions on emotions is rarely a good idea.
Some of the pirates are in the category of people who might buy your product. How do you turn them into people who will buy your product? There are several ways, but making your product worse, and making it comparatively worse than the pirated version, are not on the list. And yet, for some reason, they are the two strategies that most people involved in The War on Piracy seem to be choosing. Oddly enough, they are having about as much success as their counterparts in the wars on terror and drugs.
Agree totally. I will not buy a PC game before I try it, and sometimes i'm cool with demos, but not usually.
If i bought xbox 360 games, i'd have to play it first, either rent it or play it with someone i know.
I've been gaming since the 70's, and honestly, this is the only way I've found effective to spend my money.
Who's fault is that? The various companies that made the various software in the past. And oddly enough, quite a few of those are still around.
Be seeing you...
Actually, they're cutting off their own nose to spite pirates.
This holy war against pirates needs to end. They think that every downloaded game is a lost sale, and that every single person who can't pirate a game will buy it.
Do they honestly think that if they lock down a game to the point of near-unplayability that it will magically result in millions of dollars in sales?
Interesting figures, must have hurt pulling those ones out of your arse.
I'd be quite surprised if PC piracy even totalled 40% for most games. Even more surprised if half of these equated to a lost sale.
Not as much as you'd think. Here's how PC DRM works. EA/Ubi or other large publisher does little in house development. Instead they buy out small development studio's about half way through production when the studio's need cash. EA/UBI are just publishers, the studio's are at best subsidiaries. Now the development studio does not write the DRM, the DRM is purchased from a third party Snake Oil production company who develops DRM for a living (such as Sony DADC or Macrovision) and the Snake Oil is tacked onto the game after development is finished.
If DRM was built into the game from the word go the development costs would sky-rocket as the developers would be fighting the DRM more then creating/fixing code and so forth. Even EA understands this which is why DRM has to be tacked on at the end of development.
The DRM wil be broken and it only needs to be broken once.
Nope, this is not for protecting PC games, this is for ensuring that they are unplayable after a set period of time. When Ubi turns off the servers you will no longer be able to play the games. But of course this will be cracked in short order. No DRM scheme has ever survived and as many have pointed out this only hurts the legitimate users.
Really, it's only a matter of time before there is a consumer backlash about, they can only go so far before they break a law or directive from an organisation like the EU or ACCC and are fined millions.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
And I bought World of Goo.
Let me count the DRMed games I've bought in the last 5 years:
1) ...
Oops.
Now if only they would get rid of different release dates for different regions.
A couple of days before Mass Effect 2 came out, I saw it on a bittorrent site. I liked the first one, so I thought "nice, I'll buy it on steam to support the people that make good games!". So I looked for it in steam, and it was mysteriously absent. Odd.
So I looked on the steam website and found it, but upon clicking I got a message "this product is not available in your region". WTF?!?
So I gave up and downloaded it with bittorrent. I may buy it later if I think it is worth it, but why make it difficult for people to buy it?
Well they are probably concerned with piracy but we all know this system is unlikely to stop it. There is a 2nd benefit for the publisher at the detriment of the consumer. From Ubisoft.
Can I resell my game?
Not at this time.
Can I say, FAIL?
The most dangerous drug
Well, folks, this is the future of cloud computing that all the big companies want to shove down your throat. It means exactly what was described above, nothing that you say, do, or buy is yours. It is designed to allow the entire internet to be taken out of the box and exposed to whatever scrutiny anyone desires. It leads to lost data, because no system is perfect, lost time, because no connection is perfect, lost privacy, because no security can't be broken ( at least at home you can disconnect a drive, eh?), and misrepresentation and twisting of the truth, because there are already too many idiots out there that don't get all the facts on someone/something before the accusations begin. If you can't physically own something you pay for, then why pay for it? The concept of a game isn't what I bought, I bought the entire game, as a legal copy, to do as I wish for my entertainment. When I can't do this at will and without fear of problems from somewhere else, then I don't really control my software anymore, whether or not if its a game or my business. The real sticker for this is that if someone sued for stolen data, data loss, or interruption for a game, it would get laughed out of a court. Only when it happens to a business is it going to be a major case. Besides, data access for a business is already here, thats why you log into a site to get that data. I can't really see the advantage, at all, of the cloud.
Ubisoft does not care much about Indie / FOSS Hobbiest types. Ubi is a large and successful company, but they know that they are not the only ones making games. Yeah, its possible some hobbiest comes up with the next smash hit concept. But it is not that likely, and they have enough money that they can probalby buyout a hobbiest pretty easily.
This is about DRM. It is not very likely that they can find a DRM solution that cannot be hacked around and that wont cause undue problems for legit users who want to install on multiple computers. But internet access is not prevalent enough that it is not an unwarranted suggestion. In terms of validating a legit install, it is much more effective to have the game phone home. If it is multiplayer, then the access is not an issue. To their thinking, it is a perfectly viable solution.
Besides, if the user does not have an internet connection, I do not think Ubi is worried about bad press from that user going into online forums to complain. If they have the connection and the install is legit, there shouldn't be any real problems for the user to notice.
But if Ubi screws up and the scheme does not work, then there will be massive blowback.
END COMMUNICATION
Data is information. Taking in information you did not pay to take in is not stealing.
If you write down the words of a song and post them to your myspace (which is copyright infringement), what have you "stolen"?
If you get a tattoo of Mickey Mouse on your leg without paying a royalty, that is copyright infringement. What have you stolen?
I thought the veil of incorporation protected directors except in cases of outright fraud/criminal activity?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Well, you could disable the Online content and start with a new character. But it is still annoying.
I bought a game from a company that has the same type of system, I will not buy another. As it is I bet that one can read the terms of use and it will say that Ubisoft will not be liable for the lost of service , internet or servers that store the information about the game. And that means One will not have the use of there game or games that they have paid for . This is a bad Idea and will not work nor be fair to the persons who bought the games. I know as I have tried this type of system and it completely restricts the buyer of the game even when it is not his or her fault that you cannot access the company servers. It is not unheard of in our area for out internet to be down for up to a week, or to get a service person out to fix the issue. That means that I would not have access to the games that I bought. Not worth it , I can tell you first hand. We are not leasing the games, as it is now we are buying the game and then being told how and when we can play said game. The legal system and courts are going to have to step in and stop this before it becomes the norm. This is no different that buying a auto and the dealer say's where and when you can drive the auto, and what day's it can be used. Your right, do not buy from any company that sets this type of system up.
Except for the fact that whoever pirated probably stuck a rootkit in it and now owns your box.
Why is this issue always ignored in this debate? I think people who open up e-mail attachments are stupid. I also think people who pirate games are stupid for the same reason (and others).
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com