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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.
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.
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.
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 doubt this new system will work for me. i do have 24/7 internet access, but my high-speed line is always saturated downloading pirated game from pirate bay. no way are any ubisoft.com bound packets going to get through
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.
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
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
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.
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