Slashdot Mirror
Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed
A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting:
"If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."
Well the article is good enough to tell us which games to avoid due to horrible DRM. Maybe they're making some kind of 'level of DRM annoyingness' versus 'copies purchased' graph.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Don't buy the game, and send them letter to let them know why you're not buying the game.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
My thoughts exactly. Briefly dropping Internet connection is not at all uncommon - quite often you don't even notice it because you're just staring at a web page at the moment, or maybe the page doesn't load, and you shrug and move on. But with this kind of thing, every disconnect will have a very visible, pronounced, and highly annoying effect.
I wonder if Ubisoft could actually be sued over this. Oh, sure, they'll slap "Internet connectivity required" on the box - but it could be argued that a reasonable person's understanding of "Internet connectivity" is the one that isn't five-nines, and if the game can't really handle a typical real-world connection properly - because of deliberate regression - then it's a clear case of malicious false advertising.
I know that's a vulgar comment, but that is vulgar DRM.
Your comparison is completely inappropriate.
1) I can perfectly use IMAP or POP to download my Gmail emails and read them offline.
2) For all kind of web-based communications such as emails, HTTP or SSH I do expect to need a network connection. It does not need to be Gmail, but my personal email system is exactly the same. What you say is equivalent to: "I need a phone connection to be able to phone? What a scandal!" This is not the case for a game though, wghich I expect to work on a plane, a train or on a remote holiday location with no internet access.
...is the superior one. If you care about quality, choose your favourite release group!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
This will just annoy the people who did buy the game. The real issue is that most users aren't technical and will just buy it, put up with the shit and accept that's the state of affairs. One day somebody will offer them a crack and suddenly they'll realise the shafting they got.
What's worse is that I predict that there will be an enormous amount of cracks and hacks for this game. It'll be so bad that all software companies will use it as an example of why we need even more and better DRM and how evil consumers really are.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Some people don't pirate because they haven't been bothered enough by DRM to seek out DRM-free copies.
Ubisoft is creating a new round of pirates from formerly legitimate customers.
These really aren't Pyrrhic victories; they're just victories. The ill effects of these terrible decisions don't come around until the executives have long since cashed in their stock options and retired to wine and wealth. I think of these more along the lines of 'mortgaging the future of the industry in general'. But who cares? The gaming community will just bend over and take as they always have done. Remember the outcry against Spore with its oppressive DRM? That was about as organized and vocal as the gaming community have ever gotten, and Spore is still selling and still has brutal DRM.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
This - or something this annoying - has been coming down the line for years now. It was only a matter of time.
I can see the day where a game is going to come out and basically not sell - except for the number of copies required to crack the game.
In other words, the question's been less and less ambiguous as to whether DRM actually hurts sales and drives people to piracy. It's been obvious to *me*, but I could see how a reasonable person might think otherwise.
We might be at the point where a reasonable person can no longer lay the blame anywhere but at the feet of outrageous DRM.
On a sidenote - in 25 years when we want to play Bioshock again and relive the experience, what will most people think of the pirates? I'd imagine that we'll come to think of them as archivists putting themselves at risk but allowing us to enjoy a classic game.
Super Mario Bros came out in 1986, almost 25 years ago. Imagine if Nintendo required an always-on direct modem connection to Nintendo of America to play - and they shut off the modems 15 years ago. What would we think of the "dirty rotten pirates" who got a ROM dump and hex-edited out the watchdog code? It's not far-fetched to say that they'd come off like Robin Hood...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
The problem is, DRM seems to more often inconvenience the people who DO buy the game rather than those that pirate it. Pirates crack the game so it doesn't need the CD, doesn't need an online connection, etc. Sure, DRM might be difficult for most pirates to overcome, but it only takes one pirate to crack it, and then the rest have access through torrents. Then the only people inconvenienced by DRM are the legitimate purchasers, who can't play when their internet goes down or when Ubisoft's DRM server is down. Also, if someone wants to replay a game 10 years from now, will Ubisoft still be running the server?
Except there are plenty of people who don't go to bars precisely because it is too expensive, a lot of these people drink at private parties (where you bring your own beer or the host provides beverages), how many of these people do you honestly think would start spending $100 per night in bars if "home use" of alcoholic beverages was made illegal?
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
DRM has nothing whatsoever to do with fighting piracy. All those billions and trillions of dollars that pirates don't spend on games never existed, and spending money to chase money that never existed is, besides being insanely stupid, never profitable. Money spent on used games does exist and there is a lot of it; Gamestop alone had 8 billion dollars in revenue in 2009, and the game industry wants that money. If the game industry as a whole spends a few hundred million dollars to prevent tens of billions of dollars of used game sales, that is profitable and not stupid.
Or another ship cuts the trans-Atlantic internet cables. ...
Or a power cut that takes out your router.
Or someone adding a wireless router in the same channel as the one you are using.
Or microwaves/other device/weather interfering with the wireless signal.
Or
I know others have said what I am going to say. But this is nuts.
With people moving more and more to various wireless net connections more and more people are going to have intermittent connection issues. People are simply going to download the hacked version in order to play the game. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that people will once again learn that the hacked version of the game is the most user friendly.
This DRM tactic is going to kill any potential profits.
MORONS.
I remember looking forward to SPORE. This game took forever to hit the market. Then what do they do. They put crippling DRM on it. So what happens. It becomes the most pirated game in history. I simply gave the game a miss all together.
DRM failed for the music industry. It's failing for Video. It is and will fail the game industry. DRM is only there to make greedy execs comfortable. It only results in yet more lost money and it hurts the customer.
If there aren't any cracked versions available for the first months, most players who want it (including those who would had pirated it) are going to buy it as everyone else is playing. That's what counts mosts to the companies, since most sales are made during that period.
If a pirate has to wait several months to get their version, it's a huge win for the publisher. And with this case exactly that will happen, because it's completely new system and relies on online parts. It won't be cracked anytime soon.
Horseshit. Around forty percent of the US still do not have broadband and dial-up has never been reliable about disconnects. Even on broadband, if your line quality isn't top notch you're looking at a complete inability to play the games for hours at a time. That is not an experience I'd care to pay money for.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
To play one of these games in a moral and convienient way, you'd need to buy a genuine copy and then download a pirated version that allows you to play when you're on a plane, when Ubisoft's servers go down, when your connection goes down etc. The stated intent of DRM is to make it easy for gamers to do the right thing - but they achieve exactly the opposite, as users who do the wrong thing get a better gameplay experience.
If there aren't any cracked versions available for the first months
What's the last game you remember that didn't have its crack ready at release day, usually a few days before? The newer and more invasive the DRM, the more the cracker groups egg each other on to be the first to crowbar it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Time to die"
Would you people PLEASE stop shelling out your hard earned cash on companies that insist on fucking you over like this? Mod me flamebait if you want, but Ubisoft should die and their stockholders should all lose the money they invested in the company. It's the only way this shit will stop. If DRM kills Ubisoft, other companies will think twice about these stupid DRM schemes.
I guess they learned from Sony that even putting a rootkit on music CDs won't stop people from buying their poison products. Jesus H. Christ, people, stop letting these bastards fuck you over. Put them out of business.
Free Martian Whores!
It is a sad, sad day when illegal underground crackers care more about their reputation than the company that makes the games they're cracking.