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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?
to step on the ol' weenie with track shoes...
[Carnac] "What is 'people staying away in droves?' [/Carnac]
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
Don't buy the game, and send them letter to let them know why you're not buying the game.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
This goes a long way toward making sure I will. I can understand some level of online authentication, but this is absurd. Then again, what am I think, I won't even buy these games. Not worth the hassle.
In ten to twenty years, when we're playing these games on emulators and reminiscing about the good old days, when these activation servers are dead and gone, we will be thankful that someone took the time to remove these checks from our games so that we could play them in the future.
And I wonder, in this never ending holy war against pirates, what they think that Pyrrhic victory after Pyrrhic victory will earn them? Countless fortunes? Unending wealth? Do they think that making your game difficult to play will somehow make it sell billions of copies?
I was going to buy this, but they can shove that rubbish fair up their arse.
Another fine case of screw the people who actually paid for it and the pirates don't have to put up with any of it.
Well done UbiSoft, you are a complete bunch of arsehats.
If this becomes acceptable, someday Windows PCs will require a network connection to operate at all.
With each new release, Microsoft Windows becomes more dependent on servers in Redmond. Someday they'll have an outage and the whole world will stop.
And the subsequent increase in piracy of this game will be blamed on DRM that wasn't draconian enough.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
At last, they've made DRM so obnoxious, intrusive and butt-fuckingly annoying that even the average Joe will become enraged at the audacity of the thing. Hope Ubisoft has a team of people standing by ready to explain to people with shaky wireless routers or traffic-shaping ISPs why their game keeps booting them out.
I'm calling it - less than three months after release before they patch this out due to overwhelmingly bad press. Christ Ubisoft, who do you think you are?
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
I know that's a vulgar comment, but that is vulgar DRM.
I actually pay for my games but I refuse to pay for such draconian DRM. If you have machine limit activations or need constant internet access I'll just get your game via more customer friendly means.
Ah I think I have it: Fuck Ubisoft.
I was likely going to get Assassin's Creed 2. AC1 was pretty damn fun. I didn't get it when it came out because didn't seem like my kind of game, but I got it on sale and man, I liked it. So AC2 was on the list of potentials for me.
Not any more. I will absolutely NOT put up with DRM like this. I have a fairly stable net connection but still, I don't care. This is way too invasive.
I mean I'll meet companies half way. I'm ok with Steam, I can also deal disc based ones that don't cause a problem. However in either case I have to have a way to play if the net goes down. I am not ok with protections that limit the number of times you can reinstall a game (like SecuROM) or ones that need you to be online all the time. Goes double since I know what kinds of server problems companies can have, having played MMOs and such. If my MMO of the day is down, I'm going to be REAL mad if I can't play a single player game.
So, no more Ubisoft games for me unless they change this, because it is retarded. The really funny thing is, of course, it won't hurt the pirates at all. Those versions will have it patched out so they'll have a good game experience. All it will do is drive legit customers away. This is a bigger problem than they might think just due to the sheer number of games these days. Currently, my problem is not finding games to play, it is finding time to play games. I have games I still haven't got around to yet because there's only so much time I can spend goofing off in a day.
So if a given games maker starts being stupid, well I'll just stop buying their shit. Plenty of others to play.
Speaking of which, I think I'll go play Mass Effect 2, which just has a simple disc check. It does like to talk to EA for content updates and such, but as I found out a couple days ago, doesn't mind at all if their servers are down and it can't connect. Game runs with no problems. That, I can live with.
Oh man, they are going to sell so many copies... of this DRM technology to other companies.
I mean, no one will want the games anymore, but if they market this DRM to delusional companies disproportionately outraged over piracy, they could make a fortune.
so, if someon DDOS their servers, all people on the world will be kicked out and lose their progress ?
hmm . . . what a great idea.
I'm assuming Ubisoft, EA and the like are starting to dream about gaming on the cloud- complete control over access to the content, mandatory constant internet connection to the servers, and no pirateable game files being distributed to consumers. In addition, it will become much easier to cite server costs as a reason to shut down a game after a few years.
My webcomic
Don't buy those products.
...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
As a matter of fact, the customer is probably a rotten thief. Ubisoft is just treating us all like the criminals we probably are!
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
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.
Lack of wit, that is.
In the right corner we have Ubisoft, with their incredibly stupid idea that deserves nothing less than a Dilbert strip to glorify it permanently.
And in the left corner we have a large herd of sheep called game customers, who in recent trend have even been defending DRM schemes or believe it to be some type of chocolate bar.
Will Ubisoft succeed in shoving this latest endeavour with enough lube or will the bleating consumer do a back kick? Stay tuned as we find out just how high of a cliff a company can jump off safely.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
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.
Piracy will help archive the games, ultimately rewarding Ubisoft for their contribution to culture.
The best thing to do is to NOT pirate the games. Obviously, don't buy them, either. But, also, don't review them. Mention them in the same hushed tones that ET for the Atari 2600 is mentioned with.
What they are doing is like telling the customers WE DON'T TRUST YOU and that ain't the way to run a business.
Granted, most of the game players are kids, so basically they are bullying kids with all those dreaded DRM thingies.
There lies a silver lining though --- game players are there, throngs of them.
If they don't play this game, they will play another.
Business opportunities opening up whenever there is some screw-ups and this one ought to be big enough for others to invest in an all-open online gaming platform, no DRM, nothing.
Just log on and play.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
But I for one (and I'm sure there are many others), still haven't bought it for that very fact.
Because um.. well lets see.. From the Fine Article:
But i guess actually reading anything is beyond expectation for an AC.
Secondly, from Ubisoft's own FAQ.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
so what changes if that 85% didn't pirate? oh right, nothing. the profit doesn't change because that same 15% still bought the game. more draconian drm just pisses off the legitimate buyers who have to put up with it, the pirates strip it away. publishers are killing their golden geese because they're immature childish control freaks.
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?
Again, spore can still sell for one reason: the DRM doesn't affect the average person. IIRC, Spore had, among other things, a limit on the number of installations. Most people don't own multiple computers, so that doesn't affect them. One particular example of DRM that pissed me off was Mass Effect's Securom not letting me play it in VMware. This brings me to my next point: if someone actually cares, they'll likely just go find a crack and then forget all about it. Would you rather be sending angry letters to some CEO who won't read them anyway, or would you rather just download a crack and get on with playing your game?
If only there was some way to obtain these games without the DRM...
Do not buy any more Ubi Soft games. When they'll feel their loss of sales, they MAY be thinking again about it.
Also, if someone wants to replay a game 10 years from now, will Ubisoft still be running the server?
The Ubisoft execs who ordered up the draconian DRM will be retired in 10 year's and wouldn't care at all about people trying to play a 10 year old game. Besides, the day that they make DRM that takes 10 years to crack is the day I completely stop playing games.
Poor example. BF2142 wasn't a very good game (its a glorified mod of BF2) to start with, and the community largely abandoned it and either went to CoD4 (came out a few months later) or back to BF2.
"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine."
Its nasty stuff like this that makes me not want to buy their games anymore.
The EA DRM as applied to Red Alert 3 is acceptable as I only need to connect to the internet once to authenticate the game AND I can un-authenticate that copy anytime to install on another PC or reinstall Windows or etc. (the DRM system in question uses hardware activation to lock the game to your PC)
This kind of DRM that requires a permanent internet connection just to play the single player is NOT something I will accept and I would hope enough people say "NO" to ubisoft to make them rethink the decision and move to a more acceptable form of DRM (be it CD/DVD checks, hardware-linked activation or whatever else)
With the online DRM which will boot you out every single time you have a dropped line, no one, not even those with pirated copies, will be spared.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
Did they really fucking do that?
Seriously?
expandfairuse.org
After reading this, Ubisoft has lost my sale; I was intending to buy the Super-Duper Deluxe version of Assassin's Creed II had they released it for the PC. 'Internet required' should only be for MMOs and not games which I intend to play in the quiet of my basement... er... seaside lair.
The added services to the game (unlimited installs
Wow, they make it sound like they're doing me a FAVOR by allowing me to install the game more than once. Screw the right of first sale, they're going to be charging you per install in a few years.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There are plenty of games that I can only play online.
Granted, they are usually Flash games, and are little more than frivolous time sinks.
But they're free, and I can play most of them even on a low-end machine.
This looks like an expensive version of one of these games. Not interested.
Capable of killing! Now, join me!!!!111 Let's get those bastards for the evil they are doing!!!11111onetacular!
Or, you know, let them go bankrupt on their own pieces of shit.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
I still play Quake, which according to wikipedia was released June 22, 1996...
I can always find people to play against, and thanks to ID open sourcing the quake code i have a version which is better than the original, and runs on modern hardware.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Don't worry, in 10 years they'll happily sell it to you again as a "Vintage Game" for Windows 12.
i mean, its stupefying. there is no other, elaborate, politically correct approach to what they are doing. its pure morondom. its like saying 'hey, we are going to sell you a product, but it may or it may not work, because we want it to be that way. because, see, there are pirates.'
Read radical news here
I'm not buying games to crack them, if I have to break the law anyway I can just as well download the whole thing.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I mean, people spend $100 a night at a bar constantly, for a few hours of fun.
$100 at a bar? You'd be so drunk that you'd need to be carried out of the bar at the end of the evening.
Or is booze really so expensive in the States?
Or do these $100 include the hookers?
If your customers somehow took 85% of your revenue
[citation needed]
Ubisoft: 3rd quarter sales (Feb 9, 2010) 495 million pounds sterling.
Now let's see if I get the math right, if 495 million is 15 percent, then 33 million is 1 percent, therefore 3.3 billion pounds is 100 percent.
So, according to you, a company like Ubisoft should be selling 3.3 billion pounds PER QUARTER? Just as a minor comparison, General Dynamix (a small defense company that makes oh, fighter jets and boats) only sold 2.1 billion DOLLARS last quarter.
I absolutely LAUGH at "piracy hurts sales" whiners who start throwing BS numbers like that 85% about. You are full of shit.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yes, and UbiSoft know that. DRM on (PC) video games is all about the "time to crack". Look, this is how the modern piracy scene works and why UbiSoft are doing this.
A PC copy protection scheme on a major game will attract the attention of professional reverse engineers. These guys are likely paid to do it, because pirated games a the perfect way of getting people to install viruses and malware. The "pay per install" scene is largely based on torrents because it's so much easier than finding browser 0days.
Given this, it's not surprising that DVD-binding based DRM is weak. The techniques to defeat it are well known and the montary incentive is there.
So why move to internet based DRM? There are two reasons I can think of. Firstly, it's much stronger. Secondly, it solves the problem of people making backup DVDs, which is the traditional reason cited for why media binding is an unwanted technique. Internet connections these days are pretty damn reliable. Mine croaks maybe once or twice a year, and usually only for a few hours at worst. Trading a few hours of downtime a year for the ability to make backups seems like a pro-consumer move.
So what about strength? My gut feeling is that internet based DRM can be made significantly harder to break than media-binding based DRM. Even if it's still eventually done, if it reliably takes a month or two after release then it'll be considered a wild success. Consider the range of techniques available when an internet connection is active. The goal is to stop people sharing accounts, and to stop people removing the need for a connection. So, make every asset encrypted under a unique key that isn't stored on the DVD. As the player progresses through the game, it informs the server of where the player is up to. The server sends a small program to the game which then runs and gathers a hash of various bits of in-game state (like the values of certain memory locations) which "prove" the player has actually played that part of the game. The results of those hashes unlock the keys for the next areas. Of course all the usual anti-debugging tricks can be used, which are actually very effective (most cracks these days are about emulating the dvd drive rather than removing the checks, right).
In a non-linear game this approach will prove difficult to crack, because the cracker will have to play the game over and over to ensure he has actually reached every room, every level, every boss, every weapon. If he misses one, he produces an incomplete crack that will crash the game for some players. Of course the cracker might not care - pirated games are very often unstable and buggy compared to the retail version, as they only care about getting you to install their virus anyway. But it still increases the amount of work significantly.
AACS style broadcast encryption can be used to ensure every player who plays the game ends up with a uniquely watermarked/decrypted set of files, so the leaked version can be traced back to a credit card or buyer. So now the pirate also has to use a stolen CCN too. It's all about raising the bar.
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.
I think it's more security theater to placate the investors than actual anti-piracy measures. Saying that there's a huge number of interested people who could be convinced to buy it with some technical measures sounds like much more of a growth possibility than trying to figure out how to make your product actually appeal to more people.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
If your customers somehow took 85% of your revenue, you'd do something - anything - to stop the hemorage.
If you want to stay in business, there's one thing you'd better NOT do - and that's piss off the people who DO pay for your product or service. I know that I, for one, will certainly not be buying any game that phones home like this.
Oh, and don't confuse "playing a copy of the game" with "taking the company's revenue" - the company doesn't gain or lose a cent unless the person playing the pirated copy would otherwise have paid for a legit copy. If I decide that Nissans have terrible handling and so I buy a Toyota instead, I'm not "taking Nissan's revenue." If I decide that Nissans are too expensive and I buy a dodgy Chinese copy of a popular model Nissan instead of the Toyota, I'm STILL not "taking Nissan's revenue."
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Dunno about the States but in Australia you can easily spend that much. These days it's $8 - $10 a bottle for longnecks in some clubs.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Imagine... every pirated movie and every pirated software in asia/eurasia/south america were paid....
What would happen to the US trade deficit and what would happen to happen to US debt... it would be significantly decreased.
By moving from manufacturing to computer software/media the involved countries hurt themselves because it is easy to bypass their protection.
The DRM used today may not be great but its evolving for better or for worse and hopefully in about 20 years time there might be something less intrusive.
But I should be entitled to 100% of the profits the company makes, right? That's how it works in the real world. So if I only actually end up with a tiny fraction of a percent of the company's profits as pay, I should DRM the widgets I produce so that I can earn the full 100% of profits I deserve. Right?
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
How, that's expensive, indeed. Around here in Luxembourg, it's €3.70 for a large glass of draught beer (1/2 l), and that's at the "expensive" places!
It's not about having money, it's about having the will to buy their crap in the first place.
I've pirated some games and deleted them after an hour of bad gameplay experience. I was very glad I didn't purchase it.
And don't go waving the "Try a demo, you liar!" card, because draconian DRM like Starforce (which rootkits you and makes USB ports go haywire, disables some of your software) are nowadays included with those demos.
No, I don't feel bad about what I'm doing.
You conveniently left out how much their costs are. And who are you to tell how much companies should be allowed to make?
Where do you get your Internet connection? I've never had one that is that stable. Any ISP that uses dynamic IPs (DSL typically) will reset the connection every so often. My ATT DSL goes down for a few minutes every 2-3 days in order to get a new IP.
Cable, which usually has a static IP in my experience (although I was briefly with a cable company that did use dynamic IPs), still goes down from time to time. My Comcast cable would go down at least once a month.
This doesn't even count routing failures on the Internet, DDOS's against Ubisoft, or Ubisoft's own servers failing.
And it doesn't include user hardware failure. I had a Netgear router that would overheat about once a week and lockup. I also had an RT-chip-based USB wifi card that had a buggy firmware that caused it to lockup after so many bytes of data transfer (a newer firmware eventually fixed the problem).
When you consider the entire stack of devices that must be working in order to play your game, it becomes ridiculous to require a constant Internet connection.
A PC copy protection scheme on a major game will attract the attention of professional reverse engineers. These guys are likely paid to do it, because pirated games a the perfect way of getting people to install viruses and malware. The "pay per install" scene is largely based on torrents because it's so much easier than finding browser 0days.
Really? I don't think I've ever seen a 'scene' release that contained any kind of malware (apart from the occasional false positive due to the mechanisms involved); that's not to say that 3rd parties don't *replace* cracked files and keygens with malware and torrent them, but the people actually breaking the copy protection really don't seem to be involved in anything (additionally) nefarious. Besides, it's not in their interests; the scene groups largely do what they do for kudos and churning out malware-infected releases would seriously damage their reputation.
That's nice. How did your protest against DRM work out? Spoiler: the story we're discussing here contains the salient evidence.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I wonder how long it will take some enterprising group of phreaks to realise that they could blackmail Ubisoft by DDOSing their "game continuation" servers.
No the parent is NOT correct, because he has not (nor has any development exec) demonstrated that DRM has ever stopped even 1 pirate. The evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary, drm ONLY inconveniences paying customers while doing nothing to solve the problem of piracy.
Do I blame developers for trying to do SOMETHING to stop game piracy? Not really. But I do blame them for pointlessly inconveniencing their paying customers and decreasing the value of their product to the point that the pirated version is a superior product, without ever preventing any piracy. All drm does is ENCOURAGE piracy by making the pirated version a superior product for a lower price.
A couple of years back I remember writing PC Gamer requesting them to add DRM info to their reviews. While DRM certainly won't make me buy a game, some DRM will most definitely rule the game out, regardless of score.
I was very happy when I saw it making an appearance along with a magazine redesign (obviously, I take full credit; I'm sure nobody else requested it). They seem to be fairly serious about including proper information there as well.
When a major games magazine makes a point of informing the public about what sort of DRM a game includes, isn't it about time the bean counters wake up and realize that perhaps it's not terribly good PR? I know one thing, the DRM info isn't listed as a sales point (except, perhaps, when it says "None").
As for this particular DRM, the first thing I found myself doing was double-check the date to make sure I hadn't warped to April 1st. Previous notions of requiring gamers to go online once every week or two to reactivate were vociferously shot down by the public. How did Ubisoft take that as a sign that the public are ready to accept being online permanently to play? It redefines the meaning of draconian.
I'm truly baffled this even got past the planning stage.
I may get arrested for suggesting this, but surely on release day, and for as many days as possible after, if there was a DDOS attack on Ubisoft's master servers not only would people like us not be buying the game, but normal people would return it to the shops because it "doesn't work"? Ubisoft would have a big commercial and media problem on their hands, hopefully so big that would cause them to re-think this strategy?
Or maybe they'll just blame the pirates for the down-time and use worse DRM next time? What would be worse than this though?
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.
... not as thieving scumbags, and Settlers VII will be remembered as a holy text, not forgotten as a completely meaningless piece of entertainment.
If you want to put pirates on a pedestal, go right ahead. Just remember that they are just as responsible as the game corporations for DRM.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
The money they gain by stopping second hand game sale, is not overwhelmed by the money lost in first hand game sale. They definitively lost my money first hand second hand or even under-handed. I tried to put up with "calling home at starT" and got fed up with even THAT (mass effect 2), so forget permanent connection. All those game are now a no-go for me. And I am an avid gamer with lot of euro. How many like me ? Who knows. Maybe a few. maybe a lot. But if it is a lot, they will have to back pedal.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
In ten to twenty years, when we're playing these games on emulators and reminiscing about the good old days
I for one won't have any good old days with this one.
I have a DSL (Telia) and it never resets connection like that. Actually the DHCP server even tends to give the same IP for a really long time - I've had the same for over an year sometimes, current one maybe half an year. It's quite stable too, I have ssh sessions on my linux server that have been running for a few months.
I wish I had your internet. Here in Spain I can count on telefonica dropping my connection a couple of times a day.
This actually reminds me of one of my co workers last year. He bought a PC and a bunch of games and then ended up having to go hunt down a cracked version of one of the games because it required internet access to install and we didn't have internet access at home yet.
And on that note. What about Laptops? What if I want to play something during a two hour layover somewhere and internet access happens to cost $1 a minute?
I wonder if this is Ubisoft's way of killing off its PC gaming arm (and possibly having a go at killing off PC gaming in general).
I mean, lets look at the platforms. The XBox 360, PS3 and Wii are all single hardware platforms, yes there are small differences like the existence or size of a hard disk, but one Xbox 360 is (to game developers) pretty much the same as another, same with PS3 and Wii. If you look at PC's you have DirextX 9, 10 and 11, Windows XP, Vista and 7 and nVidia and ATI video cards just to start. Thats 14 different possible combinations with just those three options. Developing for and supporting (though you wonder if any games company actually invests in customer support) that kind of target hardware has got to be more expensive than console targets. What better way to get out of the market than saying its rife with pirated games, very few people are buying our games any more, its not worth the investment.
Of course with DRM this vile you'll incur more support costs for people who bought the game and have problems with DRM, you'll drive people to buy the game and crack it (exposing honest people to the seedy underworld of the game pirates) and even cause people who would have bought it just to download a copy. Honest people will be branded and thieves because of bugs in the DRM (I'm looking at you Microsoft) and Ubisoft will either go bust, pull out of the PC market or retire older buggy versions of their DRM (or maybe just disable a game because its too old) and in the process removing access to the games for people who have paid money for them while the pirates play on. I wouldn't bet on Assassins Creed II being playable in 3 years without a crack.
I will admit I was a naysayer with Steam but I've grown to like that platform now. In general it doesn't get in the way, you can spot games that have additional DRM and avoid them (and DLC that sneakily adds DRM, I'm looking at you Borderlands), you can still play your games while offline and Valve have shown they can run the service reliably (apart from those pesky release days where everything slows to a crawl). But the difference between Steam and Ubisoft DRM is simply this, Stream has a huge benefit. I can buy a game and any time in the future download the latest version of that game and patches can be applied automatically, no more searching around for the latest version. Where is the benefit to the end user of this DRM?
Its not often I can say there is a game company worse than EA, Ubisoft have claimed that title.
I was looking forward to Assasins Creed II, but I’m voting with my money and not buying it or any other game with this DRM in it. Bye Bye Ubisoft.
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.
The point is that greylisting is little more than an ugly hack that's only slightly less ugly than rejecting all incoming mail from servers where a reverse lookup doesn't match a forward lookup ("example.com resolves to 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.1 resolves to 328.cust.biz.isp.net, clearly this is an evil spammer!!1oneone")
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
The question is - more or less ridiculous than ever more aggressive DVD checks? On balance, I'd prefer being able to keep my DVDs somewhere safe and use an internet connection. Not saying UbiSoft will get it right, but I think internet based DRM will be an upgrade for most people if they do get it right.
They still pay money for the drinks, whether liquor or soda or juice. They are still paying for entertainment. So they can't afford 100 dollars in one night. So they don't normally have cash on hand to buy a game. It means they have to save up for their game. If someone said they couldn't afford to buy a beer, does that mean it's alright to steal it from the store. I couldn't find another way to entertain myself so I stole it officer. Oh, well mikael says it's alright if you don't make a lot of money to steal stuff to entertain yourself with, so it's alright go home and drink it.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Let's just hope UbiSoft doesn't read this.
Added services?
What an utter crock of horse shit. Pure, grade A, USDA choice lawn fertilizer. I'm talking primo dung, the kind your Aunt Milly used to rub on your upper lip so she could say you gave her a moustache ride.
What a pity. Ruse was one of the major RTSs that I was looking forward to this year. Pity Ubisoft is distributing it.
I guess I'll just have to keep my hopes on Supcom 2 and the next Total War game . . .
... and I'll be avoiding anything tainted by Yves Guillemot and his four brothers, just as I've done for Smedley and Mcquaid after experiencing their inexcusable management of customer service with Everquest.
Maybe they should hire some of the hackers... apparently they can add these "services" without requiring a permanent online connection -- and they don't even need the original source code.
And like every DRM scheme before it, this stops piracy... how exactly?
The people buying the games are choosing to do so. It's best not to cripple the game to the point that the pirate version is inherently superior to the one that costs money.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Well, from my side, I'm one of the people who buys the product (or doesn't bother with it; I don't pirate but increasingly choose not to purchase based on DRM intrusiveness).
So, to an extent, I do say how much companies are allowed to make. As does everyone. We allow them to make as much as we feel like paying for what they provide.
If everyone decides that their product is crap, or that the downsides (DRM) outweigh the bonus (entertainment), then we agree that they're allowed to make nothing by not purchasing the game.
Rather than concentrate on how much pirating goes on, they need to work out how the decisions they make affect their paying base. If the paying base reduces, they're doing something wrong.
I usually don't let my guests pay for their drinks.
For a regular beer, that's quite expensive, but not nearly as expensive as beers tend to be in Scandinavia. I've heard $10 - $20 is quite normal there.
But there are many other kinds of drinks. If you go to a good whisky bar, you can easily spend $100 without getting all that drunk.
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.
You mean they don't care about sales to me anyway? I never by a game right away. I always wait until it's patched, there are some mods, prizes go down, and hopefully there's a no-cd patch out.
I can't afford to by beer at my local liquor store. I make my own it cost me less then $0.80 a bottle, it's stronger and has much more flavor then what I can buy in the store. Liquor store beer works out to be nearly $2.00 a bottle where I am.
I take the same stance with games; if a store wants $60 for a game that I think I want, but I'm not sure I'll pirate it and see if it's worth all the hype. If it's ok I'll wait for the price to drop. If it's really good I'll sacrifice something else to buy it.
I've been a sucker too many times buying games for the $60 standard price because I've read reviews of the game being so great or seen a commercial where basically only the best parts of the game are shown. Then I'm extremely disappointed when I start playing or try to play the game, yes I've been screwed over by DRMs in the past. The industry is getting what they deserve as far as I'm concerned. I find it hilarious that by trying to fix the problem with DRMs all they're doing is alienating they're existing paying customers and turning them to piracy in order to play a game they legitimately bought. I'm sure once a lot people finds out how easy it is to pirate a game, and how much cheaper it is, few end up going back to buying games before at least trying a pirate version first.
I can't afford to by beer at my local liquor store. I make my own it cost me less then $0.80 a bottle, it's stronger and has much more flavor then what I can buy in the store. Liquor store beer works out to be nearly $2.00 a bottle where I am.
I take the same stance with games; if a store wants $60 for a game that I think I want, but I'm not sure I'll pirate it and see if it's worth all the hype.
That's not the same thing. In your example if you wouldn't want to pay for the game, you'd make your own.
€3.70 is about $8.00 Canadian. I have in the past paid $6.00 at a bar for a beer. If you buy a case of beer at the liquor store it'll run you about $2.00 a bottle. I make my own beer for lest then $0.80 a bottle. Of course when you're talking about prices you have to factor in standard of living to. $6.00 might be a lot to me, but for someone born with the silver spoon it might be like throwing a penny in a bucket of piss.
Actually it's not really that much, usually $5-10 in bars (don't know about Norway tho). Then there's the 0.33l Smirnoff Ice bottles that cost $10+ even in normal or cheap places, and then like you say theres all those other kinds of drinks that tend to cost more than beer.
Their system works by having the game send messages to a server to authenticate it. I bet there are an unlimited number of programmers out there capable of writing a version of the server that would intercept the messages the game was sending and fire back an appropriate response.
I'm sure you'll see once the first game that has this type of DRM on it comes out one of three things will happen. 1) People will put up so much of a stink because they keep getting disconnected or can't play the games they've bought, Ubisoft will be forced to do away with the DRM. 2) Someone will break Ubisoft's DRM. 3) People will stop buying Ubisoft games altogether and Ubisoft will blame piracy for the decline in sales.
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.
I used to just buy games that I thought that looked fun to play. After being burnt a couple of times I no longer buy EA games and I certainly don't buy them if they have securerom. I try the demo. I try the torrent. If I like what I see I buy the game (not from EA). Now I have to add ubisoft on the list. Thanks for the advice.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
You're oversimplifying it. It's trivial to add encryption to the protocol, which means you're going to be disassembling and debugging the code. Majority of those unlimited number of programmers drop off.
Then the new server will need to implement saving/loading and all other features the Ubisoft server does. OK, still fair enough.
What about when the game dynamically pulls some small pieces of content or gameplay scripts for the game when you reach specific parts? You can't program that in to your generic server, and to get all of that content you need to play the game in every possible way so you're sure you've got all the pieces, and still you can never be sure about it. That progress would be impossible with any little bit more open game too.
I'll be there at 7
rewriting history since 2109
Except laptops capable of playing games are more popular than ever - and laptops are frequently taken to locations with no internet access.
Yes, because dragging the entire PC down to the internet cafe instead of a 10€ USB key also makes sense.
That's because your initial analogy was broken.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Once every game need a connection to the mothership to run, they could as well (and probably WILL) put some of the game code on the server. Not critical code that renders the frame, but what about the menus, options, all that slow stuff that wouldn't overload their servers. Then once they do that, the pirated version needs to fill gapping holes in the game with rewriten code ; a bit like reverse engineering a MMORPG server. Good luck with releasing pirated versions before the next version of the game is out.
A big FUCK YOU to Ubisoft. When I read about this a few weeks back, I could hardly believe it. This DRM goes WAY beyond reason and straight into absurdity. Is this how you should treat your customers today?
Ubisioft, you just GUARANTEED that I will NEVER buy one of your games again. As a long-time and frequent PC gamer going all the way back to DOS, I have never seen arrogance like this before. Boycott Ubisoft games and take the message straight to their bottom line. Of course they will blame everything on piracy as usual, so let them eat crow.
Horseshit. Around forty percent of the US still do not have broadband and dial-up has never been reliable about disconnects.
I tried to install my steam backups when I had only crappy dialup, and I couldn't even do that. Steam doesn't resume steam client updates after connection failure, and it refuses to bless your installs to playable until after it is updated. Only game updates are resumed... And in order to play online, not that you can do that with dialup with any game engine since Quakeworld, you have to update the games too, which can run into the GB. Looks like we can add Ubisoft to the list of logos to avoid if you're a dialup user, but it's by no means alone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
C'est la moderation.
Pirates are a part of the problem, but they're only a function of the overall system. Stronger and stronger DRM creates a self-fulfilling prophecy:
1) People pirate your game.
2) You put strong DRM on your game to stop pirates.
3) Pirates are only slowed down, not stopped. Repeat Step 2, but stronger.
4) The DRM is draconian enough that people won't buy the game because of it. People being as they are, a good portion of them pirate the game.
5) Oh noes! The piracy numbers went up?! I guess we need stronger DRM!
Repeat forever and ever.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
No, he hunted it down. Went into the woods, found some cracked version tracks, lied in wait, and *bang*, bagged him a cracked version. Damn kids with your newfangled internets and webgasms. Why, back in my day, when we wanted to pirate a game, we hunted it down. We'd go into the woods, search around for cracked version tracks, and then once we found them, see, we'd lie in... oh, you've heard this story already? Well... get off my lawn!
I'll go a step further and say, in the 14 years I've...had a friend who knows a guy who has downloaded warez, said guy has encountered one malware, and that was in a keygen. Not only do the various distributors have reputations to maintain, but people just in the scene tend to point out any malware pretty quickly.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
And how many of those 15% will refuse to buy because they get fed up with the idea that whenever their provider drops them for no appearant reason (I dunno about your provider, but mine is prone to hicckups) their progress is nixed? Especially in the light of games with "achivements" like "play through this without reverting to a savegame"?
It might not hit hard at the first game with this kind of customer patronizing (note the customer here, not player. A player who is no customer because he copied it will not even be affected by the whole spiel). But I'm fairly sure people will notice (duh...) and they will remember and start looking at the DRM of games, to avoid games that offer them a frustrating experience, not because the game sucks but because its protection does.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're missing out on some great games then if you don't even consider any EA games. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is coming in a few days, Mass Effect 2 came a while ago and Dragon Age earlier, along many others. They don't even use DRM anymore.
Yep - it's a shame that legitimate customers have to be treated like would-be pirates, whereas piracy makes it as simple as
1) download via torrent client
2) install and apply crack
3) profit
Getting Battlefield 2142 (legit, of course) working was quite a dance for me... first I had to use EAs sucky download manager, then I had to create two accounts at different EA sites and get them linked (it wasn't exactly obvious how or what you need to do), and even then I couldn't play the game, bombing out with a nondescript securom error message. Turned out it considers sysinternals' Process Explorer a "dangerous thing to have running" - like, wtf?
If I'm going to be treated as a villain when purchasing a game, I might as well just pirate it and save myself the hassle.
Coffee-driven development.
From my experience if one person can do it, so can an unspecified amount of others. All it takes is time.
Do we REALLY have to wait for the game to release before we file? :)
In other news: Cracked pirated copies remain DRM free.
Once again DRM only hurts those in good faith while doing nothing to deter piracy.
I don't blame them either, and until recently, before the push for more and more insane DRM hoops to jump through set in, it was actually a good way to discourage at least "casual" copying.
But when it comes to DRM, it is all about acceptance. And I mean acceptance on the user's side. And of course comfort. Hence Steam and similar platforms are popular. They are convenient and the invasion is (at least to the eye of the casual user) minimal. Hey, nonexistant, you don't even need to search for that CD!
When the nuisance exceeds the acceptance level, people start to look around for a solution. It's no longer comfortable to "just buy" the game. Cue schoolyard:
Geek: Hey, I got me now $cool_game!
Non-Geek: Yeah, me too, but it sucks, I get booted off every few minutes 'cause $provider stinks and discon's me.
Geek: Huh? You bought it?
Non-Geek: Yeah sure, why?
Geek: Dude, I haven't bought one in ages. I'll get you a copy tomorrow.
Non-Geek installs and is happy. Next day:
Non-Geek: Thanks a bunch, that fixed it. What's that?
Geek: Cracked copy. Got it from $torrent_site.
Non-Geek: Uh? Can ya show me how?
Geek: Sure, drop by after school.
Let's rewind and see that dialogue with CD only DRM:
Geek: Hey, I got me now $cool_game! ...
Non-Geek: Yeah, ain't it awesome? They really make the movments and gore look realistic!
Geek: Yeah, tried using a rocket launcher into a packed room? Paint it red, baby!
No discussion of how to get the game or how to get rid of the game stopper. Sure, Geek didn't buy the game in this version either. But he will not anyway. No matter what you do. It is not possible to stop a professional cracker (professional in the sense of "knows what he does", not "does it for money") from cracking a game. And ONE crack, world wide, is enough to crack the game for good, distributing it via the internet is trivial and fast.
So the difference in DRM only affects whether Non-Geek buys the game. Nothing else.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
They could use honey instead of vinegar. Offer rich online experience, multiplayer, mods, ladders, community support. The people would want that and buy a legitimate copy.
But no, they're actually telling the customer "We know you're a petty criminal, we'll be watching you all the time, so you can't steal our precious product. Pants down and prepare for cavity search". Good luck with that attitude.
That's not the same thing. In your example if you wouldn't want to pay for the game, you'd make your own.
If I sample a beer someone else has made or at a beer show and I like i I buy the kit, if I don't like it I don't buy it. How is that different from sampling a game?
And that's basically the whole problem with DRM and software. Take a look at how software compares to real goods.
When you buy real goods instead of stealing them, you usually get more out of the deal. You have first of all warranty (something you certainly do not have when you steal something or buy stolen merchandize). And there's often something more on top, there may be additional discounts, in case of hardware there's support, and with more expensive goods often a trade-up option when you reach the end of your model's lifetime (so you stay with the same brand), etc. None of these advantages are yours if you buy something that "fell off a truck".
Now let's see buying software vs. copying it. When you buy software, you get to jump through a few hoops to use it, you get to "register" it, you have to let it install dodgy drivers, it might be encrypted or even run in something like an "internal emulation" or VM that slows the whole thing down considerably (I'm looking at you, Cubase!), you must not lose an important piece of hardware (medium or dongle), some even come with a full blown rootkit to infect your computer. Nothing of this happens with copied software (well, aside from the potential rootkit if you happen to be conned). It just works.
And here's the problem. Bought software actually has less value to the end user than copied software. It is the exact reverse model of usual goods where you get additional value with an honest purchase.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Agreed. I'm also pretty sure their outrageous figures, 85% of their clients pirate their games, is a number made up to give to their share holders as an excuse for making crappy games and thus loosing money. If they can't justify to their share holders why their loosing money and what they're going to do about it (DRM in this case), their share holders are going to take their investments else where. Slapping a new DRM on a product isn't for the benefit of the people who buy the game it's a reaction to keep corporate investments.
$100... that's £64. That's ten average-quality cocktails in a bar in London (the cocktails will be made properly, but with cheaper ingredients and small measures). Go somewhere fancy in Central London and you'll only get six cocktails for the same money. I could drink them and find my own way home, although I might not take the most direct route ;-).
Go to a normal London pub and you'll get at least 18 pints (~8 litres). Except you won't, as you'll be refused service before that point.
(Go somewhere outside London, like the north of England, and you'd be able to buy ~40 pints.)
Alternatively, if you just want to show off your money, pick a really upmarket bar and buy £100 vodkas.
>>Internet connections these days are pretty damn reliable. Mine croaks maybe once or twice a year, and usually only for a few hours at worst.
So losing all your progress once or twice a year is fine by you? If I lost my data because the internet went down after, say, finally beating a particularly tough license test in Gran Turismo, I think I'd throw a brick through the company's front window.
My internet connection through DSL and now U-Verse dropped probably forty times in the last year, with 11 service calls to AT&T needed until they finally fixed the problem. The worst was around Thanksgiving, when it went out for an entire week, and I was stuck having to do all my work on a tight deadline at the local Denny's.
Except if they roll out this insane DRM to the rest of their games, they won't be retired in ten years because they'll have driven the company into the dirt.
Yes and all it's going to cost you is YOUR SOUL!!!!! *insert evil laugh here*
I'm pretty sure the devil couldn't have made that pitch any better himself
It doesn't seem that way. It is that way.
DRM is usually no big deal to overcome for cracker groups. As you correctly identified, it only takes ONE group to overcome it. And after it's gone, the only ones affected by it are the ones that bought the game honestly.
Nobody who ever downloaded a game ever crossed anything resembling DRM. It's been stripped clean before the game reaches them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In the UK if you make your own motor vehicle fuel (e.g. biodiesel from waste cooking oil) you're supposed to pay the fuel duty on it (roughly 57p/litre, IIRC), even if it's for your personal use.
I don't think there's any similar rule for home-made wine, but there might be in some countries.
If games are dumped out when a connection to an Ubisoft server is lost, then there is a serious problem awaiting and an obvious target for attack as well. Send a DDoS to Ubisoft's servers and kill all games running everywhere. I think that is quite likely to happen. It reminds me of what happens to Blackberries when RIM's network goes down... it gets a LOT of attention and people get pissed off when they realize how dependant they are on this single vendor.
So, a simulated Ubisoft server? I expect to see some pop up in 5, 4, 3, ...
Then you should go to a friend's house or a game store that has the game playing on one of the consoles (unfortunately, this leaves PCs out of the mix) and "sample" the gameplay there.
"sampling" a game by downloading the entire content and then making the decision - well, there are a lot of people who just wouldn't buy the game at that point because they already have the full game, not just a sample. I'm actually amazed that there aren't more demo or shareware type installs of games - I recently tried Need for Speed Shift - thought about purchasing, but not for $60. I'm just going to wait for it to drop to the bargain bin at this point.
Karnal
Well... there's actually a fair amount of malware, but if you're running AdAware / Spybot / Antivirus fully patched it mitigates most of it.
... more draconian drm...
Every time someone uses the phrase "draconian DRM" take a shot. Cue liver failure in 3... 2... 1...
Yeah, lucky you. My ISP reset my IP every 36h and they make sure it is another one. A bitch in online games in a middle of a fight were it is a garanted death :-(
They are not even slowed down. It goes more like this:
1) You bring a game into the market.
2) Pirates release a cracked version the same day.
3) Your next game has stronger DRM.
4) Pirates still release the cracked version the same day, your customers have trouble with the new check, people who downloaded it do not.
5) You implement DRM close to "hand over your firstborn as hostage".
6) Pirates release the cracked game the same day you do, customers refuse to hand over firstborn and instead either don't play it or copy it.
7) You wonder how piracy numbers go up despite more and more DRM in your product.
My only hope is that 8) is: You file for Chapter 7.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then you should go to a friend's house or a game store that has the game playing on one of the consoles (unfortunately, this leaves PCs out of the mix) and "sample" the gameplay there.
I don't generally go over to friends places to sit around and play video games. Besides my friends have a similar opinions to myself and don't generally buy games without trying them first. Does it matter if I'm the one downloading the game or playing it at a friends who's downloaded it?
well, there are a lot of people who just wouldn't buy the game at that point because they already have the full game, not just a sample.
And there's a lot of people who wouldn't have bought the game in the first place. If I can't make an informed decision about how I'm going to spend money on something I don't have to have (entertainment), then I'm not going to spend it. A lot of game companies are very protective about who gets to review their games. They only want hype and to stir people into a frenzy to buy them. The result is "tricking" people into spending money by making them think the need the latest and greatest. Cut scenes, which is what the company's do let the public see, are nice and shiny, but hardly make a good game. A game worth buying is a game I'm going to play over and over, not just once or half way through.
$8 for a six pack of Moosehead.
$12 for a 12 pack of lakeport.
Cheap rocker bars selling $1-$2 bottles of Molson.
I think the problem with you, is that your standards are far too high.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Screw the costs, £3.3bn would mean (approximately) 82,500,000 units shipped each quarter. Even WoW has only sold ~12 million copies worldwide in 5 years (600,000 a quarter), so you'd need 138 games of WoW-level popularity every quarter to shift that many copies.
Send a letter? What is this, the 1970's? Get real, nobody is going to read your letter or care what it says and it will be junked as soon as it is opened. They are not going to rush your letter to the CEO personally letting him know that you are unsatisfied. The upper management won't care about some complaining doofus still writing letters, griping about something or other. You're targeting the wrong people with your letters and there is not enough distribution to them.
Instead write a Blog entry or a Forum post and get vocal about the reason why you won't buy the game. Have some people reply to what you wrote and start up an angry thread. Target the people who care about the issue, because obviously the game company doesn't otherwise it wouldn't be implemented, and try to reach a wider audience regarding your grievance. The more people who hear about the problem the more they know and the less likely they will be to spend money on some game where everyone is complaining about.
Would you buy a product that had terrible reviews online and by word of mouth because everyone and their aunt knew it sucked and they found out about the suckyness beforehand?
Of course the cracker might not care - pirated games are very often unstable and buggy compared to the retail version, as they only care about getting you to install their virus anyway.
Reality FAIL!
There is a war going on for your mind.
midicolorians! ... and it's not because I feel the crushing defeat of never again being able to pirate an Ubisoft title. Because lets face it, the protection will either be patched out OR an auth emulator will be written. Then it's left to Ubisofts pointy haired bosses to try to scheme something even more sinister to visit upon their paying customers.
"If there aren't any cracked versions available for the first months" Months? Months?! You must live in some alternative reality*. I constantly heard about new games cracked BEFORE release. I bet in your pink universe with fluffy clouds and sun with smile hackers and crackers are powerless against DRM. Welcome to so-called Reality. * Read: you're fucking idiot.
What modern Obelix would say today? Of course, "Those crazy Americans!".
I know this isnt a perfect solution... but what if the game companies banded together and you could buy a hardware key, you activate your software online and your hardware key is updated. Then you can play offline all you want as long as your hardware key is installed. You can then install the software anywhere you want you just have to have your hardware key plugged in to play it. The drm would be fairly effective and harder to break since it would be hardware. You wouldnt have to worry about their servers being taken offline too. You put a 1gb chip in there and you could hold the drm keys for 1000's of games on a single key. You could even build in temporary drm keys for demos... (example: Your temporary key lets you play the game unfettered for 30 minutes without the option to save or continue. Then you can make the decision to buy. The iso is available to download and burn yourself or go pick it up retail). If you keep the price of the key down to 10-15 dollars as a one time purchase or free with certain new releases, then the only people looking for the pirated copies are the people who never have any intention of playing anyway. Thoughts?
And who are you to tell how much companies should be allowed to make?
We're the consumers. You know, the people who actually, through the supply/demand of the marketplace, ultimately decide how much their product is worth? Who are they to tell us that they have a right to make $X million per quarter, and they need special laws to prop up their broken business models?
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
You conveniently left out how much their costs are.
Irrelevant. The figure is SALES, not profit. Cost has nothing to do with the revenue figure. If you're losing money with 400+ million pounds per quarter, er, may I suggest you leave the airline business?
By the way the doc I meant to link to is here and it's euros not pounds. I blame the error on it being 3 am and too much pain medication.
And who are you to tell how much companies should be allowed to make?
Oh they can try to make as much as they want. I'm just a guy with a brain that destroyed the 85% piracy argument. Like someone else said, that would be 82 million copies sold PER QUARTER. Uh yeah. Sure. They're losing 85%...
But then again I'm sure you believe in UFO's and Al Gore.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
7) You wonder how piracy numbers go up despite more and more DRM in your product.
My only hope is that 8) is: You file for Chapter 7.
Wasn't EA trying to buy Ubisoft not long ago? This DRM scheme is worse than shooting themselves in the foot, it's dropping a NUKE on their foot! EA will buy them for pennies on the dollar. That is, if there is enough left of Ubisoft after the outrage over this extreme form of DRM destroys them to be worth even wanting.
Even clueless EA has learned to not use DRM anymore.
Corporatism != Free Market
LOL, I have a lot of problems. One of which is where I live. I know out west beer is a lot cheaper then it is here in the Maritime. Here's the catalog http://www.mynslc.com/Products/01BEER, sure there are plenty of cheaper beers, but I could also piss in a bottle and save some money to. As you said my standards high.
Well, it's so annoying that nobody buys the game, so nobody gets a copy to pirate off.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
We're the consumers. You know, the people who actually, through the supply/demand of the marketplace, ultimately decide how much their product is worth? Who are they to tell us that they have a right to make $X million per quarter, and they need special laws to prop up their broken business models?
You are slightly wrong. They actually have the RIGHT to make $UNLIMITED a quarter, if the market will support it, ie: if the demand is high enough for their product.
What they don't have the right to is to make $X a quarter REGARDLESS of market demand for their product (ie: to still make $X even if their product stinks to high heaven and no one will buy it). That is what the IP lobby is essentially demanding for their dead and gone business model to be supported with laws for. I still contend that the music industry is dying not because of the internet but because their product ultimately sucks. Quality has been collapsing over the last couple decades to the point that there is no legitimate reason to EXPECT there to be market demand for it.
Ubisoft engaging in this extreme of a level of Digital Restrictions Management makes the failure of their games to have market demand a foregone conclusion. They will, of course, blame piracy, when instead they should blame themselves.
Corporatism != Free Market
What? whose cost? Wtf are you talking about? In what sane world does a giant defense contractor General Dynamix (market cap 27.04 Billion) selling high tech fighting hardware MOVE less money than a much smaller game company Ubisoft (market cap 909.62 Million) hypothetically loses in a quarter? Only in the made up world of piracy losses.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
Blizzard already does this with WoW, why the big deal? It is a proven business model that works for making money endlessly
I'm no extremist on the view of DRM but this nailed in the coffin that I won't buy AC2. Sad... the first one was very enjoyable.
Modern Warfare 2 topped $1 billion in sales a month ago, and they're sold something like 15-16 million copies.
And that's just a single game and these are huge publishers. Selling 82 million copies between all their games isn't as large amount as you think.
"Time to die"
Would you people PLEASE stop shelling out your hard earned cash on companies that insist on fucking you over like this? Mod me flamebait if you want, but Ubisoft should die and their stockholders should all lose the money they invested in the company. It's the only way this shit will stop. If DRM kills Ubisoft, other companies will think twice about these stupid DRM schemes.
I guess they learned from Sony that even putting a rootkit on music CDs won't stop people from buying their poison products. Jesus H. Christ, people, stop letting these bastards fuck you over. Put them out of business.
Free Martian Whores!
Except there are plenty of people who don't go to bars precisely because it is too expensive, a lot of these people drink at private parties
They still pay money for the drinks, whether liquor or soda or juice. They are still paying for entertainment.
No, not necessarily.
First, buying beverages from a super market, specially when buying large quantities at once, is an order of magnitude cheaper than paying for drinks in a bar. You have to pay around 100$ for yourself alone in a bar, but with 50$ in a super market you could buy enough to entertain a dozen of persons.
Second, specially in south and eastern Europa there are a lot of people having a grand-dad or a dad supplying them with "home-made" grappa or slivovitza. The total cost of production for such house-made stuff are abysmal (see the home-brewer in this thread for another example) and aren't even paid by the people themselves, but the brewing/distilling parents.
Same goes in the video game world :
Some won't buy the game on release but will wait until it is available for 10$ as a bargain offer 6 months later.
Other won't pay at all but will borrow the media from some friend who has finished the game.
Even if these are legal, none of them will show up in the "money earned during the first 5 weeks after release".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Bring it on ourselves !! We pirate games because it's easy. If your customers somehow took 85% of your revenue, you'd do something - anything - to stop the hemorage. From another vantage, your boss deducted 85% from your pay, and "not because he needed but because he could - he would not have hired you if he couldn't". Sound faimilar? You'd be screaming bloody murder, hypocrits !! If you don't want the game, or you don't want the job, go elsewhere.
You bring up a fair point, but the problem is this, DRM doesn't work, and I don't think it ever will. People who pirate games/movies/music/whatever have found ways around all forms of drm. And they haven't just gotten around it, they've done it quickly. This is simply hurting the customers of the game and I think ubisoft has finally found a way of making drm ruin a game. If you're system hiccups you'll lose connection and the game. As far as I know previous drm has only kept people from loading the game if it failed but wouldn't boot a game mid play. This is going to cause the customers to drop the game and the pirates will continue to do their thing because trust me, this drm isn't any more bullet proof than the last batch.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
Splinter Cell 2; one of the first Starforce protected games.
Those 40% probably don't overlap much with the people who play Assassins Creed.
Modern Warfare 2 is a huge outlier; very few games sell anywhere near that many copies, once you get out of the top 10 you're looking at 2 million copies tops and that's across the whole life of the game.
I'd lose my progress once or twice a year if I did nothing all year but play Assassins Creed. Please think through your arguments first! And yes for people with shitty internet connections this will suck. But for people with children that eat DVDs, it will be better. Short of UbiSoft becoming a registered charity, some people will be inconvenienced by copy protection. The goal is to minimize that number.
But that's exactly the point! Ubi wants a few weeks or maybe, just maybe, a few months of no piracy.
Clovis
^ Clovis, look! It's that guy you are!
$10-$20 per drink?? Jesus, i can get sloshed on a $20 here in the states. Granted i live in a podunk little town, and a mixed drink will cost you (on average) about $2.50
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Nobody who ever downloaded a game ever crossed anything resembling DRM. It's been stripped clean before the game reaches them
Not true. There are some that use more subtle checks that corrupt the game, and yes, these have made it to the wild. GoG recently got bit by one of these, it wasn't properly removed by the publisher. I recall some other game (Spyro?) that couldn't be completed with a cracked build, it made some things unavailable.
That's actually exactly what I meant. :) They are free to make as much money as the market supports, but they don't have a right to make money period, regardless of demand.
I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
It never will, it's theoretically impossible; you simultaneously trust the client with the code and don't trust the client with the code. There is one and only one form that is uncrackable - client sends up mouse / keyboard, server sends down screen updates. No other code involved on the client.
This DRM scheme is worse than shooting themselves in the foot, it's dropping a NUKE on their foot!
You're making an assumption that doesn't hold. This is dropping a nuke on their foot in the PC marketplace. That's not the only marketplace that Ubi is in. AC2 has been released on consoles, sold well, dropping in price just before the release of some new DLC. The AC2 that this affects hasn't even hit the market yet.\
Besides, it's not in their interests; the scene groups largely do what they do for kudos and churning out malware-infected releases would seriously damage their reputation.
Which is the funniest part. Companies used to use this very strategy to keep customers and make new ones. Now it's the "pirates" that are using it and the legit companies are the jagoffs fucking up your computer. It may not technically be irony but the juxtaposition is astounding.
$5 drink + $1 tip = $6... or 2 drinks an hour for 8 hours, which is just about how things go for me.
Yes, this is Wisconsin.
One more reason to avoid purchasing anything that is DRM'd.
--Jason--
You're right, and they'll most likely get it at the convince of the people who buy their games.
I've got satellite internet, which is usually touted as the alternative to dial-up for people in areas without broadband access. What actually ends up happening is I get speeds of 3X dial-up speed that sends in pulses. It's fine for web browsing, but since the satellite waits between each pulse I can't stream video or play games over the internet.
I imagine there will be people who will think "Hey, this won't affect me, I've got high-speed internet" and buy the game, then get severely pissed when they can't even get the thing to start.
Yes, but with a DVD check, as long as you have the DVD, the game works. With Internet auth, it works as long as Ubisoft deigns to let it work. I'm not certain that that's much of an improvement.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
I think this might be naive of me, so anyone who wants to can correct my foolishness, but surely if you buy the game and also crack it(after you've bought it) all you're doing is violating the EULA?
My point is: why on earth would we want to add another point of failure to the gaming environment? Requiring online access in Mass Effect 2 is annoying enough as it is... after you turn on the game, there's a 10 or 20 second delay while it tries to access the overloaded Cerberus Network servers, and it won't let you start the game until it downloads the useless MOTD from the servers.
There's absolutely no excuse for a single player offline game to quit running if the internet connection goes down. I've had routers in the past (most of them Netgears) who would crap out or reboot at random intervals, and everyone's had trouble in the past with wireless connections being unreliable. It's not just the internet connection, but all these other semi-flaky technologies that you're making the equivalent of a computer crash for a system that completely doesn't need it.
And that's just a single game and these are huge publishers. Selling 82 million copies between all their games isn't as large amount as you think.
But wait - you forgot to apply the 15% metric to modern warfare 2. Since 85% of sales are lost to piracy, Modern Warfare "should" have sold $13.3 billion dollars, right? Or do people only pirate Ubisoft games?
So let's see, Modern Warfare 2 should have sold not 15 million copies but 100 million copies, right? Wait, since Modern Warfare 2 doesn't use Ubisoft's draconian DRM but plain old secuROM AND it was available on the internet BEFORE the launch, this must mean that even MORE "sales were lost", right? Perhaps the real sales figure should have been closer to 500 million? 1 billion copies? Maybe everyone on the planet was going to buy it?
The truth is that games go stale very quickly on the shelf. Within a year, prices get slashed. After a couple years, you can usually pick them up for under $10. After 5 years or so, you have to bundle them with other software to move them at all. So I encourage you to hold the price constant while you multiply it by the "number of copies sold" and invent imaginary numbers to try to justify your claim. But just like Hollywood movies - if you didn't make the money in the first few weeks, you're probably not going to make much more. The income/time curve looks like 1/x. I assure you "Modern Warfare 2" is not going to make ANOTHER billion over its lifetime. Everyone who was desperate for a copy already has one, and now it's up to impulse sales.
Plus we were talking about PC sales (which is where DRM is required and "piracy" happens), but the Modern Warfare figure is TOTAL sales on all platforms. Very much an apples:oranges comparison.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
...even then I couldn't play the game, bombing out with a nondescript securom error message. Turned out it considers sysinternals' Process Explorer a "dangerous thing to have running" - like, wtf?
Just wait for V2.0!
SecuRomV2.0 Error: SecuRom has detected your OS is fully-patched and up to date, you have a properly-configured firewall & antivirus, and your OS appears to be free of malware/spyware. You obviously are far too competent at computer administration to be allowed to run this game as you present a high piracy risk. Please downgrade your computer-related knowledge & abilities and re-install.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The most anying thing with DRM is that in fact it just annoy those who pay for the game. Those that pirate it, dont have that hassle.. and since I do pay for my games, well that just mean I'll stop buying Ubisoft games altogether. Maybe i'll just go knock at their door to tell them. They have an office 2 floors up from where I work.
I used to be a big supporter of Ubisoft... I've purchased their games since the original Unreal all the way through the first three Splinter Cell titles. But once their DRM started getting burdomsome I stopped buying them. I will continue to not buy Ubisoft games because of their ridiculous choices in DRM enforcement. Luckily there are plenty of good games to buy from other companies that don't saddle me with such schemes.
Yeah PC sales actually we're a lot less - this despite the fact that big part of it is online multiplayer, which encourages people to buy it since they can't play multiplayer with the pirated version. Piracy rate with MW2 was most likely less than the 85%. Single player games don't have the same advantage.
They actually have the RIGHT to make $UNLIMITED a quarter, if the market will support it
Firstly I want you to know I wholeheartedly agree with your post - but I can't resist an attempt at humor:
Whoa there! You obviously have never heard of governments and taxes... The minute they make more than $[Magic Trigger Number], they will find themselves legislated and subject to very special taxes. Because after all capitalism can only stand so much profit before big brother wants a piece of it. After all, the government works so hard to get it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
Nonsense.
Any game developer that's honest with himself realizes that the "pirates" aren't his worst enemy.
He has to worry about other game developers, musicians, film makers and your girlfriend.
Pirates are pretty low on the list actually.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Having thought about this for a little while, it occurs to me that it's not so difficult as I envisioned, initially, to comprehend why they think they can get away with this.
It's due to the enviable, massive success of MMO gaming, thesedays - all of which is basically running this type of DRM, albeit in a socially acceptable manner, by virtue of the fact that they are "online" games, only.
Companies wanting this sort of DRM and to truly combat privacy need to build it in conjunction with a legitimate online component. You see this practice becoming more prevalent with companies choosing to do away with standard server models, instead, taking full control of their online component with their own multiplayer deployment. Sure, you get some industrious individuals managing to get onto these much more secure networks, but all in all, this is a form of DRM that is actually quite effective.
I record my sleeptalking
One of the more recent things I heard about ME2 was that it required you tie the game to your EA account, even on the 360. Maybe I heard incorrectly but that's been one of the major reasons I haven't bought this game. I got ME1 as a second-hand purchase, but I refuse to buy and game that's going to lock me in so that I can't resell the damn thing or lend it to a friend, etc.
Please correct me if I heard wrong, because it does sound like a good game, just with evil DRM.
If you pirate a game, then by definition you're not a client, right???
This is the sig that says NI (again)
Actual crackers have a very dim view of virus writers. These are two
entirely separate groups of people. Crackers are also a distinct group
from professional pirates that sell cracked works for money. Real
crackers despise this sort of person too.
Most of the virus problems I have ever heard about with games has been
with the official factory stamped copies.
The idea that cracked game -> virus is just industry propaganda.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Agree, my comcast probably goes down about 25 times a year, which isn't that much...but when my internet is down is generally when I want to play a game...so... yeah.
People will still get the RTMs and they will still have pirated copies out before launch just watch. The community of crackers is most times a lot smarter than the people who wrote the DRM in the first place.
If I steal a beer, the store is deprived of a beer which they paid for and could otherwise sell. If I "steal" a video game the people selling the game are deprived of exactly nothing (except the money from my purchase, and not even that assuming I would rather have nothing than pay for their game).
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I don't want to spend $50 to rent a game that only works until Ubi takes the servers offline permanently, there are a lot of games I come back to years later to play just for the hell of it.
I mean, people spend $100 a night at a bar constantly, for a few hours of fun.
$100 at a bar? You'd be so drunk that you'd need to be carried out of the bar at the end of the evening.
Or is booze really so expensive in the States?
Or do these $100 include the hookers?
It's that expensive. If you're in a bar to drink (as opposed to cruise, socialize, play video poker, etc), odds are you enjoy drinking. Beers are over $7 bucks in a lot of places, and a shot of real liquor will cost you over $10. Per shot.
touché
That might depend on where you are located. I've heard of court cases recently in the US where someone was actually found "guilty" for just circumventing DRM technology (regardless of a prior purchase) and I know there are many more such cases in the works.
Remember to maintain your supply of
I can't describe how excited I am to see the /. story on that!
*goes to 4chan and starts the Operation Ubistorm meme*
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
The problem with this analogy is that games, once made, aren't really scarce. If I consume a beer, it's gone. No one else gets it. If I make a copy of Warcraft 99999 Extreme Edition, I deprive no one else of a copy. My hard drive can fit at least a few hundred copies of certain games (eg Diablo II), and my ISP cap would let me download many hundreds of games per month. This is a different problem from the music industry, because in the music industry you can still make money by providing live shows and the like, even if you never sell an album. In fact, for them, piracy may even help them make more money on concerts.
Games have no such outlet; I don't want to go watch a live performance of a game. What I think is needed is for the game industry to find other forms of revenue that realize this situation. MMO games are very easy to fit into this model: give the game away, but charge for access. Other online games might charge for multiplayer to generate revenue. Store copies can still charge more, because there are always people that will pay for those, so the game company can make a profit there. I am also more inclined to pay smaller developers for more innovative or niche games than I am willing to pay for Generic FPS 900 from MegaGameCorp. Maybe they can do the whole Radiohead "name your own price" thing. Apart from changes in the revenue model, I have a feeling that the whole draconian DRM problem will only get worse.
SSC
I have done the same thing, but ended up buying the games later because I liked them. Others I passed on completely. For example, I bought Hearts of Iron 2 after downloading it. Buying games from that publisher gives benefits, like getting access to beta patches and tech support (they will not do tech support without a serial key).
SSC
Ever heard of Metropolis? Famous movie from the silent film era?
Parts of it were lost, but a few years ago most of those were dicovered (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)#Rediscovery) on a 16mm copy in Argentine that was not destroyed (as required) after showing the film.
Technically that makes the cinema owner from the 1920s a pirate, but thanks to his breach of contract(?) Metropolis is almost complete again.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Not entirely. While the biggest name cracker groups generally deserve their reputation, there are lots of scumbags out there who try to mess them up with infected re-packs, malware-laden websites, etc...
You're assuming they won't patch it out when that comes.
Don't believe me? I just installed Bioshock last week. It downloaded the DRM stuff during install as usual, and had to activate... but the install limitations was removed.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/40241/Ubisoft-Allegedly-Releases-Crack-As-Official-Fix
If it detects a pirated game, does it try to kill you with a forklift?
What is the big deal? I hate DRM as much as the next guy, but nobody is complaining to Blizzard that they can't play their game offline.
Whoa there! You obviously have never heard of governments and taxes... The minute they make more than $[Magic Trigger Number], they will find themselves legislated and subject to very special taxes. Because after all capitalism can only stand so much profit before big brother wants a piece of it. After all, the government works so hard to get it.
Absolutely true. When we allow government to grow so large and corrupt that it can get away with that sort of activity (and it is) it will do that.
Getting their "cut" was ultimately the real reason why the Microsoft anti-trust suit happened. Before that lawsuit, Microsoft was essentially a non player in Washington, they weren't hiring lobbyists, they weren't "greasing" the politicians, etc. It was essentially a shakedown, to teach the "new industry" a lesson, that once you get big enough to be "on the radar" you WILL play the game or ELSE. And Microsoft learned that lesson, today they waste tons of money on the "system" same as any other corporation their size.
No one works less for more and produces shoddier results and is all the greedier for it than government, politicians, and all the other parasites who live off the system.
Corporatism != Free Market
You conviniently not only missed, but intentionally avoided the point, which is those numbers are complete bullshit. Pay attention.
Free Martian Whores!
I think the priates could get the constant internet connection re-routed to somwhere else.
Instead of pinging Ubi website (or whatever it is) to see if the internet is connected, the hackers could just get the game to ping 127.0.0.1 instead. Problem solved (me thinks)
Games a lot of the time are available before the street date on torrents. An image will almost always get leaked.
4chan is not your personal army.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
If you're not going to pay them, just simply don't play the game. Doesn't matter if it's "easier", etc.
If they're going to treat me like a crook, I'll just find alternatives- because they CLEARLY don't want my money. Making infringements just gives them more excuses to make things worse. Not buying at all, if there's enough of their customer base to make things like Asassin's Creed 2 flop in the channel, they'll get the hint vastly quicker and back off. There was the same sort of crap that went on early in the days of personal computers- and it swiftly died a horrible death after 5 or so years once they figured out that people weren't buying because of the copy protection schemes being vastly worse than the problem they thought they were solving with it.
It's not hard. Just do without for a bit. They'll get the hint. Otherwise, just keep going on and keep giving them reasons to make the laws worse and doing stupider and stupider things like this new play.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
What is ironic is that as up-to-date games get more and more draconic DRM, the customers will find old second-hand games, whose DRM is much less bothersome (or even non-existant), to be relatively more attractive.
Queue reference to "Good Old Games". What an awesome company. Legit DRM-free "Fallout" for $5.99. Legit DRM-free "Psychonauts" for $9.99. Holy crap. This needed to happen years ago. Yay Gog!
Depends on the venue. Some places, that $100 will only buy you about 10 drinks tops.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Depends on the drink, really. If you're in the habit of drinking The Balvenie 21 year old Scotch or similar, you can expect to spend somewhere on the order of 7-10 dollars a shot in most locations as it's roughly $200 a bottle retail.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Yeah, line quality. We've got DSL from MTS at home (rural Manitoba, Canada, in a town) and suffer from frequent disconnects. We're supposed to have 8000/1000 service, but it disconnects too frequently. They tried cutting my upload to 512 and that didn't change anything. They've now set it to 5000/512 to see if that helps, and so far it's been worse, but I could just be jaded. I've been fighting with this crap for too long, tried everything. I wasn't home for the appointment, so I unfortunately wasn't able to talk to the tech directly. That would have been nice.
During the day it's fine since it's a bedroom community and mostly everyone works somewhere else. I run an SSH tunnel to home while I'm at work so I know exactly when it goes down, and during the day it's pretty good mostly. Evenings between about 5 and 9 are especially horrible because everyone gets home and jumps online which saturates the line to Winnipeg. Basically they've completely and utterly oversold the area to the point that you disconnect 10 times per evening. According to the tech, they're supposed to be running fibre out in the spring. I'm not sure if that's going to be FTTC or FTTH, but either way it should be much better than what we've got now.
Anyway, I've got Assassin's Creed 2 for my 360, and luckily it doesn't need a constant connection like the PC version or I probably would have broken something by now!
Anonymous is democracy at its finest. It may not be anyone's personal army, but if enough people particularly agree with something there will be more than enough motivation and little fear of retaliation.
Of course, if "Operation Ubistorm" really does get started, I preemptively take no credit for it.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
I think the reason they force us to be online at all time is that their new drm stuff probably place some of the application logic on the drm servers.. Of course we'll hate not beeing able to play without beeing online, but I don't see how it can get cracked (if not some clever crackers reverse engineer the stuff controlled from the drm servers).
I've only ever purchased one Ubisoft title, and that was Beyond Good and Evil for the GameCube. I rather enjoyed this game, and am excited that a sequel is in development, though likely still a few years from being released. However, it seems unlikely that they will release a Wii version of BG&E2, which means that I was going to be dependent on getting the PC version to enjoy the game. However, if it winds up with the limitations of this draconian DRM, then I will pass on it entirely.
People have often complained about Steam doing similar things. However, in the case of Steam, it at least has an offline mode. You get authenticated against the server, and then you can play your games offline. I'm fine with the way Steam does things - my only real complaint is the lack of aftermarket sales, but I've never bought a used game anyway so it doesn't really affect me.
No single-player game should ever require an active Internet connection to play. Sure, it can be supported, allowing for saving progress on the server, but not required.
Intelligent responses welcome, flames will be met with marshmallows.
Not necessarily true. Even though pirates themselves do not directly generate money for the publisher, in the case of games with online multiplayer modes benefit greatly just by having more people to play with. The more people who play an online mp game, the more likely I am to buy it.
I don't think I've ever seen a 'scene' release that contained any kind of malware (apart from the occasional false positive due to the mechanisms involved); that's not to say that 3rd parties don't *replace* cracked files and keygens with malware and torrent them, but the people actually breaking the copy protection really don't seem to be involved in anything (additionally) nefarious. Besides, it's not in their interests; the scene groups largely do what they do for kudos and churning out malware-infected releases would seriously damage their reputation.
There have been cases of non pirated software coming with malware. Also various "DRM" mechanisms do qualify as malware. Most notably the Sony rootkit which could be exploited by third parties.
Its also pretty common to get AV false positives for keygens due to the warez scene/demoscene compression systems they use (which are sometimes used by malware creators as well).
Except that in most games the pirates can't play online, or not on any non-pirates servers anyway. Even if theres pirated version servers, they don't have anti-cheat and are usually full of cheaters.
Where I am, $100 at a bar is about 15-20 mixed drinks, IF you don't tip the bartender.
That's a dangerous thing to do.
Not tip the bartender, that is.
You could end up with a case of tetrahydrozoline poisoning if the barkeep is the spiteful kind.
One of these days, I am going to flip out. When I flip out, I'll be back in five minutes.
Not 100% sure, but I believe any attempt to circumvent DRM technology, for any reason, is a violation of the DMCA.
People will still get the RTMs and they will still have pirated copies out before launch just watch. The community of crackers is most times a lot smarter than the people who wrote the DRM in the first place.
If the people who wrote the DRM are smart they will put as little effort as possible into it. Since they can be certain it will be "cracked".
Boss: How be my sales?
Underling: Ubisoft
Free Martian Whores!
Actually a little higher, usually $8-$11. In a restaurant, club or upscale pub you can add $3-4 to that, outside of the cities it's more expensive as well. In a store the cheapest brands are about $4 for a half litre can. Alcohol and tobacco is (are?) very expensive in Norway due to "sin taxes". Re: sig, is/are? Both sound "wrong" to me, I think I'd go for "is".
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
And I'll be robbing your home
Well, you see, there was this batshit crazy thing we tried called Prohibition. Anyway, after that particular collective insanity subsided you were left with a shitload of government interference in selling liquor, and in a few states the government is the only legal distributor of liquor.
Nah, 4chan doesn't have the balls to stand up to a company. They only terrorize and threaten 16 year old girls who made a youtube video for their friends.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Don't be stupid. We're talking revenue here, not profit. Furthermore, no one said anything about how much Ubisoft is allowed to make - just that the math results in highly implausible numbers. And by implausible I mean win-the-lottery-10-times-in-a-row-unlikely. Lastly, General Dynamix would have far higher costs - because they actually have to use raw material on top of the intellectual design.
2 sentences, three mistakes. Impressive.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
What the hell are you drinking? Johnnie Walker Blue Label?
If you pirate a game, then by definition you're not a client, right???
Nah, in the shady underground digital distribution word, you earn yourself the name "leech" :)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If you make a game where being a client and not a pirate is a large disadvantage as it is with these 2 releases, you're pushing for people to pirate your game, and being irresponsible to the shareholders.
This doesn't even sound like it should be all that hard to break. Download/code a script or application that makes your computer think its connected when its not plugged in. It might be a little more difficult if the game chooses to verify the status of the connection by continually attempting to pass data over it, but I have faith that some entreprising cracker will come up with a way around that too, should the need arise. Also, when did the people coming up with this stuff get so godawful stupid? This is the best they can come up with? Come on.
$100... that's £64.
100 decimal is $64, silly.
(Sorry, couldn't resist. Now all we need is a currency that uses a 0x prefix and we can be REALLY confusing!)
What the hell were you playing ME in VMWare for?
Hmmmm.....
Pay big bucks to legally play a game that puts me at the publisher's fickle mercy and demands constant internet access - and bandwith - responding with draconian punishment if I fail to provide this.
OR
Pay nothing and get an illegal copy that works fine from the word "GO"
Decisions, decisions...
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
I think that you are oversimplifying the issue and the way that the DRM is communicating with Ubi's validation systems. It's probably going to be an encrypted key exchange or something like that, not a simple ping.
That's because you live so close to Germany...
This message was brought to you by Sarcasm and Troll Feeders United (STFU)
SecuROM 3.0: “Error: SecuROM has detected that you have SENSES, and hence can employ in copyright infringement by copying it into your brain.”
*brrrrzzzzz* *user gets eyes gouged out by a nasty drill*
(3 seconds later:) “Please prepare to have your eyes gouged out.”
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
N/T
Within a year or two, Linux will finally catch up to Windows in terms of gaming capabilities. Finally, every game that refuses to run on Linux will also refuse to run on Windows, and we will have achieved parity. Just a little longer!
You know that 87.236% of all statistics are just made up on the spot, right?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Tony Key, is that you?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
No, you entirely missed the point. The point is that the only multiplayer servers are hosted by the publisher (EA) and now, a mere THREE years after release they have axed them all. It doesn't matter how many players the game might have, because the servers don't exist.
MMOs can get away with not allowing legit private servers because they have a monthly subscription, and the kind of content that warrants said subscription. The ones that don't, fail. Usually within the first year.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
I notice a distinct attitude difference between E-Book readers and PC Gamers. Gamers seem to feel slightly naughty if they download a cracked version of a game they paid for and are entitled to play as they see fit.
Quite a few E-Book readers, on the other hand, have a policy that they will not buy an e-book unless it is either DRM-free or has easily-cracked DRM that they have the crack for. I know I'm one. We've seen too many proprietary formats come and go, rendering eBook collections useless when the authentication servers went away; we've seen Amazon revoke people's books (the "1984" incident), we've seen formats that should be the same (Sony EPUB and B&N EPUB) turn out to be incompatible due to different DRM schemes (and no mention on the bookseller's site, either), so when we buy a DRM-infected book, the very first thing we do is strip the DRM off. AFAIK, no one who buys eBooks feels the least bit guilty about this; we're protecting our investment in our own property, and many thanks to the code-breakers who figured out how to strip the DRM.
Of course, we actually paid for the eBooks. We like reading, and we don't think the publisher or the bookseller has any business telling us how or when or with what machine we can read our books. Bugger them, it's none of their business once the check clears.
What gamers need are easy-to-use scripts & programs that let them do their own DRM-stripping, like we have for eBooks, so you don't have to download whole pirate versions of games. Then you could buy a legit game that's known to be strippable, run the program against it, and voila! no DRM, but no encouragement of acquiring stuff without paying for it. Convincing game companies not to use DRM would be even better, but I'm not sure that's going to happen any time soon.
---dragoness
I bet in the next 5 years you wont even buy games anymore. You will just be given a plane ticket to the a secret location where you can play the game naked, in a white sterile room with cameras everywhere so the publishers can keep an eye on you.
Has anybody thought about the fact that this awful DRM might only be on the preview copies distributed to the media? I have no evidence or insider info that this might be the case, but I think this draconian DRM might only be in place to possibly delay pre-release leaks.
The gaming industry has had that happen to them too many times, and that's what I'm thinking this is for. There's no way in hell they would be able to get away with implementing this system on the retail game without a class-action lawsuit within the first month.
Uhh, no. It is really hard to know who would buy a game with DRM and who would have bought it withuot DRM. There really is no way to figure this out with accuracy, so you are lying when you say there is overwhelming evidence that proves your point. Obviously there isn't, or companies wouldn't use DRM.
If you read Slashdot enough, you might believe it to be true because everyone cries foul with DRM. But anecdotes from this community is not evidence for anything other than the vocal majority on Slashdot hates DRM and have the technical ability to pirate.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
To add to this, it is FAR more difficult to write and MANAGE complex code than it is to crack it once. ONCE is all you need and the cost of the later is magnitudes smaller than the former.
Most things come down to opportunity costs. No one hides $1 in a $1000 dollar safe. No one will hack that safe (to get at the $1), but lets see anyone sell that package for less than $1001 (whose inherent value is $1). Game companies do more like $1000 in a $1 dollar safe (and this is the best of the best safeguards), but it costs 1 cent to crack it.
I'd say the moral thing to do is not buy or pirate the game. That way they get the message. By more people pirating, it just increases their justification for adding new forms of DRM.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Then don't play the game. You guys get so outraged. AC is not the only game you can purchase. People who don't have broadband...yeah, it sucks. I don't think every game needs to cater to people in the digital stone age. It might be to their financial benefit if they did, but they don't need to. Besides, just get it on a console. You guys get all crazy over these things.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
I think it worked. Didn't they lessen the DRM? And I think much less people bought it than would have if it wasn't for the DRM. I am included in that. Well, that and I heard the game wasn't very good.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
If I steal a beer, the store is deprived of a beer which they paid for and could otherwise sell. If I "steal" a video game the people selling the game are deprived of exactly nothing (except the money from my purchase, and not even that assuming I would rather have nothing than pay for their game).
No, that's wrong. In either case, you are depriving the store and the manufacturer of income that results from the sale.
If the manufacturers and the resellers don't get paid, then they can't continue to develop products.
The British Library archives computer games. I remember back in the early 90s when they started they were worried that copy-protection on floppy disks would prevent them from making backups so the games would be lost when the disks eventually deteriorated. I guess now limit is when Ubisoft/XBOX Live/Steam/etc. turn off their servers.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You'd be surprised. Living out in the sticks where there simply is no broadband doesn't really have anything to do with whether you enjoy some quality video game carnage.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Eh, I don't give a rat's ass about the game really. My annoyance (I gave up getting outraged over things on the Internet a long time ago) was for the twit assuming that everyone had a fast, stable Internet connection. Or even had the possibility of having one available to them.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
blah blah blah, this hurts consumers, blah blah blah, developers are stupid because the put DRM in expecting to end piracy, blah blah blah.
Developers aren't stupid; they know the bottom line. That DRM drives away a certain type of customer. And guess what? That's fine with them. They aren't interested in customers who are gamers. They are interested in customers who put up with their shit and still pay for it. You aren't their target market. Their target market is Grandma who buys whatever little Johnny wants. Or the guy who doesn't care about archiving games because he'll be onto the next one within a week.
-- MrMud
It was a while ago. My laptop's DVD drive was broken but I didnt have the money to replace it because the laptop had more important things that needed to be replaced. So I loaded up the ISO ob an external hard drive and installed it only to get a securom error. Googled it, and sure enough, securom explicitly prevents you from playing in VMware.
BTW mod this informative.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Given the long time motivation of most games these days, usually by the time you notice that additional layer of DRM you're already fed up with the game.
Not to mention that more and more game makers rely on an "external" DRM wrapper to their game. Meaning, you strip the outer layer, you're done.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Splinter Cell 2; one of the first Starforce protected games.
According to Wikipedia, Splinter Cell 2 was released on March 23, 2004 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS_(Splinter_Cell)#Multiplayer ), while the first english crack is dated to have been released March 25, 2004, only 2 days later. And that would be when the basic cracking sites got it, not went it went wild within the game. While it wasn't hours before, it wasn't a month later either.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
This is exactly the problem with all these sorts of copy protection! Perhaps not so much in Britain, but in the United States the entire point of copyright is to enrich the Public Domain, and if you can't preserve the game then it never enters the Public Domain. Because of that, these jerks that insist on Draconian copy protection don't deserve to be eligible for copyright to begin with!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You've just guaranteed I will never buy another non-Valve PC title again.
You're oversimplifying it. It's trivial to add encryption to the protocol, which means you're going to be disassembling and debugging the code. Majority of those unlimited number of programmers drop off.
I'm purposefully not commenting on the second part of your comment, as I agree with you. Once the server is doing more than authentication or authorisation, the difficulty steps up fast. However, if it's just an authentication/authorisation issue, it's not always that hard to beat. Somewhere in the code (or maybe in multiple places) there will be a bit that says something like "if notAbleToAuthorise() { goToMenu(); }". All it takes is to replace the call to "notAbleToAUthorise" to a function that just returns false. Or true. Or whatever. Usually people next argue that CRC checks will stop you from modifying the code. That means there's code that goes "if checksumFailed() ..." and again, change the call.
I believe that as long as the game is "technically" playable without any DRM enabled, then the DRM will be able to be patched without too many hardships. I just can't fathom a situation where DRM will be unstoppable (even computationally-unstoppable via encryption), because the owner of the game has all the information they want.
And gosh my formatting sucked there. Apparently I've switched to HTML mode in my profile, oops.
This is clever DRM that from the sound of it does not inconvenience paying customers--I'm all for it.
What I have a problem with is DRM that diminishes the value of the product for paying customers.
I think what we will see developing in the video game industry is a thick line of separation between shitty mainstream sellers, that are thrown together and marketed to make a quick dollar, and the games that are made by developers who make games that they want to play. This is based off of the current state of the film industry, where genuinely good films are far and few between, and every year is littered with stacks of sacks of shit: unwarranted sequels, umpteenth remakes of destroyed franchises, and cookie cutter films. Heck, we already are seeing a clear bias in the media - he who shells out more money, gets better reviews and coverage from gamespot, etc. I could give you 100 reasons why you shouldn't have bought your xbox or blockbuster game, but the problem is that we dwell within a sea of idiocracy, there are too many idiots buying these shitty games from these mega companies, and our protest will (and has to date) accomplish(ed) very little, so here are our options: 1. Study every game being released, and only buy what is in favor of the end user. 2. Become a developer, make games without bullshit, and be hugely successful, and therefore change the industry 3. Demand regulations from your corresponding government to break publisher monopolies and outlaw things such as DRM That's all i have to say. And you know, its quite a shame where talented, aspiring developers need to piggyback on a publisher for their software to be successful, and to think that only 10-15 years ago 2 man companies were developing games out of their garage.
When will game companies figure out that no amount of DRM is uncrackable. Why didn't they just go with Steam's simply DRM, especially since they were already selling the game on steam. I am a self-proclaimed pirate and even I buy games occasionally off Steam when they don't have DRM and they are actually innovative. I downloaded Mass Effect 2, played it a bit and then said screw it. I uninstalled the pirated copy and bought it on Steam. Same thing for bioshock, I had a copy for my xbox 360 already burnt and I ended up buying it off Steam.
As much as Steam isn't perfect, at least I can play games offline and I don't have to put a CD in. I have a decent sager gaming laptop so I played Mass Effect 2 mostly on my laptop when I had no internet at all, and I also did the same for bioshock 2. If they had this kind of DRM there would have been no way I would have bought it although I could have tethered on my WinMo phone but it kills the battery on my phone and why in the heck should I have to do that for a damn single player game.
Ubisoft is being ridiculous....really...they put out an old ass game for the PC and cripple it with terrible DRM. It is more than a year old, piracy is the least they should be worrying for such an old game.
When will companies learn that the PC is still king and avoiding it just because it doesn't have the same protection as consoles is ridiculous. I mean its actually easier to play pirated games on the Xbox 360 for me. No no-cd cracks, I can play online, no waiting for someone to crack it, and no trouble with updates. I can even go to blockbuster and copy a game from them. Basically there is absolutely no difference between the experience of playing a pirated game and authentic game. Then again the experience is actually better for playing pirated game vs the authentic one if your playing AC2.
Maybe if Ubisoft put out games for the PC when they were actually released and didn't treat their customers like crap, people would actually buy their games. I mean EA already learned their lesson that harsh DRM isn't the way to go after the outrage people had for the DRM on bioshock and mass effect.
what' s the problem with pirates? I mean, the music industry has been going broke since the invention of the cassette recorder and STILL we have to put up with Tokyo Hotels and Lady Gagas and man ... you should see the megastructure Kinepolis movie theatre built recently in Gent(Belgium), i bet they built that with all the losses they made from piracy as well. Imho, a lot of small businesses are going down or having a hard time, but that's not because of piracy, it's because of the giant microsofts and McDonalds from the entertainment 'industry' hogging all the cash so there's nothing left for the small ones ... plain and simple business, but we all know it's always easy if you have a witch to blame, no ?
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
a) Don't buy the game.
b) Pirate it.
Yet another boost to "piracy" from clueless top-executives...
--
El Guerrero del Interfaz
I hate that too. Bloody pain in the arse when someone does a torrent for something like a TV series and it's in 200 odd 14MiB rar files. This prevents one from downloading select episodes that they may have missed when it was on TV.
The reason behind the rar files is that early in the scene's release cycle the content is on Usenet where there is a file size limit on binaries. Uploaders seem to like using WinRAR to compress and split the content (I would prefer they used the open source 7-zip or even basic zip to split the archive, but RAR seems to be worshipped as a god or something).
Now that's all fine because there is a technical reason behind having the split archive. The problem is that Bittorrent has no such limitation. There is no reason that you would have to ever see a split RAR archive with a torrent. It's the fault of the lazy bastard who grabbed it off Usenet and slapped it on Bittorrent without extracting it first. The reduced file size from compressing it is negligible since game installers and especially movies are already compressed.
I recommend you do as I do and pick torrents that aren't a mess of rar files if available.
Unicode in Slashdot
Do a quick Google on "Spore pirated", just for fun. Page after page of links to articles about how Spore's DRM did affect pirating. Now if that hasn't reached EA...
Spoiler: it has, EA has in fact announced they'll use less obtrusive DRM in the future. Plus, they released this tool to reduce DRM obtrusiveness from certain games, including Spore.
Did you even read what I wrote? I addressed that exact point. AT MOST I deprive the store of the income resulting from a sale, but not the physical product (which is why it's completely unlike actual theft).
That may not be the choice though. If I value the experience at less than they're charging, the choices are: 1) pirate. 2) go without. In both cases they're "deprived" of income to the exact same degree.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Yes, and UbiSoft know that. DRM on (PC) video games is all about the "time to crack". Look, this is how the modern piracy scene works and why UbiSoft are doing this.
One thing I wish companies would do more (afaict some do it but usually very belatedly) is remove the protection once the point is reached that it really no longer helps them.
This would avoid the need to keep activation servers and helplines up for years and reduce the inconviniance to legitimate customers from the antipiracy meadures.
Even better would be if they promised to do this upfront (and got a reputation for keeping thier promise), so-far I have avoided any game that needs online activation but I might be prepared to accept it if I knew it would be removed after a while making the game viable longterm.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Unfortunately I think 8) is PC gaming gets even deader and an even larger fraction of gaming moves to consoles. Afaict the PS3 still hasn't been cracked and while the xbox 360 has been cracked applying the cracks carries a very real risk of a permanent ban from XBOX live.
I don't particulally like closed platforms but copy protection on an open platform is doomed to failure and ends up getting far more intrusive than the systems closed platforms use.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I reject your statement that "8 hours is entirely too long to spend in a bar". This is a purely subjective claim; perhaps 8 hours is too long for you, but around here, that's SNAFU.
DD's get free sodas around here. Not really hurting the bars, since almost everyone drives drunk.
Clubs aren't for drinking (they're for socializing). Clubs charge a premium on the drinks for the ambience and collection of like minded, often attractive, people. Bars are for drinking.
Bring on the $1 shots.
Also, WI DOT page on drunk driving which starts off "Wisconsin has the highest rate of drunken driving in the nation."
I understand that if you're not from around here, you may not understand how culturally important alcoholism is to us, but that doesn't validate your lifestyle over mine.
And this is the huge point that Ubisoft miss, is that the DRM makes playing the legitimate version of a game much MORE annoying than playing the cracked version. Once people are using the cracked versions of software that they have already legally bought _purely_ because the annoyance of the legit version has driven them to it (it happens rather alot already), whats the incentive for them to buy newer versions games rather than just obtain warezed versions?, a case in point would be new releases of the ubisoft games in question.
Note that I'm not saying that no DRM is the answer here, but when will these executives learn that crippling software in this manner is NOT the answer, and their assurances on problems in using this software in the future are sounding pretty hollow. How would people get patches to reinstall the software in the future if Ubisoft no longer exists? Statements about their best intentions are just words. Are they going to put titles into some kind of trust to ensure access, or is abandonware going to mean that games are no longer playable by the people that have paid for the right to use it? How much of the current trend ignores the basic tenets of First Sale?
Personally i do feel that the likes of Ubisoft would love to kill off pc computer gaming. Much better (and cheaper) to produce software for very limited platforms, with vastly less scope/depth (they can sell additional content via addon titles this way). Moves like this smack of an attempt to just annoy people rather than legitimate DRM measure because it's not going to slow down the speed at which their games are going to get warezed, and they know it. THeir better bet would be to actually reward people who log into their service and verify the legitimacy of their purchase wth extra content etc.
Sorry but no way is microsoft capable of 5 versions of windows in 10 years!
I don't see at all what they think they'll accomplish with this. I mean supposing it could actually prevent the game from being cracked, ok, but it can't. It will be cracked, probably on the day the game is released. As such all it'll do is piss off legit customers and have some of us take our money elsewhere.
I think part of the problem is that companies confuse stopping pirates with maximizing profits. Their goal should be profit maximization, which means getting as many happy customers as possible. Dealing with piracy should only be a concern if that increases profits. However they get so focused on it that they'd rather lose 10,000 paying customers so long as they can prevent the game form being copied 1 time.
It's just not good business. Thankfully, it seems like some publishers are starting to realize this, and trying to go with things that don't punish paying customers.
I understand your points; I guess the point I was attempting to make is that there should probably be more "Demos" and shareware versions of the games. Especially with a lower "download cost" - you could get your taste of whether you like the game or not, and then purchase the game based on that. Would give you the same result as if you grabbed the full game off of piratebay - with the exception of the demo/shareware being too short to fully realize the gameplay.....
Karnal
So you are still taking food off of someone's plate. And that is the part where people have a problem with stealing. Bernard Madhoff didn't take anything physical. He transferred funds, usually electronically. The victims were still hurt. You deprive people of their money or their ability to make money, even without walking off the premises with a bag of loot, you are still stealing.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
If it were a choice between "buy this" or "pirate this", yes. If it's a choice between "pirate this" or "do something else", no. That's the part that people tend to gloss over or misunderstand.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
This may say more about my state of mind than anything, but I think - perhaps - it's a calculated decision to actually *increase* the amount of piracy going on. If a game company can point to rampant piracy, as in it's not a fringe thing anymore, and it's demonstrably affecting sales (even if they practically force people to do it) then they win.
They win because piracy will become more of a legislative issue, it will get more press, it will be like, "even previously law-abiding citizens are doing it now".
It's funny how gamers say, "hell, I'm not buying this, it's unfair, so I'm going to pirate it instead" and think that's a perfectly valid response. As some kind of revenge, they won't just not buy the game, they'll do something illegal. That's what they're saying all over the net because of this, and my guess is that's exactly what companies like Ubisoft want. It's helping them no end to lobby government for legislative changes we will enjoy a lot less than their games.
As an aside, I also wonder if software companies get tax breaks for "lost sales" due to piracy? Regardless of the high probability that most people who pirate a game weren't going to buy it in the first place. Though that may be less probable soon.
That scenario you just described ought to be put into a YT video, ffs.
The hell are you people drinking , molten gold?
A shot of good vodka is a slightly less than 2$ where i drink. And by shot i mean 50ml , none of that fancy pants 25-40ml shot glass bullshit.
Whiskey costs double...
Eastern Europe FTW.
I hereby grant the nonexclusive rights to this dialogue to whoever makes a video and puts it on YT.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.