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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?
Don't buy the game, and send them letter to let them know why you're not buying the game.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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?
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.
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.
Your comparison is completely inappropriate.
1) I can perfectly use IMAP or POP to download my Gmail emails and read them offline.
2) For all kind of web-based communications such as emails, HTTP or SSH I do expect to need a network connection. It does not need to be Gmail, but my personal email system is exactly the same. What you say is equivalent to: "I need a phone connection to be able to phone? What a scandal!" This is not the case for a game though, wghich I expect to work on a plane, a train or on a remote holiday location with no internet access.
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
...is the superior one. If you care about quality, choose your favourite release group!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
This will just annoy the people who did buy the game. The real issue is that most users aren't technical and will just buy it, put up with the shit and accept that's the state of affairs. One day somebody will offer them a crack and suddenly they'll realise the shafting they got.
What's worse is that I predict that there will be an enormous amount of cracks and hacks for this game. It'll be so bad that all software companies will use it as an example of why we need even more and better DRM and how evil consumers really are.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Some people don't pirate because they haven't been bothered enough by DRM to seek out DRM-free copies.
Ubisoft is creating a new round of pirates from formerly legitimate customers.
These really aren't Pyrrhic victories; they're just victories. The ill effects of these terrible decisions don't come around until the executives have long since cashed in their stock options and retired to wine and wealth. I think of these more along the lines of 'mortgaging the future of the industry in general'. But who cares? The gaming community will just bend over and take as they always have done. Remember the outcry against Spore with its oppressive DRM? That was about as organized and vocal as the gaming community have ever gotten, and Spore is still selling and still has brutal DRM.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
This - or something this annoying - has been coming down the line for years now. It was only a matter of time.
I can see the day where a game is going to come out and basically not sell - except for the number of copies required to crack the game.
In other words, the question's been less and less ambiguous as to whether DRM actually hurts sales and drives people to piracy. It's been obvious to *me*, but I could see how a reasonable person might think otherwise.
We might be at the point where a reasonable person can no longer lay the blame anywhere but at the feet of outrageous DRM.
On a sidenote - in 25 years when we want to play Bioshock again and relive the experience, what will most people think of the pirates? I'd imagine that we'll come to think of them as archivists putting themselves at risk but allowing us to enjoy a classic game.
Super Mario Bros came out in 1986, almost 25 years ago. Imagine if Nintendo required an always-on direct modem connection to Nintendo of America to play - and they shut off the modems 15 years ago. What would we think of the "dirty rotten pirates" who got a ROM dump and hex-edited out the watchdog code? It's not far-fetched to say that they'd come off like Robin Hood...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
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.
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?
What they are doing is like telling the customers WE DON'T TRUST YOU and that ain't the way to run a business.
Actually I feel it sends a much stronger message than that: I interpret this as telling me, "If you give us your business, we will punish you." Well, I can think of better companies to do business with: Ironclad, 2D Boy, GOG.com, Stardock ...
Incidentally, this DRM has pushed Rock, Paper, Shotgun to boycott all coverage of any aspect of the game henceforth, other than DRM.
Incredible. In-cred-i-ble. It’s like someone taking away your food mid-meal because your napkin’s fallen on the floor. It makes us want to pull an expression we’re not physically capable of, like this. It’s also worth noting this is a day on which EA have turned off multiplayer servers for games that are only a year old – so it’s hard to have faith that Ubi’s activation servers will be around for many years hence.
If you're getting journalists that pissed off, you know you're really doing a good job, right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If there aren't any cracked versions available for the first months, most players who want it (including those who would had pirated it) are going to buy it as everyone else is playing. That's what counts mosts to the companies, since most sales are made during that period.
If a pirate has to wait several months to get their version, it's a huge win for the publisher. And with this case exactly that will happen, because it's completely new system and relies on online parts. It won't be cracked anytime soon.
Horseshit. Around forty percent of the US still do not have broadband and dial-up has never been reliable about disconnects. Even on broadband, if your line quality isn't top notch you're looking at a complete inability to play the games for hours at a time. That is not an experience I'd care to pay money for.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
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.
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'll be there at 7
rewriting history since 2109
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.
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, ...
... more draconian drm...
Every time someone uses the phrase "draconian DRM" take a shot. Cue liver failure in 3... 2... 1...
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?
"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!
...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.
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.
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.
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