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The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
spidweb writes "Much virtual ink has been spilled over Ubisoft's new, harsh DRM system for Assassin's Creed 2. You must have a constant internet connection, and, if your connection breaks, the game exits. While this has angered many (and justifiably so), most writers on the topic have made an error. They think that this system, like all DRM systems in the past, will be easily broken. This article explains why, as dreadful as the system is, it does have a chance of holding hackers off long enough for the game to make its money. As such it is, if nothing else, a fascinating experiment. From the article: 'Assassin's Creed 2 is different in a key way. Remember, all of its code for saving and loading games (a significant feature, I'm sure you would agree) is tied into logging into a distant server and sending data back and forth. This vital and complex bit of code has been written from the ground up to require having the saved games live on a machine far away, with said machine being programmed to accept, save, and return the game data. This is a far more difficult problem for a hacker to circumvent.'"
It's all about finding the sweet spot. DRM is invariably going to piss of a certain number of paying users but if you piss off too many you lose revenue, or worse yet, if your product gets a rep for being unreliable ... you're throwing away potential customers. DRM is a risky game to play, and if you're gonna do it you better make damn sure it works.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This sucks. The only way I was gonna play this game was warezed!
This is the very worst copy-protection I've heard of. Nobody should buy this game.
My DSL goes down (for just a minute or two) daily. It's usually no big deal, but here it apparently would be. Thus this is a game I could never purchase. Let's let our dollars send the message to the publisher that they're living in a dreamworld with such an unfeasible technical requirement.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Even thought it's hard to crack, it's not uncrackable. A set of talented hackers/programmers can try and reverse engineer the system and build their own server (or a server might leak out). Then, changing the binaries or using some other technique, they can replace the server address with the address for their server. Given enough time, they might do it -- but the game will probably have become deprecated when they do it.
With that said, this is the most horrendous example of what the gaming society is becoming. I'd rather throw myself off a cliff than pay these fucktards.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
I've seen cheats that let you edit most aspects of a character. You'll probably seen something similar to save/load character info & position in the game. Yeah it'll be harder but not impossible.
somewhere in the code there's a function that goes "take this memory buffer and send it to the server as my savegame". reimplement that to dump the buffer to the disk and you got your savegames (do the inverse to load).
This is a far more difficult problem for a hacker to circumvent.
Well, if the asshole "hackers" weren't trying to circumvent it we wouldn't have this draconian crap would me? /tongue firmly planted in cheek.
Sent from your iPad.
you'll have a non working game because Ubisoft will bother to have that old crap running longer or even Ubisoft could not exists anymore. No thanks.
Just when I think about getting into some on-line game play. A company has to pull a bone-head maneuver like this. Good luck on making those revenue streams before the crackers break your code because you won't get any of that revenue from me. As usual most writers have their head up their ass.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I was considering this one. I'd played the first Assassin's Creed borrowed from a friend, and I liked it quite well. But given this issue, I have an easy solution for the DRM.
I just won't buy the game, since I can't be assured of it continuing to function if Ubisoft goes out of business tomorrow. They sure showed me!
Also, remember the horrible ratings Spore got on Amazon, because of the overly invasive DRM? That actually worked. Why not do the same here?
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
It won't work, because all the crackers will have to do is emulate that distant server on your own box and route any traffic Assassin's Creed II sends through 127.0.0.1 (this is a simplification). That said, it may work for Assassin's Creed II, but for any subsequent releases (Splinter Cell Conviction, Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands, etc.) the crackers will already know how the system works and break it easily.
The system will only work if people actually go and buy the game instead of waiting for a crack. Even if I were interested in buying it (which I'm not) I would wait for a crack just so I wouldn't be hogtied in trying to play it.
...just DoS the servers. The entire plan hinges on connectivity. Remove that aspect.
Sometimes (and really most of the time) civil disobedience is the best way to get your message across. If you make a game that no one can play (thanks to a DDoS, DNS hijack, or some other trickeration that mucks up their DRM), who wins? The consumers are pissed because they can't play the game they purchased, the devs are pissed having worked so hard on something that no one is enjoying, and both sides are forced to re-evaluate their stance on using/purchasing games with DRM.
I can see a patch quite simply where someone creates a rogue server, then modifies the game to point there... or perhaps as simple as installing a loopback and turn the host computer into a server, and point the game to localhost?
Unless contents is served from a server (ala an MMORPG) then all this will require is a different toolkit. Most games are hacked these days semi-automatically, by specialized sotware that detects and replaces calls to "DRM compliance" sub-routines or emulates behavior of various external Windows APIs. With similar effort one can construct a kit that replaces calls to server communication sub-routines -- or better yet, the hackers can emulate the whole "mothership" server system, based on the analysis of the appropriate client sub-routines.
And even if some contents is stored remotely, it will take enterprising hackers only some time to download it all. Then again, if the game is really a bastardized MMO (without the MM component) then a whole market segment - i.e. laptops used in remote work/study locations is nixed.
In short the cost and lost sales is likely exceed any effectiveness of this (and any DRM).
127.0.0.1? ....
redirect server to localhost,
emulate server on local machine
PROFIT!!!
Reverse engineering the protocol used shouldn't be too hard with the aid of proper tools like Wireshark. As for encryption, at some point the data has to be unencrypted in order for your system to be able to use it.
Now, it may not be as easy as putting "activationserver.developer.com 127.0.0.1" in /etc/hosts (or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) but I'm sure someone will create a "pirate" server that can be run locally along with any required patches for the game itself.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
And heres why: the checks for Internet are already broken just substitute them as checks for the disc and you can see this. What does this leave? The crackers just need to write some save and load game routines that go local instead of cloud. So, in effect instead of having a copy that doesn't have stupid digital restrictions the day it is released you will have it a week after its released. And who suffers? Not the pirates, the people who bought the game. Luckily for me there is nothing in Ubisoft's upcoming lineup that I'm interested in anyway but if other publishers decide to follow this stupid anti-customer lead then I'm just going to go outside and take up baseball. You know, real baseball, in real life.
Shh.
``You must have a constant internet connection, and, if your connection breaks, the game exits. While this has angered many (and justifiably so), most writers on the topic have made an error. They think that this system, like all DRM systems in the past, will be easily broken. This article explains why, as dreadful as the system is, it does have a chance of holding hackers off long enough for the game to make its money.''
Two things, though:
1. Is there any evidence that games do generally _not_ make their money if they lack strong DRM schemes?
2. What evidence is there to support the notion that this DRM scheme will make the suppliers more money?
Although I don't have any evidence to support any claims, it seems clear that implementing any DRM scheme has its costs. First of all, there is the cost of implementation. Then there is the potential of lost customers: people who will be angered by the scheme, or people who buy your product, only to find they can't get it to work, and then return it. I've seen both happen multiple times. Finally, assuming your DRM scheme manages to restrict distribution and use, that means your product has fewer users. That can be a Bad Thing for your sales, especially when network effects come into play.
With several things speaking against an invasive yet effective DRM scheme making you more money, I'm really curious how the numbers turn out in practice.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I for one, if I can't download it from a torrent site, then I won't buy it. First, because gaming reviews are mostly useless, second because I don't want DRM.
Assassin's Creed 2 can be the best "game" of the decade, but it's not if it has intrusive DRM. Then it's just a waste of money.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I bought this (the latest 3D one) on DVD after I heard it had no DRM at all. The box actually said it did, but it appeared not to. I think it's the only example of a major game without any DRM (no cd check) on disk.
As some one that buys games and never pirates I'm one of the innocent victims of both sides. Back in the day there was no security so games were easy to install on new machines and required no additional set up. Now I'm facing if I buy Creed II the eventual death of the game. One day those servers will be turned off and the game will be rendered worthless. Blame the company? It's hard to since they did this in self defense. I blame both sides. The side that wants something for nothing and the side that worries only about the pirates and not the paying customers. The paying customers are always going to be the true victims in this war.
...and maybe it won't, because not enough hackers will bother to obtain the thing when they hear about the horrid DRM. I expect this system will delay a crack. I hope this system will also delay and limit sales resulting in the game not making money after all. I think Vogel has overestimated the difficulty of hacking the game; it uses the Internet, and thus there's no major difference between talking to a far-away host and talking to good old 127.0.0.1. So there's no need to set up and maintain servers; a crack could contain a local server.
listen hardcore ok
hacker will addin whatever is required to NOT need that net connection
the sales would be as they would for anygame and might be less with negative PR.
THEN
when its released cracked they will all whine more
You don't really need some special code for save games when you can easily write a program that will save the state of any game and let you resume right at that spot. It's been done with emulated games, it will be done with these games, and will avoid the whole mess of picking apart the mechanism used by the game's DRM. If you update the game, however, it will cause problems, but it's certainly doable.
Twinstiq, game news
This new DRM system is essentially a virtual dongle and will likely hold up about as well as the old DRM systems (i.e. not very well at all). The remote server will be emulated or the bits of code which check for the dongle will be cracked.
I don't see how this system is all that different from early attempts at DRM in the 80's other than potentially annoying their legitimate customers a lot more. That and there are a lot more skilled crackers now than in the 80's.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
One thing I've seen over the years is that people will accept any form of corporate control over their computer. It doesn't matter how draconian: it can be "you can only buy software from *us*", and they will cheerfully accept it.
Occasionally a big stink gets made, for example Spore, and everyone group-thinks and many avoid buying it. But mostly that doesn't happen, and the next thing, even if *more* draconian yet, will succeed. It always does. It's a lumpy road, but the path is clear if you look at things in the 70's and again now.
I can make a clone of Assassin's Creed with unbreakable DRM in 5 minutes. The catch? Legitimate users can't play it at all either. Just like spam filtering, the more DRM stops pirates the more it will stop legitimate users, and 100% anti-piracy stops 100% of non-pirates too. Anything less than 100% has holes in it which can be exploited.
"Cloud" DRM! Damn, next you know be nanobots inside your game DVD waiting to strike...
First problem is that this is a few paid programmers vs the world. Good luck with that. Secondly good luck keeping those servers running 24/7 for the next decade. Right now as I write this my daughter is playing Dead or Alive on my original XBOX. She would be pretty ticked if they were to have turned off the servers. Thus they have left code where they can plug in an update that will eliminate their server requirements some time in the future and allow local saving. Saving a game state is really easy. For the most part it is a big serialization. Thus hackers might just intercept the activation of the game state and just dump the data with the load function reversing the same procedure. Lastly they are going to find that running all these DRM servers is eating into their bottom line big time as these servers are going to receive some wicked hack attempts. Then lastly they are going to really tick off their customers when they lose game data to the hackers(or HD failure) or the hackers put everyone back to square one and rename their characters to Gay McGayster.
I don't really deal with much third party software, but this seems like a better version of the old scheme of authenticating over the internet, because it builds a dependency for consumers while supposedly providing a service. As long as you can make it seem like it's a real service and not just a onerous form of DRM, nobody minds. This is why, for instance, automatically posting scores to a shared space for players is a great idea -- buys you authentication while giving clients a feature pretty much all of them would either like or see as reasonable.
And yes, I'm putting these things in positive terms because they provide options for getting paid for work I make for sale to the public. If I don't get paid, then I stop working on publicly available software - or at least publicly available software that's not on closed hardware. That's what it boils down to, since I'm not independently wealthy or immortal. Obviously the best form of DRM is the kind you don't notice, and developing a natural dependence on a central server can be a slick way to go. Of course if it's completely artificial, then it pisses everyone off.
Most gamers I know have decided to just skip the game entirely. I know I will, I did buy the first one though and felt ripped off so I wasnt likely to buy the new one anyway. Still, friends of mine that did like the first one have mentioned not buying it specifically because of the DRM, two of them live in a rural area though so its understandable they coulnt play if they wanted to. Sure there are other games that are online only like WoW, etc but those are sold as an online experience, the first AC had single player only, the new one has some multiplayer modes tacked on but is still primarily a solo game. Gamers that dont follow gaming news are likely looking at it as a single player game and many will be duped into buying it that wont be able to play it at all.
Actually it does bring up an interesting delima...are they putting huge warning stickers on the outside of the box? I live in the midwest and there are still lots of rural areas around me that have no broadband access or very limited, a constant connection just isnt possible. Concidering the joke of a EULA that basically is summed up as "If you opened the box to read this...its too late sucker". There had better be warnings the size of warnings of cigarette boxes or I smell a potential class action suit in the near future.
because they've been doing this for QUITE a while on their arcade games, and this is a VERY small hurdle for those hackers to get by, and quite a niche audience for a bootleg compared to AC2. Long story short, Konami lost this battle in 2002. Ubisoft didn't pay attention, learn, and will lose again in 2010.
The claim that the save and load code is intimately tied to a server is misleading. From what I've read about the game, all save games are stored locally and uploaded some time afterward (This is also how Steam Cloud is usually implemented.) All a hacker needs to do is rip out this second part. It's not actually part of the save/load mechanism - it's an after-effect.
From an edit made to TFA: "As for the game making local copies of the saved games. IF this turns out to be the case, and IF the game also has easily accessible features in place for loading those saves (as opposed to only caching them there and only being able to load from the distant server), then yes, it's a dumb and easily crackable system." Well, yes, that's exactly what the system is. So...yeah.
more like The Awful Anti-Player System That Will Probably Work.
Conceptually, cracking this game is trivial. If it's using a DNS lookup to find the server, edit hosts. so it just loops back to the local machine (127.0.0.1). Then, write app that simulates the DRM server to save games, etc. are handled locally. Of course, I say it's conceptually trivial - depending on some specifics, it could get a little more difficult, but definitely doable. Same goes for the idea of streaming textures, etc. that someone else suggested - it's all crackable, just like nearly every scheme. Heck, even having the game live online only can be overcome with the help of some really determined people - if you can set up a WoW server at home, then even streaming game content isn't viable as a copyprotection mechanism.
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr - looking for something to read? Check out my three free novels at MidnightRyder.org
What game has Ubisoft lost money on due to lack of DRM? It remains a poor solution looking for a problem.
First off, awful big assumption that the crackers won't be able to break it. Thus far, all the complex DRM schemes that have come their way have fallen in short order. This one I imagine will face particularly intense attack just because of the "Oh it can't be cracked," idea. Tell someone they can't do something and that is just a challenge to see who can be the first to do it. I'd say there's a real good chance the crackers break it, and probably in not all that much time.
Second, there's the incorrect assumption that it will do nothing but increase sales. No, wrong. That is based off the extremely faulty assumption that everyone who pirates a game would have bought it had they not been able to pirate it. That is not at all the case. You have a very non-trivial number of people who will pirate it if they can, and do without if not. After all, there are plenty of people who will try something if it is free that won't if it costs anything at all. So even supposing it succeeds, there isn't this vast reserve of people out there who would pay but aren't.
To offset any gains there, you have people that won't pay, because of the DRM. I am one of those people. I enjoyed AC1 and was looking in to getting AC2. I was told that it was more of the same, but with some of the annoyances cleared up. Great, sounds worth it. I buy a lot of games, they are my primary form of entertainment, and I don't lack for money. However, I won't be buying this one. This DRM is unacceptable to me. I'm not going to pirate it either, I'll simply play other games, there are plenty of good ones out there. So they are directly losing a sale, because of the DRM.
That's the problem with invasive DRM. Even if it can stop pirates, which is real doubtful, it pisses off legit customers. As such you may well lose money using it. Remember that the total number of sales you gain due to preventing piracy has to be enough to offset the total number you lose AND the amount the DRM costs you, including development, implementation, and support. If not, you've lost money and it was a stupid business decision.
Ubisoft seems to have the idea that the goal should be to punish pirates. No, it shouldn't. The goal should be to maximize profits. You do that by getting the most sales and you do that by getting people to buy your title.
So they can have a lot of fun with this, but not on my dollar.
Wish I had mod points for you. You're absolutely correct. The only reasonable course of action if you object to the DRM is to ignore the game altogether.
http://www.product-reviews.net/2009/11/23/assassins-creed-2-sales-better-than-original/
It sold more than the original
http://thepiratebay.org/search/assassin%5C%27s%20creed%202/0/99/0
Zero hits
If creating a server that actually implements the save-game functionality is too difficult, then perhaps they could just save the process's memory to a file and reload it. Sure the save files would be on the order of gigabytes but disk space is cheap.
I think the harder DRM is designed to crack the harder crackers will work to beat the challenge.
Any anti-piracy system that the user has to be aware of and take extra steps to ensure normal use of their game has already failed.
A good anti-piracy system would prevent piracy AND be transparent to the end-user.
I've abandoned Windows as a gaming platform due to several of these recent 'advances' in DRM to the point where I don't care much about upgrading my hardware. I'll play the odd indie game with low requirements and no DRM, but that's about it.
Schemes like this are only going to kill the PC market (no reason to upgrade specialist GFX hardware if every game that needs good hardware has crazy protection schemes which are just annoying) and I can also see it taking a bite into Windows too (I'm seriously considering installing Ubuntu as my primary OS, my only reason for having Windows was new games, and schemes like this have made that a non-reason)
There are several high-end design and visualisation packages that need to call home to authentication servers before they will work. And there are pirate versions of all of them, which include authentication servers that you run locally and the software talks to them instead.
It sounds like Ubisoft's plan is more obfuscated, with save/load data being mangled in some way, and they are relying on crackers not knowing how to mangle/un-mangle it.
Maybe it will take a day or a week for a pirate version to come out, with a local save/load server. But, for sure, people will still pirate the game, and potential customers will still move away from buying it due to the aggressive DRM.
I just don't buy PC games anymore, due to these anti-customer technologies. I don't pirate them either. And because PS3 games are so expensive at release time, I wait to buy them a few months after release, or if one of the larger retailers has them on special offer.
if you search for 1991Razor you'll find what looks like a crack, I've not tested it myself but i wouldn't be surprised if it was legit.
The pirates need to set up their own DRM/Save/Restore server and hack the game to use it instead.
Problem solved. Now how badly do you want to do it?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That way, when sales of Assassin's Creed 2 are pathetically low and there are no cracks available, then Ubisoft must be forced to accept that poor sales are due to poor products, not "piracy". Hopefully the movie, music and games industries will learn from Ubisoft's impending demise.
So, in effect instead of having a copy that doesn't have stupid digital restrictions the day it is released you will have it a week after its released.
But that's exactly the aim. This is about making money.
Game publishers buy protection by the week.
Here's how it works:
Game development houses, generally, do not write their own copyright protection systems -- that's not their expertise! They just work on making a good game.
As the game nears release, they shop around for companies that write protection systems. How are they priced?
The protection companies say, "Well, for $N,000, we can implement protection scheme X1, which should keep you protected from crackers for about 2 weeks. But for $N0,000, we can implement protection scheme X2, which should keep you protected from crackers for about 6 weeks." They know roughly how much time it takes, because they have prior experience.
The publisher asks itself, "How many copies are we selling between week 2 and week 6?" The bulk of a games' profit is made in the first 1-4 months, so however much time they can buy, that's money in the pocket.
There is no doubt in my mind that competent hackers will be able to bypass the internet checks and redirect the DRM save/load requests to a local server. This is routine stuff.
The thing that could make this difficult is if Ubisoft transforms or processes the data on their servers before returning it to the client. In this situation, if Ubisoft was sufficiently devious, a real crack might never appear (without a leak from Ubisoft), as the hackers would need to reverse engineer this processing, which might be unfeasible.
If you don't like it, don't buy it. Copy protection goes through cycles. Companies think it's a great thing, start implementing it, and then customers stay away in droves. If anyone here remembers the copy protections of the 1980's involving induced bad sectors and other things, you'll remember that it pissed off customers and it died by the time the 1990's showed up, because they simply wouldn't buy the games.
Then the industry largely forgot about it and here we are with another round. Do the same thing - don't buy DRMed media and it will die the same death.
Don't break the DRM. Don't pirate, either. Pirating the game/software/media only skews the market in favor of the incumbents and locks out alternatives. Give your money and market share to the alternatives if you don't like DRM/copy protection. That part of the market will grow and favor companies that don't treat their customers like potential thieves. Indeed, Bill Gates said as much 12 years ago when he said that Microsoft will get the Chinese "sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Strong copy protection and DRM in a free market always fails eventually, if you let it.
--
BMO
This is actually a reason to support "piracy" (or more accurately, cracking games, because not all crackers of games are pirates). They give your games longevity and save you from annoyances.
Twinstiq, game news
The fundamental problem with DRM has always been that if it works then it will inevitably cause a lot of hassle for legitimate customers, thus driving consumers to buy different games.
To take a particular example for this scheme, imagine the following: Your net connection is down, so you can't play WoW with your mates. Good thing you have those single players games that don't need a connection... OH CRAP! Requiring an Internet connection for a single player game is about as sensible as trying to convince people they should use condoms while masturbating.
To me, the real target is to kill used video games. In France, 40% of video games sold are used games. For every used game sold, the game editor gets ZERO. But video games recyclers get a important commission and every time a customer gets it their shop to resell his game, it's the occasion to sell him goodies, accessories and useless insurances.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
1. Don't buy the game at all.
2. Wait for the pirated version. Someone is sure to make a little local server and just redirect the conversation to that.
Either way DRM is evil, its not a question of them doing what is right, its a question of them doing what is wrong.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
How about the lost of people on dial up and low cap ips? does this work on Sat internet as well?
l
This may even force people to pirate as they will be able to use the game they paid for.
I'm not sure at all about this, because I'm not terribly sure of how this would work in the legal system, but.. couldn't they be setting themselves up for a class-action lawsuit? I frequently do not have internet access, or if I do it pops in and out. If I buy an application, and because of the developer's intentional ham-stringing, the application shuts itself down, would I have legal recourse? This isn't an issue like a developer being held accountable for buggy code, because this is clearly an intended part of the program just a thought, don't know if it has much merit
It might hold off the pirates, but what's the point when you're alienating your entire user base? It's been said before and i'll say it again: I don't own the media that i buy, i only rent it. I and most other pc gamers that i know simply wont buy any games with a drm this restrictive. There's a sweetspot to drm, that sweetspot is called Steam, companies need to stop ruining games with useless attempts DRM.
You just saved me 50 euros on Assassins Creed. And will probably save me more for future ubisoft games. And no, I'm not going to buy the PS3 counterparts.
its funny the xbox version has been out since "November 17, 2009"
I played it for a bit on my modded 360. Got bored of it, never finished it. Pirating games on the 360 is too easy, I have too many games. But my point is, why the fuck is it taking 3.5 months to port this to the PC? They're stupid for spending that much time and money on DRM if that's why. All the hardcore pirates have modded Xboxes and Wiis and don't give a shit about this version.
There are simply too many things working against the game for it to possibly do well.
Step 1: "Make your own, free saved game server and alter the application code to use it." Well, the author assumes incorrectly that the server must be a big server somewhere on the internet and must handle thousands of users...What he didn't think of is that the hacker/cracker could just write a very small and dirty server that runs only on local machine and accepts only local connections and just redirect the game's requests to that. POOF, no need for costly server maintenance, no need for internet connection etc.. And this has been done before, it's not the first time.
I am not for piracy, nor am I anti DRM, but I am anti-DRM when it impacts users. The article is written by someone who is not an expert at the relevant fields: programming and hacking. As such, the article draws erroneous conclusions.
Spending the majority of your efforts making sure that people don't steal your content, instead of producing content that's worth stealing is clearly the way to go. Kudos Ubi!
this will piss off pretty much every pc user who is stupid enough to even buy it. my pcs wifi isn't constant it likes to randomly disconnect this game would be unplayable. or those in dailup or just not online like on a laptop away from its wifi spot. the backlash from this will be worse then ea and spore.
I remember when Bluray was thought to "have a chance" of stopping piracy...... Seems that it was a paper tiger as well.
This will be cracked as fast as any other game. All you need is a fake server running on the local machine and redirect the game to it. The rest of the hacking process is business as usual for people who do that sort of thing.
No sig today...
To me, the real target is to kill used video games. In France, 40% of video games sold are used games. For every used game sold, the game editor gets ZERO. But video games recyclers get a important commission and every time a customer gets it their shop to resell his game, it's the occasion to sell him goodies, accessories and useless insurances.
That's definitely an issue ... game publishers seem to feel that they should get a cut of every single single transaction involving that original disc. That's just blind greed and goes against, well, a couple hundred years of law and tradition in the U.S., at least. Of course, if everything is online (like Steam) then there's no problem. Nobody owns anything that can be physically transferred from one person to another. The real problem is that they keep charging for their products as if they are actually selling something, when in fact they're just effectively renting it.
Bloodsuckers, all of them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You speak as if there's this magic point where a pirated copy comes out and then the game sales immediately plummet. I wasn't under the impression that reality worked that way.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I don't think anyone has yet mentioned that games from Bethesda and Bioware have seem to have little DRM outside of a disc check. Games like Oblivion, FO3 and Dragon Age all seem to lack this crippling DRM. And yet they're still in business happily producing games. Maybe it's not enough to simply not buy games that have crippling DRM. Maybe we should also go out of our way to also buy games that are so lacking in DRM even if it would be trivial to get it for free. I think sending these non-DRM (relatively) developers my $50 or $60 is worth it just to support the idea.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
When you can patch a *single bit* in the binary to make the game believe it is already connected to the server?
That way you could play without any network setup at all.
This is the part that I really don't get. All of the DRM schemes to date are provably insecure, yet industry continues to buy into them. Why? Don't they understand that all it takes is *one* enterprising hacker to find the CMP instruction where the game checks for the internet connection, and flip a bit to reverse the comparison? Or worse, patch around the connection-checking code entirely.
Once your code is on someone else's machine, you have no control over which parts of it run, and which parts don't. No control - none, nada, zip. Really, how hard is it to understand this?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The bigger the Flag that states "Im uncrackable!"
The quicker they will run a Jockstrap up Ubisofts Flagpole.
Anyone actually pays for a game that demands you be 100% wired to The Man, needs their head examined. Its not like you have to overuse the imagination to come up with a scenario whereby the legit consumer is gonna come incross the inevitable flaw in this particular DRM Theory.
May Work - But Probably Wont. Wait on the Crack, because buying this is, quite simply, pissing away your rights.
Step 2: "HA HA!" - Nelson Muntz, pointing at Ubisoft
I'll go a step further. I'm not buying this game. I'm not pirating this game. This game is not getting my money, my time, or my tactic approval.
This is something that just bugs me about the attitude some people have about DRM and piracy. People will take the approach of "this DRM sucks, ergo I'm going to pirate it, instead of paying for it". This isn't a boycott, nor is it voting with your wallet. This is taking the approach that two wrongs make a right, and that pirating the game somehow "punishes" the makers of it for the sin of screwing over legitimate users.
Want to send a message? Do what I'm going to do. Don't touch the copybroken crap with a ten foot cable.
Because make no mistake, piracy rates for a game are measurable. If the game is popular, and pirated extensively, then the message sent to the publishers is that the DRM system, however extreme, still isn't "enough". That an even more extreme measure is needed to turn those hypothetical pirated copies into sales figures. And the developer still gets acknowledged as having made a game good enough for you, the pirate, to want it. If they think they can make a paying customer out of a pirate by making the game unpirateable, then they'll got to great lengths to do exactly that.
The only way to break DRM in the long term is to vote with your wallet, and simply ignore the very existence of companies that cross the line the way Ubisoft has. They need to be told, and have that information backed by hard data, that DRM is hurting their sales by making the legit users leave (you know, the people who actually pay for the game?
Couldn't agree more!
...how much these companies pay to have DRM integrated into their product. Or even how much they have to pay for the DRM vs. how much it "gets them back" vs. piracy.
But I'd be really interested to see the numbers they project to lose to piracy vs. how much they're spending on DRM. It seems to me that buying the DRM would only hurt them more--it obviously does very little if anything to deter piracy. Wouldn't piracy be hurting their bottom line like this?:
Income lost to piracy = income lost to piracy + cost of DRM
It's like if you lost some jewelry down the sink so you throw more down there to clog the hole so no more can get through. Just doesn't make any damn sense.
In principle all you have to do is spoof the server.
In practice they've probably used strong encryption to make this nearly impossible without inside information or breaking the encryption.
However, you could attack the handshaking code so it handshakes with a spoofed server, probably one running locally on the same machine as the game. You could even embed the server portion right into the game.
However, I would have a very hard time trusting this code unless I trusted the people who wrote it or had source, and as such I wouldn't put it only any non-expendable machine.
Therefore, in practice, this is a possible win for Ubisoft.
However, it is a big loss for the gaming industry: If teens on limited budgets are forced to scale back to only a few games, they may lose interest in these games and move on to another form of entertainment, and won't be as interested in playing and paying as adults. It could also lead to a loss of developer talent as today's and tomorrow's teenagers may choose another career besides game-development.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is another perfect example of how DRM *only* hurts legal, paying customers.
Want to be legal and play it on a laptop away from home? You're out of luck if you have a legal copy of the game.
Mr. Pirate...? He won't be affected at all.
No sig today...
When I hear news like this, it just makes me want to pirate a game more. Why should I, as a paying customer, have to deal with bullshit when pirates don't? Shouldn't paying money for the game give me less hassle than people who don't? Game companies that dont hold their games hostage get my business- because I'm not going to deal with the DRM bullshit. I'd rather wait till the game is cracked and play it then.
No. It doesn't.
Your joke has actually sucked humor from surrounding, better, jokes. It's really that terrible. In fact, it's painful. Reading that "joke" was like having bowel surgery with no anesthesia.
Whatever extremely small amount of humor might have been gained had the parent post actually included the name "Polly" anywhere (it doesn't) would be instantly destroyed but that retarded "gives a whole new meaning to" template which hasn't been funny in approximately a decade.
As-is, the joke basically simplifies to: "The word 'cracker' has two different meanings! Hyuk!" Even the writers of Two and a Half Men would be ashamed of that line, had they written it.
Comment of the year
If the marginal gain in revenue from adding DRM to the game is greater the marginal lost in revenue from pirating, then Ubisoft is not going to care about those people who'll have problems with their business model. If DRM is necessary to make a decent buck from the work you've invested several million dollars in, then something (or someone) is definitely broken. And those support calls? They're handled by some low-wager in Ireland.
People can grab copies of whatever people download from the servers and put it in the local cache. Once you have a complete working game in your PCs memory you have a complete working game, period.
No sig today...
There are a bunch of good games out there-- that are filled with DRM.. and I wont touch it. And I kinda wish people had the collective backbone not to buy "hostageware" , even if you can get some awesome convenience factor as a bonus prize.. (steam installs are a tempting draw)
But I don't want to be treated like a thief.. And I avoid giving money to anyone that treats me as such. If the gas station says prepay only I'll fill up elsewhere -- even when I'm swiping a card to pay for gas.
Storm
If the data is encrypted, it will be much harder to figure out though.
All it would take is for their server to get hit by a DoS attack on an opening weekend for a major release. Every customer would suffer from being kicked out of their legally obtained game over and over. The complaints would flood their offices and sales would drop. I don't think I'd want a game where a group of bored kiddies could kick me out of my single player video game.
"This article explains why, as dreadful as the system is, it does have a chance of holding hackers off long enough for the game to make its money."
Then I won't buy it or play it. And I encourage other people to do the same.
If this is the future of DRM in games then it is in my best interests to ensure this awful experiment will fail. You can forget about my dollars, Ubisoft. I'm an honest player that does buy games, but I'm not putting up with this level of nonsense.
Too bad I did not know this when I bought the game for PS3. Had I known, I would certainly have spent my money on something else.
I would like legislation forcing DRM:ed software and content to clearly state that in the labeling. Similar to how cigarettes now has to be labeled (although that in itself is a frigthening sign of stupidity), DRM:ed software and music should come with a "this is crippled, and may stop working, or not work at all"-warning.
Let's see how well DRM would do with an informed consumer-base.
Indeed. Considering the game's $60 price tag, and the fact that you cannot trade it in at Gamespot, and this ridiculous DRM... it'll be a wonder if any PC user buys this game. I may end up picking it up for $20 some point down the road, or just renting it for $5 and playing it on the PS3. Good job Ubisoft, I guess you win. Now you can go crunch numbers and come to the wrong conclusion that PC games "don't sell well".
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
The reward for a DRM system is not "people don't pirate it", it's "people buy it".
If you don't like it, don't buy it.
This doesn't sound like DRM, and I don't understand what's so horrible about it. Basically, it sounds like some critical game functionality is offloaded to a server. In a way, this is simply a half-way point between an entirely client-based game and a network-based game. A game which is purely network-based also stops functioning if your network connection goes away -- would that be equally upsetting?
If you object to this sort of model, then wouldn't you object to a purely network-based pay-to-play game? Say, for instance, a pay-to-play MUD? Or any sort of for-pay web activity? I guess I don't understand what is so upsetting about this. If the dependency on the net is a showstopper for you, this game is obviously not a good purchase. Beyond that, the complaining going on here just looks like whining because they've made it more difficult to use the game without paying for it.
I'm an indie developer, and I see our games pirated all over the place despite their being available for roughly the price of a fast food value meal. It feels sorta sucky to be pirated, and while I can't prove it, I suspect that my studio would gain at least little more money if people didn't pirate it.
That said, I don't forsee us ever taking draconian DRM measures to prevent people from playing our games. Piracy will change the way we design them, but I think what will end up happening is that we start creating games that make use of online content. Some examples:
* Level of the Day -- Log in and download your free level right here.
* Matchmaking/Leaderboards -- Pick up the game, and you'll have an account to taunt other people with your mad skills.
* Server-Side Content/Collaboration -- Co-build a level with a friend, online, and make that available to everyone else.
My thought is to offer additional, online-only content that gameplay into having an account. Sure, you can probably still pirate the game, but by picking up a legitimate copy, you have access to all this other neat stuff.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
Just wondering. Has anyone considered that, for so long as anyone wants to play the game, there will have to be a server maintained with the appropriate code?
Even though most "gamers" tend toward newer, shinier programs, I still think there is a large enough demographic of people like myself (older computers, less time) who may not buy a game the first year it comes out, and I would be rather displeased to purchase something only to find that the DRM prevents me from playing.
Its probably not that complicated at all, trick the software into thinking that the "remote machine" is the end-user's computer, or even easier a virtual machine with spoofed information. This method would be much quicker and easier than trying to dismantle the drm altogether.
2 words: WoW Emulator.
If people can make an emulator for an entire game, they can surely make an emulator for just saving the data online.
Even if the game requires online saves (and there's some doubt) it'll only be a few months before pirate servers exist that you can run on your own machine to store the saves. You don't even need to be a pirate to want that server emulator, either!
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I love bringing this patent application up. There are different ways of preventing software piracy, including the one applied for below. No points for guessing why I love writing about it. It is effective antipiracy without the overreaching DRM.
USPTO Application Number 11678137
Basically, each and every copy of a protected program gets it's own internal intelligence, interpretable only by itself, which includes time of program creation, etc., etc.. The only hitch is that each copy of the program must be compiled or otherwise created at the time of purchase. Also, the maker must keep track of each and every set of created special software in case the user emails in that he needs to reinstall. Perhaps even the purchasers name would be included as part of the intelligence. The number of permissible occurrences of requests for new key codes, say, 5 times, can be controlled by the program maker. If a pirate cracks the code for that single copy of the program, still, it will work only for that copy, and only in the time frame tat the internal intelligence says it can be installed.
The upshot is that program maker gets money, the purchaser can own it, install on more than one computer in his home, again within a day or so, and new key codes can be obtained in case of needed reinstalls, a reasonable amount of times.
Ubisoft has never understood how to do online multiplayer gaming correctly. It has been all downhill since the original Far Cry game and they will never see another penny of my gaming cash. Steam on the other hand is almost perfect. Almost.
Apparently, the OP isn't a 'hacker'. Or a somewhat experienced programmer, for that matter.
Is it harder than something like a CD Key? Sure. Is it 'far more difficult'? Not really. Wireshark the data if it's unencrypted. If it's encrypted, dump it from memory after the game decrypts it. Both are easy. Disable the network login and the network status code (trivial). Replace "save" and "load" functionality with something using fopen() on the previously-snooped data.
Let's step back and have a look at the decline in quality PC games vs the uptake of P2P, I think we'll find some correlation.
I bought an Xbox 360 so I could play Assasins Creed, it was cheaper than upgrading to a new PC.
I'll buy Assasins Creed 2, for the Xbox, where it makes sense, the unfortunate situation is that on the PC it doesn't.
If Microsoft would support the mouse on the Xbox I'd throw my video card in the bin. Consoles are here to stay and DRM is the only way PC game developers will make money in the long term.
Sad as it is, this is the world we live in.
You think that the publisher is going to treat this logically, but you fail to understand that many (if not the majority) of the CEO figures are sociopaths... simply because that's the only group that can manage to get into these positions. As such, they may interpret the sales figures differently.
If game X sells ten million copies with little DRM, they will see it as justification that DRM works (since they assume everyone will pirate, since they judge by themselves). If the sequel (X-2) sells five million copies with horrible DRM, they will see it as justification that "hackers" have gotten more sophisticated and the consumers (whom they hate) have pirated at least five million copies. In their eyes, this will mean that X-3 should have even more DRM.
This is the logic that the music industry has been using for years. You didn't buy a CD by an artist you've previously patronized because it contained DRM? You just gave the publisher another -$15 to claim as damages from piracy.
For every used game sold, the game editor gets the price that they sold the game for originally.
For those who haven't been paying attention, there are several reverse-engineered versions of the server software for World of Warcraft. Your shitty little save-game routine is never going to be magically delicious enough that someone can't crack it. Pirates win, Ubisoft loses, consumers lose. And who wants to put money down that somewhere in the code left on the disk there's a partial or even complete local save routine left over from the development phase?
Set our botnet to DDoS mode, target their main servers and transmit our extortion email. Mr Lawyer, load the "DMCA take-down" torpedoes and target their upstream provider (Network Solutions).
All your game copies belonging to us now...
yeah - right - you might not be able to fool this DRM system, but you might be able to kick it out completely, using a disassembler and assembler skill...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
They WILL, they got no choice, no more choice then my cat has of pouncing when I dangle a string in front of its nose, or I have of rubbing her belly when she goes all cuddly on my lap. We are simple creatures, and hackers are no different. Give them a challenge and they WILL pounce.
Has ANY of these DRM architects ever wondered HOW the DRM hackers get the game to hack? Oh, some get it from friends who work at game shops and such, but plenty BUY it. Do you REALLY think the people that crack Windows DRM don't have a legit version themselves? They do. They don't hack for profit or even to save money but because it gives them a thrill.
Frankly, I think this game can be broken in a very simple way on release, just create a fake server that says "OK" and simply do without in game saves but use machine states to do it. Sooner or later someone WILL sort this out, after all, the save code is in the game, it must be at one point or another to send the save file over to the server.
And there are dozens if not thousands of hackers who smell a challenge.
We have seen restrictive DRM before and the more the game company announced how unbreakable their DRM is, the more quickly it has been broken.
This bit of DRM will fail because unlike say the PS3, it has to run on a open platform where the user is ultimately in control of the entire system. Every bit that goes in and out can be analyzed and altered at the will of the user. And at the same time all three parts of the encryption puzzle must be available for the game to work.
I would be suprised if a working hack isn't out at launch and a complete hack within a month.
Meanwhile, everyone who buys the game has to endure this DRM.
People of the game industry, "cutting of your nose to spite your face" is NOT a motto.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You don't buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001 "I Am Sam." Remember? Went full retard, went home empty handed...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
To all those creating, producing, and selling ...
"The market for a product is the group of those who are willing to pay money for it, not those who will steal it, or can't pay for it."
If you are trying to come up with a method to extort money from those who try to steal your product then you are wasting your time, and probably the time of those who actually buy your product.
True criminals will never pay you. Teens without incomes can't pay you. The poor can't pay you.
What's left is an insignificant sprinkling of people who will never increase your bottom line. Everyone else will hate you, and provide negative feelings to their peers about your company and product. Extortion is wrong and serves nobody, especially your true customers.
There are two pretty big assumptions that are being made. First, one has to have a constant and reliable internet connection, so what of those who use wireless access points, or who play games on airplanes or in vehicles? Second, the crux of this scheme is assuming that online servers can't be emulated, which I think the prevalence of MMORPG private servers has disproven.
Of course, being the cynical optimist that I am, I hope that they go ahead with this plan, fail miserably, and create enough backlash to deal a heavy blow to DRM.
Wonder if there will be a hack that tricks the game into looking at the loopback and an external program for ping responses to allow offline game play
I tend to find them a lot in keygens and cracks. Which is why though I usually run my games in windows, I run the keygens in 'nix and print out the serials.
All some enterprising hacker needs to do is rig up a local server app instead. Hack the game to talk to the 127.0.0.1 instead of the "official" server.
If "private" World of Warcraft servers can exist, then so can a private save server.
Quit whining, and complaining, the only way you can make the companies that do this kind of crap, is to not buy their products.
Stop buying the game! And tell them why you are not buying the game.
Tell your friends to do the same and find some other game to entertain yourselves.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
so the crack will include a locally run save game server? I fail to see how this will be all that much of a barrier unless the save games are not even created locally, but rather created by a remote system as it receives constant status updates from the game, much like an MMO.
how exactly is losing your ass on server upkeep costs for a game going to save you from piracy? by bankrupting you before the pirates can?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
"For every used game sold, the game editor gets ZERO."
They already got their money, on the original sale. They have no right to any other money because they no longer own the item in question. Don't like that? Then don't deal in tangible/tradable goods. This of course is why game companies love downloadable sales. They can cut out used games when everything is virtualized.
This system isn't supposed to eliminate cracking, it's just supposed to delay it for a while. If they can delay the cracks for a significant amount of time, they believe would-be pirates will get impatient and buy it. I don't know if that theory's correct, but I'm pretty sure that's their model.
Also, there's nothing particularly novel about streaming actual game content from a server. You've pretty much just described an MMO, but without the Ms or the recurring fee. The piracy model will be roughly the same.
It is tougher than just patching with a few NOPs, but it's hardly insurmountable. At some point, the entire game state is serialized and sent to the server. Later it is retrieved and de-serialized back into the game state. The key is to control where it sends that serialized data stream. Either to a file or to a local server.
TFA nearly gets the last part, but for some reason assumes that someone would have to set up the one true pirate server somewhere. I don't see why, they would just have to freely distribute the pirate server software so individuals or small groups of friends can set up a server for their use.
Certainly, it's a lot harder than just patching a few bytes to skip an authentication check, but it's not impossible. Some people consider stuff like this more fun than actually playing the game. Raise the level of challenge and increase the determination of people like that to crack it.
When a company spends more press time hyping their DRM system, than the actual games, they have a major problem, and it isn't piracy.
I see DRM as a way to shut down the 2nd hand games market, more than piracy. That's been the trend lately. Activation limits, bonus items etc, are all there to reduce the value of a resold game. Game publishers seem to think that their products have no right to be resold.
I hope someone cracks this shit fast. Not because I want to pirate these games, but because they've bragged about how hard it will be to crack. I hope someone shoves a cracked version in their face on 0-day.
sniff the data, set up your second machine to be their remote machine and return the data locally. Or make a little app to do that on your game playing box.
And the server code...
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
I don't know about that. I use Ubuntu and some intel chipset with on-board graphics that I never even had to know about. I just slapped a computer together and installed Ubuntu and never had to know anything about the specs except for what would work on that motherboard. I do my gaming on consoles though so I never had to run Windows. I have a MacBook Pro and some games can run on there, and I've never had to worry about drivers either.
This just shifts the cracking effort to one of reverse engineering the network protocol. Hardly touch the client and write your own server. That sort of thing has been done before (I remember 10 years ago playing Blizzard games with an open source Battle.net server.)
Same thing will happen as every other time they've tried to use intrusive or annoying DRM.
Sales will plummet, piracy will be blamed.
There are many good arguments on here and most of them addresses the dislike and disgust of DRM. What I don't understand is this:
All of these game companies are striving to create control of their software; they are spending just as much money on software that is used to prevent hackers from pirating a program as they are the games themselves. The software that they are creating is simply not working and if it does, then it does not work for long. This means that software programmers and engineers are going to have to keep on updating and changing the anti-piracy software to stay ahead of the hackers; costing the software companies even more money over the life of a game. In order for the game companies to continue to make money on their product, with all this extra cost of security, then they must increase the price of the game, create subscription fees, or have limited time on license for their software.
It seems reasonable to me that if they would stop focusing so much on the anti-piracy measures and focus more on making their games enjoyable and AFFORDABLE then they would sell more and make more on their games.
I know that when I can't afford a game that I want to play then I won't even attempt to save up for it. I will, however, find a way to play the game without buying it, and if that means that I have to play it for only an hour at a friend's house then that is what I will do.
For every used game sold, the game editor gets ZERO.
Really? What do you think the person selling their game used is going to go spend that money on? More video games, would be my guess.
I'm certain you're correct, but it's rather remarkably short-sighted on the part of publishers to think every used sale represents a potential new game sale lost.
I want to play on a ferry for the 3 hours it takes me for the trip - no internet there - That's a loss of a sale of every decent product they make with that DRM right there.
The again - i could pay them nothing and pirate it (they are really naive enough to think any copy protection can't be cracked??) and still use the product on my 3 hour commutes.
Alternatively I can purchase products that don't have this sort of DRM and give those publishers and developers my money.
Either way - they've lost any sale I might have considered and I've paid for every good piece of software I've ever used. Sucks to be honest yet treated like a pirate.
Dumb story title by the way 'will probably work..' hah.
...will probably keep intruders away, but it won't be a good place to live in. Same here: Perhaps this thing has a chance to work technically, but that doesn't mean that it will increase the company's profit gained from this game. I pre-ordered the black edition of AC2 (and some other coming Ubisoft titles, too), but now I canceled it. I know myself pretty well and I know, how much it would annoy me when the game pauses again and again (because of my lousy internet connection), always forcing me to start from the last save point. I don't want that. So I will not buy Ubisoft games any more. Ok, honestly, I wouldn't buy it, even if I had a great internet connection, because of the DRM-thingy. Honestly, I simply don't think that "one person who downloads the game illegally less" equals to "one more person who buys the game". In my (not very) humble opinion, the main priority of people who want me to buy something should be to please me and not to annoy the people who will not buy the game. By annoying all of us, they perhaps decrease the number of people who will download the game illegally, ok, but probably, they will also decrease the number of people who will buy the game.
and every time a customer gets it their shop to resell his game, it's the occasion to sell him goodies, accessories and useless insurances.
Or other, sometimes even new, games...
The best mixed martial arts training in Boston - www.redlinefightsports.com
Whats to stop someone from deploying a ddos against the content/authentication servers? seems that this streaming server(s) would be a lucrative target. Even a partial blackout could ruin the game's reputation and sales.
That's assuming the DRM doesn't work. But the whole point of this aggressive approach is to prevent it from being cracked. From a technical standpoint it will certainly give the crackers a real hard time. Let's wait and see.
People claiming that DRM never works because you can download games from torrents don't know what they're talking about.
...should be reproducible on a black-box level by intercepting traffic during regular game-play and extrapolating behavior.
1. It is bad at actual copy protection. It can be circumvented without the crackers ever having to mess with the actual program - all they need to do is to simulate the server.
2. It is bad for the customer. Come on, losing game progress because your internet connection decided to fall into a coma? WTF are these people thinking?
This sounds a lot like what Blizzard is doing with Starcraft 2. Don't like it? Don't buy it. That is the route I am taking. It's a game, not a necessity.
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Whoever thinks this will work is crazy or stupid. One modified exe later and the game will run without talking to the servers. I would be surprised if this sets the crackers back a whole day.
I disagree, this DRM will not slow hackers down by more than a day or 2. Additionally, you're going to get a MASSIVE loss of sales due to this. All in all the pirated version is FAR better. /Personally I don't really care about ACII.
Also for every new DRM it takes a little longer to break, then every time thereafter is shorter (see Securom)
But the entire point of this article is that in this case mr pirate would be affected
I'm quite surprised that nobody seems to have read the FAQ from Ubisoft:
"Will all my saved games be stored online? Yes! They will be stored both online and on your PC."
Source: http://support.uk.ubi.com/online-services-platform/
"...and on your PC."
It will be cracked in no-time. End of story.
Soon you will be forced to travel to the publishers studio and play the game there while being monitored by cameras.
Software pirates have had a 100% success rate at cracking games with any sort of protection. I'm no pirate cracker guy, but couldn't a creative hacker just host the 'magic same game server' on the local computer? I'm thinking using a little hosts lookup like suck.ubisoft.com = 127.0.0.1? Why is this approach so 'revolutionary'? If people can crack other online activation schemes why is this one significantly different?
To date, the only activation scheme that I haven't seen cracked properly is Arma 2, and I think the only reason is that it's really not apparent when the game "isn't working", it just causes accuracy with all your weapons to be off a little, just enough to make you miss 20% of the time. I'm sure the cracker got the game to start and said "done!".
So I look forward to watching the BT hordes downloading the fully operational crack for assassins creed 2, as they have with every single DRM / copy protected game ever made.
Here's a new idea for the DRM pushers... Don't do it. It does not help prevent piracy and really pisses off your legitimate customers. Today, someone who pirates a game is going to have a better experience than a person who bought the game and does not circumvent the DRM. And to what end? The people who you were trying to fetter are actually having a better experence with your game than your paying customers. Nothing was accomplished and many bridges were burned. The worst part for UBI was that the people pirating the game probably were not going to buy the game anyway, so the idea that preventing piracy would increase sales is a flawed theory in the first place. It would be like stopping a 17yr old meth addict from pirating autoCAD. To what end? To what end? Seems like nobody really thinks things all the way though these days.
If you can stand it (or you have a busy life anyways), try staying a year or so behind game releases:
1. hardware is cheaper: upgrade your video card for a fraction of the cost, while still getting a few years life out of it.
2. games are all patched: any/all bugs in the main story-line and/or single-player are fixed by this point; usually performance tweaks are done as well, again benefiting your "old" video card.
3. video drivers are stable: and there's usually game-specific improvements at this point as well.
4. games are cheaper now: get games at half the price (or less) through Steam or in-store.
5. Hype has worn off: reviews are everywhere at this point; get the games that matter to you and/or are worth the money.
I'm just playing Crysis now, having picked up a Core 2 Duo with a Radeon 8500HD for really cheap and it runs great and barely cost me anything. Since I'm a casual gamer and look after my machines, this will likely end up as my niece or nephew's machine if not a home server of some capacity down the road.
body massage!
For every used game sold, the game editor gets ZERO.
If I couldn't resell my games I would never by them for $50 to begin with. For games, like most products, market segmentation exists, and some form of price discrimination is necessary to maximize profits in such an environment. The used game market provides this without any additional work on the publisher's behalf. Eliminating the used game market will just decrease the value of the new sales, resulting in a lower number of sales at a given price point.
Thus, they are not getting ZERO for the used games sold, they are getting the fraction of new sales that wouldn't happen without the used market.
Of crackers...
If it needs an outside server to save games, they may very well make an outside server-to-save-games program. And patch the game to contact the local server instead.
They might not normally go through the trouble.
But... some of the people now who hate the DRM and want to break it will be legitimate customers who never intend to actually pirate it.
IOW, they now have an itch to scratch. If enough of those legitimate customers are sufficiently annoyed by the DRM but like the play of a game enough, Ubisoft has manufactured a reason for them to work on the problem.
Requiring a constant internet connection is a major annoyance for the legitimate customers, and so, there may be lots of hackers working on this problem.
Lots of hackers who are skilled at reverse engineering protocols, since they see Ubisoft as basically "creating a challenge for them" ("Unbreakable DRM, you say?" Hah! sounds like a day)
So IOW, no, I don't think it's correct that it will work, necessarily.
Just depends on how much real dependency on the server is there, how complex the interactions are, and how good/how popular the game is.
I heard about this awhile ago, and it drove me to a rage. I'm never buying another Ubisoft game ever again, period.
In case you haven't realized, lemme spell it out for you: You can never play the games offline (never on a plane, never on a laptop, never at grandma's house....). But even more ridiculous,
ON THE OFFICIAL UBISOFT FAQ:
Q: Can I sell my game?
A: No.
I am not a lawyer, but shouldn't that be illegal?
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Funny observation about remote saving.... We have people who made reverse engineered version of battle.net and now author questions hacker's ability to recreate some load/save stuff.
Give me a break.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
I would love to hear an example of a game that actually LOST money because of piracy. I don't think such a thing has ever happened.
Wouldn't it be possible to set up a server on the user's own machine, and just have the game connect to 127.0.0.1?
Revive the Constitution.
I know who isn't getting my next $50.
I loved Ubisoft games. Well their older ones. You see I stopped buying their shit right about the time it started requiring the bought version to be cracked for me to use it. For a while it looked like they'd learnt their lesson. They even REMOVED CD checks on Chessmaster. But it looks like they must have had another management change....oh well. Bye bye, don't let the door hit your arse on the way out.
Same goes for Code Masters, and those Russian developers that developed Lockon Flamming Cliffs (whatever the name is they're using today). Ruining superb games with shitty DRM.
All these companies and all their talented programmers - they can all just fuck off! I'm not a pimply teenage script kiddy that gets his thrills breaking the law. My entertainment time is scarce and I don't want to spend it defeating copy protection. So for all I care they can - all of them from management down - go get jobs flipping burgers.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This is actually particularly easy to crack, because it's on such a hair-trigger it's easy to trip, and everything that deals with the network is either part of the copy-protection, or part of the online savegame functionality that you want to remove as part of a 100% crack anyway. That's a pretty obvious red flag, and techniques are good enough now thanks to malware analysis that none of the anti-debugging techniques work well anymore.
The irony is that the deeper and more obvious you put the hooks in, the easier it is to trace them out automatically. One good run-log - easy to do in this day and age now that we have hard drives with thousands of gigabytes of space each - and this system is completely screwed even if it uses online watchdog sentinels (which it doesn't). It doesn't matter if it takes an extra few hours to get it just right, because now that millions of people have heard how awful this protection is, those millions will be not buying the game and will be prepared to wait for a fixed (read: cracked) version.
It's not impregnable. Not even close. Just obnoxious. And that makes it all the more satisfying to remove, but means there really is no excuse for this kind of crap.
The cynic in me believes that they want this system to fail, they want this game to fail, they want this to be massively pirated, so that Ubisoft have an excuse for leaving the PC platform behind altogether. Maybe that is what they want.
I don't suppose anyone bothered to point out the obvious. That the game is already cracked and available for download on the pirate bay.
Publishers can whine about PC gaming dying all they like, it isn't. So what'll happen is if they leave, they'll just make less money and other companies will get it instead. If all publishers went and exited PC gaming, that'd be a problem for gamers. If one publisher does it, that's just a problem for that publisher.
PC gaming is still huge. Viewed by revenue, it is the largest platform (considering it to be a platform like the Xbox 360 or Wii or so on). Lot of money being made on PC games of all types. It also helps that there isn't any licensing costs. On a console, you have to pay the company that made the console a license fee for each title sold. That's how they make it work, cheap hardware, make money on the software. No licensing fees on a PC, of course, you get to keep your money.
Regardless, Ubisoft can keep being stupid, it won't matter. I imagine, as they have more and more problems, they'll wise up and stop it. That has been happening with EA. For awhile they were getting real anti-PC, insisting on bitchy SecuROM protections and releasing PC games long after the console releases. They seem to have wised up, their two first flight RPG recently (Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2) have shipped with no DRM, and at the same time on PC and console. They seem to have realized that screwing over PC gamers is a bad idea.
The reason Spore's sales were less than stellar (they were still sufficient to make money by the way) is because the game sucks. It really isn't very much fun. I don't think the anti-DRM campaign had much to do with it.
Yeah, Bioware pissed me off an awful lot. Not only is there "first time buyer" bonus gear in Mass Effect 2 (not that it's any good stat- or appearance-wise), but there's actually a game dealer on the Citadel. They make sure to make him a giant douchebag, talking about how he prefers realistic games where it takes weeks of real time to fly between planets, not the bullshit where you just click on the map. He also sells used games, and makes comments about how that way the guys who actually made it get nothing, and he gets all their hard earned money. He goes on to offer you an member card, and says you'll get a free digital copy of a game if you buy now. Way to encourage me to ever buy a Bioware game again, assholes. Can't you guys even try to contain your pathetic crying? I'm surprised they didn't just out and say this guy works for EB Games. Bioware is talking about how from now on, they'll take it even farther than ME2. Next game the game will be missing most of its content if you don't unlock it with their "loyalty code" or whatever they call it. Of course, GameStop/EB opens all of the boxes for 360 and PS3 and PC games so they can keep the disks behind the counter, to prevent theft. They couldn't POSSIBLY be corrupt and steal "Real Game" unlock codes, so that their used customers will have a nice working code, and you find that your code is already in use. Then you have to spend an extra $20+ just to play the game you already bought. (Remember, EB games offers a no refund no matter what policy). Bioware was also going to use DRM in Mass Effect that would connect every few days, and if there was no net at the time, your games goes bye-bye. They backed down, but now that Ubisoft is doing it, I'm sure their knew Star Wars game will use Ubisoft's new system, too. Bioware and Ubisoft are leading a huge push to get all games as Online Only, the CD just contains the engine, all content streams from their servers, so even single player games will have lag now, awesome! And of course, they'll then have an excuse to charge $20/month to play their games.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
...and I thought that Dawn of War 2 was annoying. Sheesh!
Fine! Then stop treating me like a criminal, and maybe I'll buy your games, and thus you will get paid for your work.
The things that you are doing are keeping me–an honest customer–from playing my games. Your DRM is keeping me from playing when my Internet connection is down. It's keeping me from playing without having to have physical media on-hand. (This makes your software effectively protected by a "dongle.") Your DRM has at times caused anything from mildly annoying bugs to grossly compromising holes in my system's security. Meanwhile, even if you develop a 100% effective DRM solution, the pirates will still not buy your game! I fail to see how even that helps you get paid for your work.
I'm sorry, but there are more options than the false dichotomy of "give your game to everyone for free" or "enslave humanity," and if you really want to get paid for your work, then you're going to have to back away from your dug-in position. There are plenty of games out there without oppressive DRM that are doing perfectly well in the market. I'll simply choose those instead—and you'll continue to get nothing.
I wish I had mod points; that is spot-on.
Well, regardless of the fact, that I am not interested in this game (no harsh critic, just simply does not interest me at all) ... I have to put my 2c:
I would not buy a program that exits if the server is not reachable. I find it dreadful even for an online game, not a single player one.
I would say, that I would return it, but we all know, that this is not an option most of the time. Games have absolutely crap support, canned responses from Ubi (Ghost Recon problems), from EA (NFS) and from Codemasters (Dirt)......
In fact I got so mad over zero help from EA, that I haven't turned on my gaming machine for 3 months and I am not even planning to. All the games I purchased in the last final months of my gaming were full of bugs, lag issues, crashes, and some took more that a week to be able to run (with 0 help from the companies), that I just quit.....
Most of them were a console port, stripped of prior features and just plain dreadfully crap....
But either way ... a game, that has this kind of protection that makes legal customers miserable is just plain ignorance from the publisher.
Disclaimer: I work for Ubisoft, though I had nothing to do with this DRM stuff. This is my own personal opinion only, I do not speak for my employer.
I hope those black hats are ready for a visit from the FBI.
To all those who think Ubisoft should just let the pirates win... you have no idea how frustrating it is to spend many millions of dollars and several years of our life making a game, and then see statistics from our update servers that 15 to 20 people are playing pirated copies for every legitimately purchased copy. PC gamers have $2000+ computers and drop $200-500 on a video card every year. But most of them are too damn cheap to buy their games. They grew up pirating them through high school and university, and don't see any reason they should stop now. Most of them have managed to convince themselves that (somehow) they aren't doing anything wrong.
People say Ubisoft shouldn't treat them like criminals. But an unfortunately large majority of PC gamers ARE criminals who will steal any game they can, and justify it to themselves however they want. By the way, after the reactions to Spore and Bioshock (and a other heavily DRM-ed titles) we tried shipping the recent Prince of Persia without any DRM. Guess what? It was pirated heavily.. more so than any of the previous Prince of Persia games.
So rather than give up on the PC market entirely (which is the other possible solution), we're trying the heavy DRM stuff. Some of those pirates (a small fraction probably) would buy a retail copy if they were not able to easily pirate the game. Most of them won't, and we don't care about those guys -- they can go pirate our competitors' games and thats fine. But after we spend 2+ years with hundreds of people working their ASSES off to make something just to entertain people, we would like them to pay us for it. Is it really so much to ask?
We know people who don't buy our games aren't customers. That's not the point.
We can see from the hits on our servers that dozens of people download updates to the game for every copy was sold.
When you have millions of customers downloading updates for your game, and it only sold a few hundred thousand copies (and actually losing money on the PC port), then your choices are basically to (1) try to stop those pirates somehow, even just for the first few weeks after launch, or (2) withdraw from the PC market entirely. We don't want to do (2) but if most of the players of our games on PC are just unwilling to pay for them, we might have no other choice.
They are the miracle workers in the biz. I sure as hell won't buy any of that infested bits but the schmucks that do - who want to play a game - will, and I WIN !!
SUCKAZ!!
Ubisoft might take notice if several hundred annoyed slashdot readers posted poor reviews for the Xbox, etc. versions.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I'm not sure they thought their clever DRM plan through very well. Russian bot nets will simply DDoS their servers until they pay up the extortion money. :)
Don't play Assassin's Creed 2: Don't give them your money, Don't pirate the game, giving them a flimsy excuse for their failure... just play something else. ... and don't blink.
If you can stand it (or you have a busy life anyways), try staying a year or so behind game releases
And fail. By then, the video game's publisher will likely have shut down the authentication and/or matchmaking servers. Or if the servers are still up, there aren't enough other new players to make online play worthwhile. Playing against diehard fans who have been playing since launch week is like a high school football team trying to challenge an NFL team.
Funny you should mention that :
back when I was a teenager, I once worked for Ubisoft as a tester on their early Atari ST games and softwares. Their office in Paris was small. They had only started their business 3 or 4 years earlier at that stage. They showed us some preproduction games and also a pretty cool sound-sampler. I remember one of their anti-piracy schemes at that time included hardware protection : basically, just as you mentioned, a hardware dongle the software on the 3.5 disk (hey we had no HDD's back then !) would interact with. If the hardware dongle wasn't there, the game wouldn't run.
In the end I don't know whether they used that anti-piracy technology but I remember playing one of their games a year later which used a hardware dongle to provide stereo music and game sound via a mini jack (the Atari ST F had mono sound output, only the later ST E had stereo sound). Now I wouldn't be surprised if the dongle also provided anti-copy protection but the stereo output was a sufficient reason for me to purchase the game.
As a side note it's pretty ironic that the cartridge port of the Atari ST would be used as an anti-piracy device because it was also used by the underground scene (piracy was rampant, same thing for the Commodore Amiga) as a hardware copier and disassembler to crack games.
Anyway, this just shows you that piracy has always been a problem for Ubisoft and other software publishers. Piracy is what ultimately killed the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga.
Oh god no i have a disk in my console. The humanity.
If I want to put a disc in a console to play Bob's Game (for example), I can't. The console makers have rejected the developer.
If they want complete control then put the content on their own servers. Wow does not drm my system or make windows unstable. Its not drmed other than requiring an internet connection and no piracy as the wow discs wont be of much use.
Google docs are going over the net from a cloud and so are business apps like SAP and salesforce.com.
Some may object to this but to me its a reasonable thing to do and being networked has sweet benefits for the consumer too. Yes, developers do have a right to charge for their work. Would you like to work for me for free? I do not think so.
This is the only way I think both parties can be happy. There are also free games and FOSS software for entertainment to use too. If you do not like then write your own.
http://saveie6.com/
it would feel differently if I were renting a game product (i.e., software as a service) by paying a small monthly fee.
You are renting it for (my estimate) three years, after which Ubisoft pulls the plug on the saved game server.
This will get cracked and once again the Pirates will enjoy a game unencumbered while those that legitimately pay for it have to deal with the inconveniences.
OH well, won't be buying this game, my game PC runs windows and I don't allow it to connect to the Internet so I don't have to worry about that nasty virus threat that happens when you network computers...
Some people who regularly post comments to Slashdot claim that they have no need for a laptop unless it has a mobile data plan: a a USB 3G card, a 3G phone with a tethering plan, or a MiFi 3G to 802.11b adapter. But I ultimately agree with you: I'm not going to pay $719.40 per year just to play a video game.
I'm not completely against DRM maneuvers when they are spelled out BEFORE I spend my money on it. If the buyer knows what they are getting and can make an informed decision on whether or not to purchase, then I think the publisher can do whatever they want. If however [insert wildly anticipated game] comes out with little to no warning that I will have to be online to play when a user should be able to reasonably expect to play it offline, then I think the publisher has erred. Under the system requirements put in "Internet connection required", or have a logo indicating network access is a must. So many of these hassles are why I switched and stayed with console gaming. My games come with an expectation of DRM by the fact they MUST be played in a console. However, I don't have to upgrade every year to play the new games and each game (at least for the 360) has a handy set of logos/descriptions on the back as for multiplayer abilities, etc. My major gripe would be if the publisher required payment for in-game features advertised as part of the game (Looking at you EA) or, more dastardly, changed the nature of some form of the game after purchase.
but there's actually a game dealer on the Citadel. They make sure to make him a giant douchebag,
No offense, but reading the rest of your post, I feel like the concept of parody has been lost on you.
There is another alternative. I heard a talk in which a researcher showed how Paradyn could be used to dynamically rewrite portions of the binary code to just not execute the "DRM". (In the application he talked about, the software contacted a license server to validate that you had a license before running. That function was rewritten to return "A-OK" and away the program went.) Figure out where in the code the DRM is called and patch it not to do that. In this case, there may be several places but it won't be too many because this is a game to be played after all... Unless we are all mistaken and the real game is the challenge in getting past the DRM!
This is a Templar plot to keep the masses from knowing the tr
Just install a packet sniffer between your machine and the network connection. Problem solved. Then copy the code that they transmit and install it on a server on your network. Find out the connection details and point them at your local server. Presto, problem solved.
Is the reset thing.
This reset will hurt almost ALL the legitimate users of the game in a horrible horrible way, and no, it's NOT like WOW or something because afaik these games don't punish you sending back to the last checkpoint because your internet sucks.
Why reset the game when the internet falls instead of lets say... saving the current state?
They have fear people will hack the savestate to pirate the game? if thats the case, just use a huge 512 bit key to encrypt the savestate that comes from the server, and thats it.
In Germany, almost every game with violence gets repacked. Say hello to green blood and no gore. In China... well, it's China after all. In Russia the recent Call of Duty is missing a whole mission in the ariport. The funny thing is, nobody officially told publishers to censor anything.
My first disappontment in Steam was, when it didn't allow me to watch the game trailer, because that game was not sold in Russia at that moment.
You'd be surprised, but there are other countries in the world apart from US, UK, AU and Canada. Unfortunately, some game publishers are surprised by that fact, too.
Publicly available game save server? Glutton for punishment. Vulnerable and breakable. Details: http://drums-of-peace.blogspot.com/2010/02/awful-anti-pirate-system-that-will.html
These DRM schemes probably cost more money than they ever get back in increased revenue. People download games for free for all kinds of reasons. That in no way means that they would actually pay money for the game if they couldn't download it. There is zero correlation between the two things. It is just security programmers earning a paycheck :) (nothing wrong with that)
I recall Starforce going uncracked for a long time, and being used in many commercial titles. Until Reloaded released a half-dozen Starforce protected games on Christmas day, along with extensive details on how to bypass Starforce.
Interested that these are called "cracks." The more accurate term is "fixes." It is taking broken software and making it work...
The ubiquity of internet connections makes it easier to do crazier and crazier schemes based on encryption, server interaction, and obfuscation, but it doesn't change the underlying fact that piracy has little to do with sales revenue.
Remember StarForce? The awfully obfuscated, almost unhackable protection? Its developers were so proud of their product, they said it was impossible to hack into it. And pirates believed them. They simply copied the whole drive image along with its smart protection, bit-by-bit.
Same thing will happen here. Pirates won't try to figure out how the online stuff really works, they will simply capture all the trafic during the test run and replay it locally in the pirated version. Never underestimate the human lazyness.
It's not actually about money but control of distribution. If retailers have a separate income from games, they're more independent of the game industry. Compare game distribution to the movie industry, because that's the model they're pursuing. You don't have so much a market for used movies as you have a video/dvd market, which suits the MPAA because they still get a cut (ask a video store owner how their distribution works, it'll open your eyes).
The games industry wants similar control. They can't legally stop resale of games due to the various forms of first sale doctrine around the world. But they can make it less remunerative to retailers by lessening the value of a used game. This is a direct challenge to the EBs. Ultimately they want to cut out the resellers altogether by digital distribution/DLC. I have a copy of ME2 I intend to resell. I made certain NOT to use the code or the cerberus network, but it will be interesting to see whether my local EB will give me a good trade-in price.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
There is one assuredly effective way to ensure this DRM scheme doesn't work, and that is to not buy the game. Period. It happened with Spore (although it unfortunately was pirated more than anything), but essentially if enough folks vote with their wallet, companies will stop doing this sort of crap - pure and simple.
Unless you LIKE that sort of thing, in which case, please make sure to pre-order it and buy as many copies as you need for you and your friends.
That depends if hackers attack the system its designers think they wrote, doesn't it? Only 300 million years of evolution can design survivability.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Hehe, you know a game that requires you to be connected 100% of the time to be played? WoW. You know what game has been in the the many piracy streets of my beloved La Paz Bolivia for years including expansions? WoW. I have stopped doing piracy when I grew up and just moved to open source, but I am fairy sure there are a lot of wow players in here that are not paying blizzard for the game. Then again, I have no idea how it works, most likely they are just using a pirate server...
It is naive to think the method described can work as well as the article claims, they assume it is actually hard to get rid of this form of DRM, but really.... Does the game use public key encryption? hack the game so that it does not use it!, simple! Or you thought they were gonna try to bruteforce the key? lol... my bet is that the pirates will get to play the game it even before the release date. (it is gonna be leaked, gratz!) Mean while, true costumers won't be able to play when internet goes down. Good work.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
If enough computation is done on the server-side it's good game pirates.
I've been arguing about that ten years ago with a someone very smart who refused to believe it. Yet it has *already* happened: nobody is playing WOW in the real-world economies (ie one of the real Blizzard servers, with all the legit players) with a generated serial key of WOW.
Done correctly a client/server scheme is impossible to defeat.
The author of TFA is of course completely pointless when it comes to cryptography, from TFA (yup I read it, I'm new here ;) :
" 2. Trick the Ubisoft servers into believing you have a legit copy,
" so that they will let you save your game.
"
" OK, the hackers will probably eventually come up with a keygen program.
" This is tricky, because the software that generates the keys will be in Ubisoft's
" hands, far from prying eyes. But they could possible do it, given a bit of time.
Oh really? The NSA may want to hire such crackers and possibly try to create clones
of such pirates: random Joe cracker, no matter if he's from Razor 1911 or any lesser
group is *not* going to crack public/private key crypto.
A private key has been used to generate all these serials and unless you get hold
of that private key there's no way you're generating a valid serial.
Unless of course the Assassin's Creed 2 coders are total moron that overlooked
something trivial, but cryptography is here and well known, and, no, "given enough
time", you aren't going to crack it in your lifetime.
Couldn't someone just reverse engineer the datastream in order to figure out the save/load logic then redirect the URL call to another IP (maybe your own)?
Stop whining.
I've got broadband. Probably something like 3 9's uptime. I used to play Diablo 2 only by myself, with three PCs (two characters/PCs would just be idling/characters staying in town, so that drops are better/game more difficult for my main hardcore character).
Never playing with anyone.
Yet I was *always* playing online. No Internet connection, no Diablo 2 for me. Guess what ? With a 3 9's broadband uptime it's not an issue. Sometimes the connection is lost, deal with it. It is *very* uncommon.
Do you hear all the WOW or Counter-Strike players bitch about "not being able to play because Internet is down" ? WTF is wrong with you dude: most people have an Internet connection that is always on.
It is a non-issue: all those bitchin' that they'll be pissed off when Internet shall be down (wtf? how often do you need to check your mail and find that your connection is down?) are intellectually dishonnest.
I gave up Diablo2 and now the only game I play is online poker. Guess what? I hardly ever have a disconnect and the server is conceived to allow you up to 4 minutes to reconnect.
Stop being dishonnest. It's a foolproof anti-piracy scheme that works. Most people won't bitch. To the ones who do a) you're intellectually dishonnest b) don't buy the game.
I disagree with this method of DRM, but I really want to play this game. Also, I don't pirate games as a matter of principle (though if I made a game and it was pirated widely, I'd take that as a compliment, it just means people liked it).
So what I'm going to do is borrow a friend's xbox and play his old copy. I get to play the game, I don't have to deal with the ham-fisted DRM, I don't pay a cent, and all without doing anything illegal.
Still, it makes me kind of sad that I don't get to play on my platform of choice. I don't like where this fight is going either, it seems like publishers are just intending to take piracy as an excuse to leave the PC market for the console market. I like my all in one work and entertainment machine, and the thought of having to purchase additional hardware just to play games is really annoying.
The worst part of all this is that they did it on a really popular game. Most people will just suck it up and buy the game with the inconvenient DRM because they just want to play the game, and then Ubisoft will claim high sales numbers as proof that the system "reduces piracy rates". This doesn't work because all it means is that more people are playing the game. Once the game is cracked, the ratio of pirated copies to legitimate copies will probably still look the same as for any other game. If this was done on a less popular title, that title's sales numbers would fall because the mentality would be "oh, I wanted to try that game, but the DRM is a pain in the ass so I guess I won't bother". And since the game didn't get a chance to prove itself before the inevitable cracking, less people would be looking to pirate it due to lack of general interest and word-of-mouth advertising, resulting in overall less copies in the wild, but a pretty much similar ratio of pirated copies to legitimate copies.
Of course, there's no way to tell if the above would actually be the case until the scenario actually happens, so let's wait and see.
This clever new DRM system has a nasty side-effect I can't live with. If Ubisoft goes bankrupt or gets fed up with hosting the DRM server, my $60 games dies. They can kill my game at a whim. This is closer to renting than it is to buying.
"You must have a constant internet connection, and, if your connection breaks, the game exits." -- Yes, Assassin's Greed, indeed!
will be to the enterprising young hacker(s) who sandbox the whole thing and reverse the streams involved with the loading and saving of game data, set up some quick and dirty webserver to respond to the proper requests and then thinstall/virtualize the whole damn thing, unless ubisoft is going to withhold a lot of their content on the central servers , i dont see how this screws over anyone BUT the paying people but sometimes...i am way way off
If I was publishing a game, I would give the fucker away: a free download. Play away! BUT, if you want to participate in the really cool group activities and higher end graphics and physics, in game features like saves, well, you gotta sign up for access to the online servers. That is charged by the hour. Not a lot per hour. Just enough. Has anyone tried this model?
Social Credit would solve everything...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/2/19/
Fine! Then stop treating me like a criminal, and maybe I'll buy your games, and thus you will get paid for your work.
I sure hope you've never been to a store. Electronics tags, detection gates, security guards, alert staff, CCTV, detainment, arrest, citizens arrest, laws against stealing. All DESIGNED to treat you like a criminal. I sure hope you've gotten used to your mom's basement, you'll be spending the rest of your life there if you hope to avoid ever being treated like a criminal.
Meanwhile, even if you develop a 100% effective DRM solution, the pirates will still not buy your game! I fail to see how even that helps you get paid for your work.
I'm a developer. I wouldn't mind having that kind of assurance. It would sure inpsire me to developer more creative games and take more risks if I could sleep soundly at night knowing that consumers are either forced to pay for their entertainment, or find it elsewhere.
Somewhere along the line, publishers got confused!
Marketing Strategist: "Well, its a form of piracy prevention, see? We proliferate our "cracked" copy through the piracy channels, effectively shipping it with a trojan. When the pirate runs it, we have the malware phone home and ta-da, we remotely render their copy useless."
Boss: "So you're saying we can prevent paying customers from enjoying their product and spy on them? Ship it!"
Strategist: "But..."
No one says that World of Warcraft has DRM because it cannot be played without connection to game server. Is this any different?
As with any back-to-base monitored system, this DRM model is vulnerable to a basic DDoS attack. By changing to this model they are effectively selling a service, rather than a product, so disrupting the service would completely cripple the product. Effective DRM, but a risky business model.
Not that I'm suggesting you should DDoS their servers or anything...
i wonder how long till someone sniffs the protocol, substitutes entry in hosts file and runs a local service that will satisfy the 'protection'...
Indeed - For example for eBooks I have moved to DRM free providers like smash-books and beam-ebooks. I only stated using iTunes when it went 100% DRM free.
Ubisoft thinks that 0% pirates => more revenue. But that is not proven and I think it is wrong.
Depends on your casing - my MacPro can be upgraded without a screw driver.
Citation needed.
You cannot make accusations without evidence.
You post is nothing but bare assertion fallacies, your opinions phrased as facts.
You are not entitled to profit. Try making things people want to spend money on instead of trying to force them.
Every Ubisoft game in recent memory has been so horribly flawed (FarCry 2, the constant re-spawning, the constant radiator repairing, this was not entertaining, it was annoying, I want my A$90 back, you charlatans because if you're marketing it as an "entertainment product" it was sold under false pretences, or as the lawyers call it "not fit for sale" or fraud) it wouldn't surprise me if Ubi went out of business. But this is not the case, Ubisoft is in no danger of going out of business.
Make good games rather then trying to shove DRM down the throats of your paying customers.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You just make one mistake here: You think you can turn all pirates into legitimate users. Or at least more pirates into legitimate users then you have turned users into no no-users. The danger is draconian DRM might mean less sales.
For example I stopped using Amazon all together because of DRM and territorial restrictions on eBooks. That is not only won't I buy eBooks - I am not buying anything there any more.
Again 0% piracy does not mean your DRM was a success.
Or is it more like this
Well that is an optimistic diagram as there are more customers with DRM. It might as well be less. Problem is: you never know - you know the amount of piracy and the amount of customers - but you never know how much you might have sold if you did things different.
How did you get accurate numbers on pirated games?
Which is entirely irrelevant - the only number important is: How much would I have sold if I did things different. Which is even more difficult to obtain.
I'd like to see Ubisoft prove me wrong, but I have a feeling that the game won't do well, there will be a class action lawsuits, and more people will be driven to piracy than they could ever imagine.
Well, I was going to buy this game.
Last night I was sitting trying to decide whether to get Assassins Creed 2, Supreme Commander 2 or the new AvP game.
I will not be buying this game at all now. There is no way in hell I will ever buy a game which requires constant internet connection or stores my content remotely. I don't mind connection to activate or something like Steam. But I will not buy something like this.
If they want to stop piracy they should release it on Steam or as a GFWL title. Both of which would make most people stump up the cash.
I'm also not going to play it. The problem is that they don't believe me. "It's such a cool game so you have to want it, so you have to either buy it or pirate it, there is no other option!"
The idea that people just show a digital four with their fingers to a game that is bloated by DRM and instead go spend their dough on a game that doesn't treat them like criminals simply does not enter their mind.
I am not going to buy a game that requires me to hand over the control to you. I will not buy a game that lets you swing that damocletian swort of turning off your authentication server and turning my game disc into a 50+ bucks coster over my head.
I think it's time someone told them the story of sun and wind battling over who can make man take off his coat...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
People have created emulated servers for WORLD OF WARCRAFT, a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE PLAYING GAME FFS. And it's not the only MMORPG that has been "cracked". Some online games even got their original server app stolen.
People will crack it, as long as they're interested in the game. Which is probably why AC2 won't be craked : not because it's not possible, but because it's a piece of shit, just like most Ubisoft games since a long time. I avoid Ubisoft like the plague.
As long as the code is executed on your own CPU, it’s cracked by simply fetching the decrypted code out of RAM. Even when they send you code fragments from the server so that they never touch the hard disk.
The only way it will ever work, is if they use an external system to compute vital parts of the game.
And the only way that is going to happen, is by it being a online game, in the sense of WoW. With some game logic being solely decided by a server, trough an API. Which of course also creates lag.
So my guess is, that in the future every game will either have a vital physical device that you need to play it (e.g. a controller or an FPGA chip on a USB dongle), or will be a real online game.
To make the fucked-up reality of the content mafia real, that all you’d do, is rent the software.
Well, I’ve already designed a general model and a business model, that works in reality, without having to make up fantasy lies like “IP”. It does’t need government to change. It doesn’t need laws or forced behavior of people. It doesn’t even need the content mafia to go away, as it can work in parallel. And I am already in contact with the Pirate party, to spread the concept. :)
Content mafia: You’re going down!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
This version seems to run fine: http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Assassins-Creed-2-PAL-XBOX360-MegaWare-ShareReactor/458805dd93c156bd0968b199a1fcc7c54b86527a3f33
(Ignore that spammer comment in there.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Most people here are essentially saying something along the lines of "I won't be buying the game, as a form of protest".
Am I the only one that thinks that this is completely naive, not to mention ineffective as a form of protest? Ubisoft (or any other manufacturer) has no idea how many sales have been lost due to DRM as opposed to, say, low demand for the game itself, due to overall quality, targeted audience, current economic climate, recend trends in gaming memes, etc.
If you want to give Ubisoft some numbers to work with, then for every game you feel the need to inform them the reason for not buying was in fact their shitty DRM, send them a letter / email -- labour the point that you were really excited about the game and would have bought it otherwise, but now they blew it for this game, and any potential sequels that they may have released, since the connecting link is now broken.
If they received a lot of those, then maybe they'd start counting. Otherwise, with no clear indication as to 'why' people aren't buying the game, they'll turn to the more convenient suspects, like 'those damn pirates', 'not enough marketing', 'we should have used more explosions/cussing', 'there was no hot chick with big boobs on the cover' etc. DRM protesters would be the last thing on the list to explain low sales IMO.
Otherwise your protest has just gone to waste. Nobody even knew you were protesting to begin with.
I've been reading a lot of these posts and I can't help but click on TPB and notice all new titles for the PC, XBOX, and PS3. I'm not much for Socialism in gaming, but I can't be upset with a company for trying to protect its products and offerings. Sure, someone may be pissed that they can't play unless their online - however, as someone else suggested, you don't HAVE to buy the game.
Remember when Half-Life 2 came out on Steam, and how no one could play, even when online? I was one of the affected "no internet available" people who couldn't play at first. I had to hook my PC up at the parents house and wait for it to update. This did piss me off at the time, but I still love Half-Life 2.
You wouldn't be upset if your parents put a security system in their home. So, why be pissed that UBI Soft wants to make some scratch off their work? Can't blame them.
Just take a look at the below link (be careful, TPB is filled with Nasties) and put yourself in the developers shoes.
Pirate Bay Top 100 PC Games
In Soviet Russia, road forks you!
you have no idea how frustrating it is
I'm sure I don't. And I wish I had the answer for you, but I don't. I do know that you don't have the answer either.
PC gamers have $2000+ computers and drop $200-500 on a video card every year.
And they didn't do that so they could spend even more for a game that will annoy the hell out of them with draconian DRM.
most of them are too damn cheap to buy their games.
I'm not, but I'm punished for it. So the number of games I have bought has decreased dramatically. I used to get maybe a game a month, now maybe one a year.
Some of those pirates (a small fraction probably) would buy a retail copy if they were not able to easily pirate the game. Most of them won't, and we don't care about those guys
Actually it sounds like you care a great deal about these guys, at your customer's expense.
we would like them to pay us for it. Is it really so much to ask?
I would like to pay for a good game that does not treat me like a criminal, restricting what I can and cannot do, not only with the game, but often with other software. Is it really so much to ask?
Hating pirates who are not your customers and then taking it out on your paying customers is not right. It's like some a-hole who has a hard day at work and comes home and beats his wife for it.
...and maybe I'll buy your games...
Maybe doesn't pay the bills.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Meanwhile, even if you develop a 100% effective DRM solution, the pirates will still not buy your game! I fail to see how even that helps you get paid for your work.
I'm sorry, but there are more options than the false dichotomy of "give your game to everyone for free" or "enslave humanity," and if you really want to get paid for your work, then you're going to have to back away from your dug-in position. There are plenty of games out there without oppressive DRM that are doing perfectly well in the market. I'll simply choose those instead—and you'll continue to get nothing.
Well said sir. Well said.
You practically have to be a pirate to navigate through this many comments.
I have AT&T and my service goes down many times a day. If I were to buy a game with a DRM like this, I'd be really pissed off getting the game to crash multiple times a day. Could you imagine playing a RPG like this? I buy NEW games all the time, and I NEVER buy games used or at ebgames/gamestop because I strongly believe in supporting the publishers. Games will always be pirated, but most of us would rather spend less on games for something new than to spend less on something used. Make it illegal to resell games and drop the overall price of games / consoles and of course forget about DRMs. While not many share the same interest as I, I know for a fact that the last 12 games that my roommate bought gave no profit to publishers because they were used. Might as well download them illegally right?
Awesome, so i'm going to have to get the network admin at my university to open ports on the firewalls just so I can play single player games! I also love spending $50+ per system per game! I think all these developers can go to hell with their overpriced shitty games that are nothing new.. How many games these days have Co-Op ? Oh wait.. Co Op isn't fun, i'd rather own over 50 games that ALL have online death match! Let's run around and shit eachother mindlessly in different games with different weapons. Sounds like some fun there. They develop these ridiculous DRM schemes to try to drive pirates away, but in reality, they're just using it as an excuse saying that they lost even more money to implement the crap in the first place and it took some skilled cracker a day or two to crack it. Nice work. I buy very few select PC games, mainly because most suck. I did find the FBI scare tactic amusing though. Blah Blah Blah. Stir up some more shit. If you want more people to buy games, try implementing some more Co-Op features, so two people can buy the game to have fun.
Are you fucking serious? By that reasoning the entire game code should be reproducible by hooking a second PC to a keyboard and watching the video output.
There are many parameters in savegames. Even the tiniest amount of reprocessing could make the data unrecognizable. And unless you have a pretty perfect reproduction of that, it would be easy for the game to recognize it wasn't processed by Ubisoft's servers.
It sure pays a lot more than "hell, no" does.
It is irrelevant.
The lack of sales will kill it.
Oh, you are so full of crap. Not all DRM is like that. Why are you getting on this guy when you have no idea what kind of DRM he uses? Yes, AC2 goes too far. But you aren't being treated like a criminal.
"Oh my god, my bank made me show my id. They treat me like a criminal!"
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Dear pasty nerd,
Simply. Do. Not. Buy. It.
They will lose money. You will gain sunshine.
All DESIGNED to treat you like a criminal.
Although the surveillance has gone way too far, most of the measures you mention aren't treating me like a criminal until I have actually broken the law. The DRM crap does it by default and the cracked version does not do it at all. Crucial differences, those two.
I sure hope you've gotten used to your mom's basement, you'll be spending the rest of your life there if you hope to avoid ever being treated like a criminal.
Go fuck yourself, you blithering moron.
I am 40. I have a basement. I do not live in it, and neither do my kids. I pay for my games. I am an honest customer. I expect to be treated like one. Companies like Ubisoft don't. They can go to hell for all I care. I might even pirate their games just out of pure spite.
Fuck you, and fuck Ubisoft, who has permanently lost a previously potential customer.
People claiming that DRM never works because you can download games from torrents don't know what they're talking about.
Have you ever studied mathematics and cryptography? For how long? How far did you take your studies? From your statement above it appears to me that you might have studied some but not enough to realize why it is in fact you who don't know what you're talking about.
You know enough to be wrong, but not enough to understand that you're wrong and why.
It's a common problem.
I know for that for me, as an avid gamer I'll be adding Ubisoft's games to my not gonna waste any time on list. Games simply don't have the same hold they used to any more because it is all the same thing. I have enough games in my catalog, all legal of course, to keep me entertained for a few hundred years, many of them go back to 1996. Besides... there are enough open source games out there at this point to pick up any of the slack when I get bored of the ones I have. When a company tells me that I have to play their game when the sun is blue, the moon is green, oh and you have to call us every time and get an authorization key to click on the icon to get an authorization key to load the game....then I simply tell them they have no rights to my money.
This is not the first time I've heard a new protection technique bragging about being harder and more difficult to hack. It will be hacked, you will see. The problem is it has a very idiotic design. Probably UBI hired a janitor for the software project management position or somebody with similar IT knowledge. By generating so much frustration for the gamers, even the people who bought the game will look for a way to hack this stupid protection. This will end by far the most popular gaming crack from all the times.
"For every used game sold, the game editor gets ZERO."
They already got their money, on the original sale. They have no right to any other money because they no longer own the item in question. Don't like that? Then don't deal in tangible/tradable goods. This of course is why game companies love downloadable sales. They can cut out used games when everything is virtualized.
With how much money they're charging for games as it is it's criminal to ask for any more.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
What is the legality of buying the regular version of the game, but installing a cracked version? I know the EULA says stuff about not reverse engineering, but you aren't doing that. What would a court say if a company tried to call you on that? Maybe we could start calling the crackers a "Game Optimization Service". hehehehe.
My opinions are completely my own and do not reflect those of any entity I may be associated with - including the voices
So... just add your own save feature to the game.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
[...] there aren't enough other new players to make online play worthwhile. Playing against diehard fans who have been playing since launch week is like a high school football team trying to challenge an NFL team.
Fortunately, these aren't the kind of people I am interested in casually playing a game with. I'm not into the whole "matchmaking" gaming, however.
And give that high school football team some credit, they probably take football as a sport more seriously than the guys that can live a lifetime off a single contract.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Okay, I think most of us agree pirates not paying customers and most probably never would shell out a dime. This fact alone is why I want their sorry asses burned on free content; I'm tired of all these people who think that they are exempt from ethical behavior so long as they feel sufficiently anrgy about a publisher's efforts at protecting their work from theft. I do not want these people getting free content just because they feel justified on some idiotic level that its okay. Whether a piece of software has DRM or not, they will pirate it. It's the Ring of Gyges applied to digital media, apparently. For my vote, I'll get behind the companies trying to prevent the piracy, because giving up on this means that those same fucks who rip off software might (read: absolutely will) graduate to my car, bank account, credit cards or other personal possessions one day, if it turns out they can do so without consequence and even a modicum of justification (like being angry that I dare suggest they're all a bunch of thieves). Once there is no more piracy (and that will never happen) then I will get irritated at companies that attach DRM to their software. In the meantime, the only companies which look foolish right now for these actions are those which install DRM on their games that punish legitimate users more than the pirates. And even then my anger level is going to be more along the lines of , "better fix this," rather than "I will boycott." I'll reserve my genuine loathing and contempt for the pirates, who absolutely should find that they suffer a severe electric shock with every illegal piece of software they download in the name of their right to exploit others creative content without any recognition of worth or effort. Fuck them all.
If DRM doesn't improve the sales of a game, I'm pretty certain that developers won't bother taking the time to painstakingly implement and test DRM. In other words, shooting yourself in the foot is stupid, and developers that survive to implement DRM aren't (usually) stupid.
(Obviously, this requires the developers to have reliable information. But that's a topic for another day.)
Conceivable, but without having access to the source it could be a huge challenge to program something that would work properly.
They could do just save a few parameters in a file, but if they're serious about this then they'll make it so that every time the game looks for a saved parameter the game crashes.
Seems like it already has been: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=assassin's+creed+2+torrents&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq= From what I hear, it was even cracked 2 weeks before release, though I have no references to back that up.
Option 1 doesn't sound as bad as he makes it out to be. You don't need to run public servers that pretend to be Ubisofts server. Just run a server process on the local machine.
I hate this idea. I'm a military member and often have a laptop with me living in a tent in a field in the middle of a third world country for entertainment. If this catches on I won't be able to play games I own while I'm on the road.
It's been cracked guys : http://torrentfreak.com/ubisofts-uber-drm-cracked-within-a-day-100304/ I can't believe how ironic it is. Not only Ubisoft DRM will piss customers so much that help pirating their own product, but an incredible blow have just been made to anti-piracy group.
Elok
The way I see it, cracking the DRM should actually *help* the game publishers to realise sales... My decision to purchase a game might be influenced by the knowledge that I can avoid the abuse by using a crack, and still not feel like a thief because I paid my money for the game. The crackers are doing Ubisoft et al. a huge service by improving the customer experience.
The extra profit comes from killing off the second hand sales.
There is money in it.
It's just isn't honest money.
It screws the honest customers the hardest but isn't that the way of the world.