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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 is the very worst copy-protection I've heard of. Nobody should buy this game.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This sucks. The only way I was gonna play this game was warezed!
Hardly flamebait. If the warez scene offers a substantially more friendly product than the publisher, that publisher should consider rethinking its position.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That is harder to do.
First, emulated games have access to the entire state in RAM. So, save the RAM and the framebuffer, then restore -- easy. This one is also going to have tons of state in video RAM, meaning you now have to re-initialize the entire DirectX (or OpenGL) context and load everything relevant there.
Second, emulated games assume a console, which is vastly simpler than an OS. Anywhere this game is accessing something in the OS, Internet, whatever, is a potential problem when restoring.
And finally, it means dumping all of the RAM, rather than the most convenient on-disk representation of RAM. That means savegames are now going to be several gigabytes of crap, instead of a few kilobytes.
And of course, as you say, if you update the game, it will cause problems -- I would say fatal problems. I don't see how you could reasonably expect to restore an old savegame to a patched game this way. With an emulator, you generally assume there isn't going to be a new patch to, say, Mario 64, and if you patch the emulator itself, it really doesn't matter, since the emulator knows how to dump the state of the emulated machine, not just a RAM image of the entire emulator. If there was a patch to the game itself, emulators wouldn't save you.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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.
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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...
Free of charge sure is friendly.
Oh go ahead and tell me that just about every pirate is of good conscious and is only interested in "try before you buy" and that if they like it they'll buy it. (Because there's no such thing as demos.)
-1 Missed Point. If you're a game publisher (of anything, books, media, video games, whatever) copyright infringement is a fact of life. Wherever you stand on the subject, it's just something that publishers have to deal with as a cost of doing business. So, within that context, what are the risks of alienating legitimate customers with DRM? Fairly high ... and as I said in another post in this thread, it's a trade-off.
I've purchased a number of PC games over the years, and if I decided I liked the game enough to keep playing it, I would immediate go out and download a cracked copy. I used to crack them myself back in the eighties but I don't have time or interest in that anymore, and besides, in the pre-Internet days the game producers had no control over that software once I had bought it.
So yes, I download cracked games. I'll tell you why too: it's because I don't trust these people not to screw me over and leave me with a useless plastic disc, that's why. Until they wake up and realize that the people who gave them their hard-earned dollars deserve some respect, their actual customers will still be hitting torrent sites.
Just a fact of life.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
They don't care about the real pirates, there's nothing they can do about the hardcore crackers anyway, and these people would rather do without than pay for software.
What they do care about is the grey market middle ground, the kid who buys a copy from a store but lets his friends borrow it, the people who resell used games...
These people, unlike the hardcore pirates, *ARE* willing to spend money on games, so the games companies seek to extract as much of it out of them as possible via whatever means necessary.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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!
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.
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.
To all those who think Ubisoft should just let the pirates win...
Here's the thing- the pirates have already won/are winning. The DRM will be broken for any single player games. Even multiplayer games will have private servers hacked up. DRM doesn't work except against the most casual forms of piracy. I have no problem with games requiring a disc check or a serial key to discourage people from just handing the DVD to their friends to install. Anything beyond that is pointless and counterproductive (unless it's part of a larger online service, like Steam or a MMO, but even those have been hacked).
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.
So? I'm sure it is frustrating, get over it. Publishers shouldn't be looking at the number of pirated copies- it's irrelevant. The only thing that matters is the number of copies sold. You're not fighting a holy war, you're a business. Attempting to keep people from playing pirated games from some sense of moral outrage rather than acknowledging the technological and business realities a) doesn't work, and b) just ends up pissing off your actual customers.
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.
And you're not going to change that, especially not with DRM that gives pirates a better experience than paying customers.
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.
How did it *sell* compared to them is the question, not how much it was pirated. Guess what? Someone pirating the game and someone not buying it gets you the exact same amount of money. And no DRM at all, not even a serial/disc check seems silly, as it does nothing to discourage casual piracy.
So rather than give up on the PC market entirely (which is the other possible solution)
If the company can't make a profit on the number of games actually sold, then yes, you should get out of the PC market entirely. Again, the number of pirated copies is irrelevant. Perhaps I'm missing something, but this doesn't seem that hard. The people pirating games aren't your customers, by definition. More restrictive DRM won't change that, especially as it never works.
I can sympathize with you (I actually buy all the games I play), but if your post is indicative of the type of thinking within publishers, it's a shame as it seems entirely counterproductive and willfully ignorant of reality. Also, I presume you can estimate the number of pirated copies connecting to your servers but not which are which, otherwise I don't see why you'd be allowing them to patch...
Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft. I write shrink-wrapped proprietary software for a living, so software piracy directly affects my income.
I am also a gamer. I have over 190 titles in my Steam account (granted, quite a lot of that are old games; a lot still isn't), and that's not counting the boxes. For some games, I have it both as a box and on Steam (e.g. Oblivion, Doom 3, Majesty 2), so I've actually paid twice for those.
Now, all that said...
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.
You have no idea how frustrating it is to not be able to start a game when your Internet connection is down (and you really just want some entertainment to pass time). Or, as I've heard you did in this new game, to have it exit as soon as your Internet connection goes down in the middle of a gaming session (I sincerely wish you guys are sued for this, and lose in a big way; it's far more sinister than anything I've ever heard about in this industry). Or how about limited number of activations, where you lose one if you, for any reason, cannot boot into your OS and need to reinstall?
All those things are reason why I will not buy any Ubisoft game ever again (and you're not alone on the list). Frankly, as a customer, I don't care about your row with the pirates. I don't even care about DRM as such! What I do care is when you drag me into the mess, and have the audacity to take my money, and then refuse the service (entertainment) that you have promised in return for some vague reasons of "fighting pirates". I'm not one; why should all of this be of my concern?
If you can come up with a DRM scheme that does not excessively bother me (a single-time Internet activation is fine, for example; server checks on connect for multiplayer are fine, too), I'm fine with that. I can even understand slip ups (activation servers going down unexpectedly etc), and am willing to tolerate that in minor amounts - though I would expect workarounds (phone activation, whatever) to be provided in such cases. But when you deliberately go out of your way to annoy me as a gamer, guess what? My money goes elsewhere, to companies like Valve, which understand these sorts of things.
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.
And when Ubisoft goes into the ground, as most game companies eventually do, will I still be able to play AC2, with its non-existent save game servers? EA has had no problems shutting down servers for games more than a couple years old. I routinely play Wizard's Crown, a game released for the PC in 1985. In fact, every PC game I have ever purchased I am still able to play in some form or another. In understand Ubisoft hates pirates, but I buy games, and I'm not going to buy a game that will potentially be useless in a couple of years.
The best thing would be for this to drive Ubisoft into the ground so no one else bothers going with DRM so draconian.
15 to 20 people are playing pirated copies for every legitimately purchased copy
A lie like that makes it difficult for me to buy any of the other points brought up in your post. If 33 to 44 million people played the Prince of Persia reboot, then congratulations to your company on creating the cultural phenomenon of the decade, even if it didn't make you as much money as you'd have liked.
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.
How much did the number of legit customers reduce, as opposed to the number of pirates increasing? Or is it more like this?
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"