Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
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 whole story is about how and why the DRM will work.
Yes, and I don't agree with Vogel's premise. It's not going to be more difficult to crack this than it was to crack, say, StarForce; it's just going to be different. And once it's been cracked, how much can Ubisoft possibly change the method for all of their future games? This new DRM is just a complete non-starter.
I'm just waiting them to take this one little step further - stream parts of the game code, textures or other data from server (something not used often).
Yes, I'm waiting for them to finally come out and admit that they don't want any of the PC market as well.
Rob
Except you are still giving complete control over your games to a third party. I used to love steam. Then one day they decided that they wanted to change the censored version of a game I bought into the uncensored version. I was annoyed, but more importantly the women folk didn't like it when they saw it. Contacted support to ask for it to be rolled back or for a refund. Was treated like an absolute idiot and was pretty much told to piss off. This after years of being a loyal customer have having spent hundreds of dollars on games. Just completely out of the blue and without permission changed the fundamental character of the game. Had they even tried to apologize I might have been okay with it. Instead I got couple idiots lying to me how they are contacting the developers to try to fix it and other BS. Not just poor support, but down right insulting. When I tried to get another associate thinking I got a bad apple the first time, it was the same thing. They hold every game I ever bought on there for ransom and there is nothing I can do about it.
No matter how good it may seem now, it will come back to screw you. It is still DRM, it just has a happy face painted on it.
I don't pirate either, and that's one of the reasons. But I also don't buy things that come with DRM.
Same here. I'm not so much into the game market, but I do buy a lot of music, and the same principles apply. But when it comes to the point where a game manufacturer is spending more resources on preventing someone digitally ripping off his product than he appears to be on the product itself, then everybody would be better off if the game was simply produced as a physical board game.
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
No matter how good it may seem now, it will come back to screw you. It is still DRM, it just has a happy face painted on it.
Yes, I agree with you about Steam, and Valve Corporation in general. What you are describing here is the difference between copy protection (which is the avowed reason that companies employ this crap) and Digital Rights Management. Game publishers that want complete, unquestioned real-time control of purchased content resident on your computer have gone way too far in my opinion, and it's just wrong. That applies to everything, not just games. Remember how Amazon removed access to an e-book on the Kindle, after the customers had paid for it? This is a level of control over the customer that sets the MPAA/RIAA drooling on their respective bibs.
Now, having said that, it would feel differently if I were renting a game product (i.e., software as a service) by paying a small monthly fee. I'm just paying for access. I get thoroughly torqued off, however, when I spend fifty or a hundred bucks on a disc, and then get told that a. I have to have an Internet connection to activate or use it and b. find that my use of the product can be revoked or modified at any time, and for that matter that the content can be swapped out at their whim. That's just ridiculous, but that's what they want. I say don't give it to them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Legit purchases have been known to come with malware too, there have been various cases of storage devices being shipped out with malware preinstalled for instance.
Up until the Internet went public, the only major cases of malware release were on commercial software. There was a computer outfit near me back in the early 90's that was selling blank 5 1/4" floppy disks by the hundreds of thousands ... all of which were conveniently pre-infected with a boot-sector virus.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Steam works, at least for me. It adds value to the games most closely integrated with it. Integrated out-of-game and in-game server browsing, community features, store, automatic installation and patching.
I used to like Steam, until I paid $30 for a thirty party game on there which asked for a CD Key which I obviously didn't have. Looked on the forums and everyone was having this problem. I contacted customer service and they wanted me to disable this Windows thing and edit that registry whatever. No thanks.
But the important thing is they told me the refund they gave me was a one time thing. Even though I asked for it within 48 hours of the purchase I was treated like I tried to download the game, play it, and return it. And if you reverse the charge on your card? Your account is suspended and you lose ALL your games.
So I'll still Steam... for Valve games. And not much else. It is part of the reason I moved from PC to PS3 gaming.
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
The game likely knows the public key for the remote server, and any machine trying to contact it without using the appropriate key won't be able to authenticate. The traffic between the game and the Ubisoft server could be completely encrypted, which greatly increases the difficulty of reverse engineering the game's "heartbeat" ping, not to mention that whoever cracks this game will end up writing a server for the game to communicate with, which will have to manage the save game files and such. No matter how you look at this, it's not going to be an easy crack.
I have a giant pile of games next to my tv. Even for a console, Assassin's Creed 2 isn't going to ever be among them.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
if there was an analog to this in the PC world - some hardware DRM you could put on your machine and be done with the various software based disc checked and network activated schemes once and for all - would you install it?
Absolutely. As long as it doesn't interfere with any other executables I want to run on my general purpose personal computer. And doesn't compromise my personal security through invading my privacy.
I once worked as a student developer for a company whose products were protected by hardware dongle. Near the end of my internship there, one of the larger customers demanded a dongle-less way to run the software, and my then-employer complied. By overwriting the hardware-dongle DLL with one that simply returned back "true".
I got to implement that DLL. It was entertaining.
My current employer uses software license keys. They're even funnier. The lawyers get all in a fit about them, when, in reality, they are basically no protection whatsoever.
Actually rumor has it on a lot of black hat bords that a planned DDos attack is planned the first few weeks of release, just to screw over this system and cause problems for everyone, after all if the system becomes unusable then it will make ubisoft think twice about it.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
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?