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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.
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?
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.
His whole argument is predicated on his incorrect assumption that the game saves are solely online, and that the game is constantly using those saves. In fact, the game itself uses only your local saves, and the online saves are merely a backup.
The DRM will be broken, and just as quickly as ever.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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.
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
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 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 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.
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
Every SINGLE article detailing it specifically says that online saves are optional. It's an on by default option in the configs. You can turn it off. Even when it's on, all saves are still saved locally, and your local, offline, saved game directory is synced with their servers when you quit the game. So maybe instead of spreading FUD, you could read ANYTHING other than this particular TFA, where he even acknowledges at the bottom "OK it doesn't save online, but my point still stands, they COULD have online saves only making their NEXT game uncrackable!!!! I WASN'T WRONG I WAS LOOKING TO THE FUTAR!!!!"
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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)
It's actually hilarious, Assassins' Creed 1 has the same DRM system, only if it couldn't connect, instead of crashing, it would just let you play. But if the connection was slow, your game would lag just like an online game played via modem. So the game tanked hardcore. The fact that their review copies were designed to crash at the half way point on PURPOSE to fuck pirates who got a copy by a leak from a gaming magazine/website, ensured that the PC version tanked in the reviews. Meanwhile, the pirate version didn't have massive lag issues at launch, while all the legit copies lagged to fuck and made the game unplayable, as their servers melted under the force of every player of AC1 connecting to their servers every 3 seconds. Their official solution was "unplug your internet connection before you launch the game". To this day, Ubisoft cites AC1 as proof that piracy hurts games, as AC1 sold something like 10,000 copies on PC, as opposed to the millions it sold on XBox. (though PS you can pirates XBox games easier than PC games, since they don't have DRM to crack). It appears Ubisoft's point was still lost in their bosses, since they were still being asked to make PC games against their very loud and obnoxious protests. So now they're trying to see if they can't top AC1, and sell under 1000 copies on PC. Thus proving forever that piracy is the cause of PC gaming's woes, somehow. Meanwhile, the pirate version will be up, at the latest, the day before street date. (You see, TFA is wrong according to PC gamer, the games do NOT save online, they save offline, with an option to have the game upload your local games to the server when you quit the game. Thus, any cracking need only fool the game into thinking the server said it's OK to continue, no server emulation required).
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
No not experienced at all, hasn't written any games for macs or pcs ever in his life.
Oh wait, it's Jeff Vogel. Um maybe you are the one with relatively little experience in the domain of game development?
Sure ubisoft may be moron and make it that easy to do, or they might have the save game network protocol only send and receive the needed parts of the save. So unless you play the game all the way though you won't see the format of the save game data for later game areas, etc.
But yes he is mistaken in the idea that the crackers would bother with a remote save game server and not just hack a local copy save only variant into the crack.
Which isn't surprising since he is in fact an experienced game programmer, who has likely never cracked a game in his life.
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!
Most of them are false positives. I think it's mostly because keygens and malware often use similar executable packers. But there are conspiracy theories that the AV vendors get paid for flagging keygens.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.