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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.
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.
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
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?)
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
Wrong. It's taking the approach that Ubisoft considers you a pirate either way. Any gamer who didn't buy it is a "lost sale", and they have no way to determine what the cause is of that "lost sale". Simple answer: they're all pirates. So if you're not going to buy it, you may as well pirate it if you have any interest in playing it.
A boycott is only successful if you can prove it is having a significant impact on their profit. Good luck with that.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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
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
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.
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.
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?