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Ubisoft's New DRM Cracked In One Day
Colonel Korn writes "Ubisoft's recent announcement that upcoming games would require a constant internet connection in order to play has been discussed at length on Slashdot ('The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work'). Many were of the opinion that this new, more demanding DRM would have effectiveness to match its inconvenience, at least financially justifying its use. Others assumed that it would be immediately cracked, as is usually the case, leaving the inconvenience for paying customers and resulting in a superior product for pirates. As usual, the latter group was right. Though Ubisoft won't yet admit it, Skid-Row managed to crack the new DRM less than a day after it was first released."
Or maybe not...
No sig today...
that Skid Row has done something since "Youth Gone Wild."
Engineering hours building unbreakable DRM: $1.6M
Marketing devoted to managing customer hostility to new DRM: $800K
Lost sales due to customers boycotting your product: $2M
Having some wiseass kid from Sweden break your DRM on the first day: Priceless
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ubisoft can always blame "those damn pirates" and claim the DRM development as a failed project tax write off.
And the pirates can still play the game for free with no issues.
And paying customers still get to take it in the ass, now AND when Ubisoft decides to can the online service.
Win, Win, Weeeeee
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
$10 says UbiSoft doesn't learn from this. Again.
At least I can use this in combination with a legitimate copy, to get the best of both worlds.
The really sad thing about this DRM being cracked is as much a win to the consumer as to the pirate. The pirate gets a game that functions under more circumstances than the consumer, which I imagine will lead to more consumers being pissed off at Ubisoft and resulting to pirate a game they've already paid for just so they can fucking play it without having a connection to the internet 24/7.
Good job Ubisoft, alienating customers will surely lower piracy rates and raise your stock prices.
Disagree != mod troll.
the legitimate customers lose! Ubisoft's encouragement of piracy has reached new heights with this move.
I propose that, by shipping games with DRM, software vendors are promoting the dissemination of malware. This means that DRM is a direct contributor to spam, botnets, and all the other nasties that infest our Internet.
And others with limited connectivity. I hope this DRM fails and fails hard, if only to scare other publishers away from something that is truly anti-customer (not consumer).
Shh.
Normally I actually pay for my games. In most cases, I do it the old school way - I buy physical discs from physical stores. Lately though, companies like Ubisoft seem like they're treating me like a criminal for giving them my money. At this point, they're really making it more convenient for me to prove them right.
I owe to them, from the 1990s, a couple of Amiga pir.. er.. evaluation version games.
Did no one see this coming? Every time one of these customer-raping companies says they have achieved new levels of DRM-Uncrackableness, they are proven wrong within 24 hours. How stupid are these people to continue to waste millions of dollars trying to secure their software from being pirated, only to have their efforts shown for naught within a day, three days at the most? And how do they not fucking understand that all they are truly doing is pissing off customers and running their company name into the ground? Every time I hear about a company pulling this crap I get more disgusted with software companies. Oh, I know they have a right to protect their properties and profits and all that jazz. But, damnit, consumers have a right to expect a certain level of quality and usability WITHOUT draconian restrictions and double talk and non-ownership-of-a-product-you-paid-to-own type bullshit. This is EXACTLY the reason I choose to pirate a large amount of the games I play. I paid for Mass Effect because of the outstanding (to me) gameplay and story/graphics. Same goes for Dragon Age : Origins, The Witcher, Boderlands, and Divinity II : Ego Draconis. Yes, there is a bit of DRM to those games, but it isn't anywere near as retarded, insulting, lame, fucked up, and basically fucking illegal (or at least it SHOULD be illegal) as forcing me to be connected to the internet to play a god damned single player game that, other than the fucking DRM, has abso-fucking-lutley no reason to connect to the internet. Fuck Ubi and I hope with all seriuosness that Assassin's Creed 2 gets cracked and becomes the most pirated game in history while simultaneously becoming the biggest financial failure in the history of video games. Maybe then these companies will stop with the DRM and find a mutally agreeable way to protect their work without screwing over their customers.
Halitosis - (n.) Halle Berry's Camel Toe.
Exactly, what *when* they go out of business? Because on the scale of what gets done when a company is bankrupt customers are dead last. There are no more customers: the company is gone. What matters at that point is creditors and the more your owed the higher you are on the list. If there is no non-restricted version held in escrow with a lawyer who has explicit instructions to release when the company goes insolvent then FACT: Your purchase is gone.
Shh.
instead of focusing on selling goods, they should suck it up and realise they are selling a service and model themselfs around the hospitality industry where customer satisfaction is king.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I noticed the quoted nfo file on TFA's page. It made me wonder how many people out there only ever see nfo files as random bizarre characters with no alignment, rather than the relatively aesthetically pleasing monospace-font designed pages that they really are. Case in point, compare the quoted block in the article with this.
They didn't have to pay for it, duh. How could businesses possibly match that and make money?
This stupid meme really needs to stop. It's getting old.
PS3's DRM has not been successfully cracked. There were some reports recently, but you still cannot buy a PS3 and run pirated games on it. It will only get worse for future devices.
Great! Now the next attempt at DRM will be even worse. Every concession they try to make to honest consumers is another loophole for pirates to exploit.
Hey, pirates: could you guys stop thinking of yourselves for five minutes and stop contributing to this childish arms race? If you don't approve of the DRM (or the gameplay, or the story, or...) then DO NOT PLAY THE GAME. By pirating it, you're convincing them that you would be a potential customer if they could only force you hard enough. By NOT PLAYING, you actually tell them that this is unacceptable. All you're doing is screwing over the people who actually want to support the game developers.
It's just a game, christ; find something else to do.
Just because a really good player can beat Ubisoft's DRM Game in one day doesn't mean it isn't a fun game. I'm sure us "normal" geeks can get countless days of entertainment out of trying to break this DRM ourselves.
Imagine a person, in a casino, sitting at a slot machine. They're pumping coin into it and steadi;y losing everything. They know that they should walk away, but they can't. Walking away means admitting to themself and others that they lost. And so they keeping telling themself that if they keep playing long enough, they will win back enough to at least break even.
The same is true of Ubisoft, Microsoft and all the other companies who keep pumping money into the DRM slot machine. Year after year they keep coming up with new DRM schemes to replace all the previous ones that have failed (ie, all of them). They can't stop. To stop would be an admisison of failure. An admission that even if they created uncrackable DRM, the extra sales revenue wouldn't even come close to covering the cost of creating and maintainging new DRM schemes.
It would be funny, it it wasn't so stupid.
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/21961.cfm
And what is there plan for people who don't have good internet / have high pings? stand by and let buy the game and just download a hacked exe?
Developers: Lets not put DRM in our software so that everyone can play the game without problems!
Management: I don't know about this...
Pirates: Awesome! We can steal the game and play it for free with no problems!
Customers... Oh, too bad there are no customers because everyone stole the game.
Management: Developers, I'm sorry, but our last game didn't make any ROI so you're all fired.
Developers: We should have used DRM...
I love how everyone bashes DRM without thinking of the consequences of not using any. Pirating is far too widespread. For every person who pirates a game, less games are made for the PC for this very reason. Pirates blame the developers for using DRM, the quality of the game is reduced for actual customers, yet the pirates are the one to blame.
Stop trying to spin the argument, pirates. You're the very reason that this shit happens.
This is not the first internet based anti-piracy tool circumvented. There have been plenty in the past.
*DrugCheese rants*
How about this DRM:
1. Ubisoft creates a reasonably simple (read cheap) traditional DRM;
2. Ubisoft promises to donate five thousand dollars to cancer research for each day the game goes without being cracked, for a year.
I think they'd have better chances that way. Don't you?
you'd think some companies might enjoy the sort of publicity and awareness they'd get out of having a lot of people use their software... and without fear on top of it!
Long live the BSD license
I was excited about Assassin's Creed 2 until information about its DRM showed up. Steam describes it as: "Ubisoft requires a permanent Internet connection to play this video game at all times."
Fuck that shit. I haven't pirated a game in over three years (since I got out of college and have money to spend) and have purchased several of Ubusoft's games over the years: Assassin's Creed 1, Beyond Good and Evil, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, Far Cry 2 (I don't care what anyone says -- this one kicked ass), and a couple of the Splinter Cells. I'm sympathetic to the desire to limit software piracy -- software development isn't cheap and games can be risky -- but here is one almost guaranteed sale that you've fucked up, Ubusoft. I'd still like to play the game, but I definitely can't, in good conscience, allow my money to make this sort of shit look successful.
Well, you can always just walk away and not play. It's not like you don't have any choice in the matter.
in jest (that humor itself is priceless), I certainly could not agree more. The reality of DRM is that the whole concept is flawed, by the logic alone. In that you have to give the user everything they need to run the app, or listen/watch to the media, so what is there to prevent someone skilled with IDA Pro from making it work for their own purposes after the DRM manages to sufficiently piss them off? So, you there you sit, you have the key, you have the data/code/bitstream, and you have the algorithm. Nothing prevents you from hacking apart the code and putting those three pieces back together in a different way other than what was intended, except for a few badly written laws like the DMCA. That's not a prevention, it's just a social mechanism that just serves to make the hackers self-righteous in their own mind, and therefore even 'more likely' to feel justified in 'getting back' at 'the bad-guys' (not my frame of mind, but its out there).
The sad thing is that with the use of DRM everyone looses, EXCEPT for the one peddling DRM as the 'answer to everything'. It's not. Reality could not be further from the truth. Yet these modern-day snake oil salesmen always manage to walk off with millions of dollars in their pockets while everyone else, including the owner of the copyrighted media being 'protected', get the shaft. It only hurts the owners bottom line, stiffs the purchaser who can't use the product, and the snake oil salesman lives in a big mansion somewhere on a hill. What is wrong with this picture? What we need is a new set of laws to protect us from snake oil salesmen, in that if you promise your product is going to do XYZ then you should not be legally shielded by some EULA when you promise something that is known by real experts to not be true. Selling a 'solution' under false pretences is the way I see it. If you sell snake oil you should pay the price.
btw - If you honestly believe that DRM can actually work, then Have I got a bridge for you!!...
And now we have it your way:
Management: Developers we're using DRM this time, period.
Developers: OK, we think we have an unbeatable system.
Customers: Lame.
Pirates: We cracked it.
Management: That unbeatable system was beaten and now the game is being pirated. Unfortunately we wasted untold billions paying you to develop that system and now that it's been broken and we're losing trillions in sales you're all fired.
go fuck yourself troll.
Awesome news! What is the URL to the counterfeit (read: superior to the genuine) product? ;)
If some significant portion of the game was actually computed on the remote server, then "cracking" it would not be possible. One could attempt to "hack" a user account on the remote server to get the free play, or a shady developer could attempt to reverse engineer the networking protocol and implement a fake remote server others could run. The latter would only prove useful if the portion of the game run by the server was trivial. Otherwise, the developer would essentially be reimplementing vast portions of the game him/herself and should just make their own game anyhow.
Without pirates no DRM would be needed. Your line of reasoning still proves exactly what I said: pirates are the original problem, not the companies.
trillions?
Hack the planet!!!
is it just far far harder to try to protect from piracy then it is to crack, or is Skid-Row just more talented then their employees.
I understand anything is crackable, but this 1 day cracking that happens most of the time is just excessively quick.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The only thing that I'm surprised about is that companies remain so obstinately stupid in trying to implement Digital Rights Restrictions.
Anyone who has ever been involved in software development knows that even when it comes to relatively simple systems, all it takes is one minor SNAFU, one little bug, for the whole thing to be laid bare before skilled hackers. And it doesn't even have to be a problem with your code; it can be in anything from firmware to the operating system to libraries you've linked to to the compiler you used. Add to this the fact that Digital Rights Restriction systems are hardly anything but relatively simple; they typically encompass very complex encryption, heavy duty mathematics, picky dependencies on very specialized hardware and/or software and/or connectivity requirements, etc.
Also, how many people did it take to write your Digital Rights Restrictions system, and how smart were they? Let me tell you, it's not like there's just one guy holed up in a basement somewhere working on cracking the Digital Rights Restrictions of a popular game. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands. And they all want that reputation boost (or sometimes even financial gain) of being The One Who Cracked [insert game title here]. Oh, and maybe your people are smart, but these people are frickin' brilliant.
Yet still, these companies are under the delusion that after decades of abject failure after abject failure by companies much bigger and more motivated than they are to stop software theft, they're going to be the ones that come up with the magic bullet, that special recipe that will keep their software locked. So sure of it, in fact, that they're continually willing to invest a lot of time, money, and effort into their futile pursuit. The reality of the situation is that all it takes is one. One hacker, one flaw, and every cent you poured into your Digital Rights Restrictions system is *poof!* gone.
I'd like them to hire me to create the Digital Rights Restrictions system they use for their next game. I'll charge them a few thousand dollars and put a text file on the root of the installation media that says, "It would really mean a lot to us if you would not copy this game illegally, so please don't. Thanks!" Now, I know you're probably thinking, "But Skippus, people would be able to copy the game from day one!" My contention is that I've saved them tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars and my Digital Rights Restrictions system lasted just one day less than the one they would have otherwise spent so much money on.
Actually, it might work.
You have to make the distinction between people who distribute CRACKS and people who distribute the SOFTWARE itself (presumably along with the crack). The latter people are usually the sociopathic, immoral, uncaring bastards. That, and they are usually pretty DUMB (they sometimes end up accidentally distributing software with malware on it). So dumb that I highly doubt these people would have skills to crack the software themselves.
The crackers, on the other hand, are usually pretty brilliant people (they reverse-engineer binary software after all) who just didn't have money and didn't (or refused) to make the connection between "illegal" and "immoral".
Many of these guys even claim in their release notes, "If you like this game, buy it!", which points to the likely possibility that they just cracked these things to get their fair-use rights back.
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
And what is the plan for people who don't have computers that meet the system requirements? stand by and let them buy an old game, used?
This is why I buy games, don't open them but instead download them because of the stupid DRM that plagues legitimate copies. No I don't wish to always have the disc in the drive. No I don't need an internet connection for single player games. No I don't want to install copy protection software. Make a good game and I will buy it.
Hell. Yes.
to give to everyone at work. Now I'm forced to pirate the game and it makes me want to cry since I've always bought my games and I really wanted to pay for 100 copies. My little girl is sick with the plague and told me the other day that seeing me cry just makes her feel worse. P.S. You can trust my story because I'm an internet forum poster.
I know a bunch of people that do that anyway. mainly because they like the physical disks and don't want to wait a week to download the files (my swarm speeds always suck hardcore). the cracked .exe is maybe at most twenty megs, which blows the hell out of four gigs. plus then I get to not be harrased, install stupid stuff like tagus, or have the dvd in the drive.
and yet they are still considered terrible pirates, because they bypass copy protection.
Without pirates no DRM would be needed. Your line of reasoning still proves exactly what I said: pirates are the original problem, not the companies.
What is your fucking problem? Someone somewhere is ALWAYS going to pirate so shut the fuck up and move out of your parents basement already.
And I can promise you even in your fairy tail omg ponnies world where no one ever pirated a game there would still be DRM. Please fucking note D.R.M. stands for Digital Rights Management and not Pirate Control Management. Theses companies don't want to sell a product they want to rent one for a limited time but at the same fucking price.
Please for the love of god just shut the fuck up already you fucking moron...
but I wouldn't expect a refund halfway through some crappy Will Smith movie. You don't have a right to entertainment on your terms. Go play with a kangaroo if you want some cheap entertainment.
pricks who can easily afford the games. When piracy rates of pc games are around 90% even a 10% increase in legit sales is a huge amount.
Do you honestly think that companies would invest money to create DRM if piracy had not become so widespread? See what I did there?
God damnit I'm sick of these motherfucking shills on this motherfucking site...
How many more times am I going to have to fucking tell you to SHUT THE FUCK UP. You are a pathetic piece of shit who clearly doesn't fucking understand how shit works in the really real world.
D.R.M stands for Digital Rights Management those words answer your fucking question.
anymore than Stardock liked having their demigod servers overran by pirates. DRM works just fine on PS3 games and many MMOs as well. The problem is ineffective DRM, not the idea itself.
Well I'm glad that game is cracked but some of us people who actually bought Assassin's Creed II have gotten the short straw.
This is as far as I get into the game when I try to play it on PC:
http://i.imgur.com/iEfwF.jpg
To make matters worse I can't return the game because it's already been associated with my account and Ubisoft's "customer service" doesn't respond to any service request.
I'm sure it's a great game but I doubt I will be able to play it until a crack is out.
Make a DRM implementation which allows pirated copies to play but with an unskippable lecture of the evils of piracy which grows in length with each execution. People won't bother cracking it because it's a minor inconvenience and you'll probably guilt some people into buying your game when they would of otherwise cracked it.
.
I think the companies that release stupid DRM'ed games have more to do with it. If I like a game, I'll pay for it. Bucks aren't THAT hard to come by. Heck, I'll skip lunch a few days a week if things are that tight. I could stand to lose some weight anyway.
First, why should a game cost $28M USD? More money doesn't a better game make. If my single player game (legitimately purchased - I'm not advocating ripping off someone that doesn't choose to place their product under GPL - their choice) borked because the crappy ISP dropped cell delineation, I'd consider that broken. By intent. Why would I buy something I know is broken from the get-go? Ubisoft has nothing to worry about on my account - I won't by their software, ever. I won't play their games - ever. People that make such breathless mistakes as this DRM'ed abortion likely made other mistakes as well. We just can't see them. It's closed source. If you need a crack to make a game work correctly, I'd say you're better off without the game - or the crack.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
"They already lost my money. I was halfway interested in AC2. Didn't buy it because of the DRM. Didn't pirate it. I have no intention of doing either."
Then you're the last kind to complain about what Ubisoft did. Pirates (briefly) and customers were affected.
My predictions were on the first side which was that the DRM would be effective but would basically piss off their users, both legal and not resulting in a pile of disinteresting crap.
My presumption was based on the presumption that they would do this DRM *right" by making it difficult to crack. Clearly, they make it not so difficult which I did not expect. After all, what I expected was that something that was so important to them to be implemented with all the care and diligence as Microsoft's Windows Vista. You know, that OS no one uses that has DRM up the wazoo where all internal program communications are encrypted to avoid media being ripped through playback and stuff like that?
Well, I'm going to risk being wrong again by saying that "It's not over yet..." They will issue an update to the game such that it can't be played without an update being applied or something like that... the update, of course, fixing the problem and/or making it more difficult in the future.
Ubisoft claims it lacks features.
For instance, the cracked version lacks the requirement for a continuous online connection.
The cracked version lacks the occasional lag caused by the internet connection, nor does the cracked version have the feature where the game gets useless when Ubisoft shuts down their servers.
It also lacks all other DRM available in the original game.
So yeah, the pirate version is lacking features.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Without pirates no DRM would be needed. Your line of reasoning still proves exactly what I said: pirates are the original problem, not the companies.
Yeah, pay no attention to those dirty, thieving bastards who are buying the games secondhand, 100% legally. Because the publishers certainly aren't. Nope. Not a bit.
Idiot.
What about cloud games and pay-per-hour?
I want to play in my Netbook powered Linux an original game without DRM. This would be amazing and it's plausible!
That's the tip of the iceberg. Shipping things with DRM also promotes piracy.
Now everyone knows that because it's obvious: it promotes piracy of the DRMed object. Duh. You will have fewer sales if you use DRM. But there's more to it than that. Everyone will have fewer sales. It hurts the entire industry.
Look at the situation with movies. SD movies on DVD had DRM, but that DRM was completely cracked soon enough to leave a viable DVD market. As a result, I could buy movies on DVD and be confident that I would be able to watch them, even though doing so violated federal law (DMCA). Everyone won, even me. Yes, I didn't win as much as I should have (since I took a very slight risk by illegally playing the movies I bought, but it was in my own home where no one would know).
High definition came along. With Bluray, each title needs to be cracked. As a result, before you buy a movie, you have to research to see if anyone has a key for it yet. Bluray isn't viable, and won't be viable until the DRM is totally defeated.
So what is a normal person expected to do about high-definition movies? Research titles before every purchase to make sure someone has found a way to make 'em work? Really?!? People can't even be counted on to fucking vote in political elections, find out candidate positions other than what's in the 30-sec TV ads, etc, and you want them to research a $20 buy and never ever buy any Bluray on impulse? That's fucking insane. Let's be realistic about what someone is expected to do: pirate it. Crackers have the time/motivation to deal with DRM; I don't. I'll just download.
But we all know that. Bluray DRM means substantially lower Bluray sales than what the movies could get. Duh. But here's the thing: the movie studios are training the users to start using the piracy infrastructure and habits. Those customers could still be DVD customers and still occasionally spend some money on DVDs -- legally obtained but illegally played (i.e. the movie studios could receive money) -- even if they can't be part of a higher definition market. But let's get serious, if you visit m00v13w4r3z.com torrent listing site every day to find highdef movies (since they're not for sale in playable form), pretty soon you're going to stop worrying about which movie files have written off being a serious part of the market (Bluray releases) and which movies are actually released with the intent of making a profit (DVD). You're going to see Rocky 7, think "Ooh I wanna see geriatric boxing" and not give a flying fuck what resolution it is. You're not going to see "480p" and then realize "Oh, this movies is for sale and I could actually buy it and be able to play it." You're just going to download it for free, because what if it's not 480p? If it's 720p or higher, a cracked copy is your only hope of seeing anything other than a black screen. Even if you do see "480p" and know you could buy the movie, "it's just another movie," and you've already pirated hundreds before that.
So what happens? The user has exited the market. That's not just a lost sale, that's a permanent lifetime series of sales. Not just Disney sales when they sell DRMed works, it's Sony sales too. It's even little independent filmmakers, because they can't sell DVDs even without CSS protection anymore, because Disney and Sony trained everyone to pirate. Once you go bittorrent, you don't go back.
That is how DRM is socially irresponsible.
At least that's how it is for movies and TV and there's just no doubt about it. Games? That's not my thing so I don't have the personal experience, but it's not hard to imagine similar things happening. All it takes is a person spending money on one game with annoying DRM in it, to get 'em looking for the crack to the game they bought. Now that user has a bittorrent client installed, and they have been to a website that lists hundre
At the time of writing this. I scanned all subjects. Not one actual single mention of the actual game name has been made in the subject lines. NONE. 72 replies and 1 article and not a single subject with the name of the game. A couple of acronyms but no names. However mentions of DRM and variations on DRM are common. This says something. Some of the responses are full on rants about DRM. Interesting piece of social observation I think. Almost like a mob mentality. Herds of people charging for a cause that isn't fully defined. However it is true that this thread is more an extension of the original article. So one could say this is the giant "I TOLD YOU SO YOU GREEDY SONS OF B@#$@%". type response. I still marvel at the fact the people seem to have forgot the subject of the problem. ( hmmmmm. , ) P.S. I personally think this moronic attempt at DRM was a finical Cluster F#$& and will have serious issues for Ubi. However this post is more about the thread than the subject.
Would you have told them that it would be a waste of time?
You all missed the point : this new DRM target was to lock every game to a single account. With such an association, you can not resell your game anymore. As such, they don't even care if the DRM is cracked in 10 years or 10 millisec : you can not legally resell a game that was legally purchased.
In France, 40% of purchased games are used games. I guess that the figure should be more or less the same in other western countries.
So, let's say 100 people are buying the game and 200 are stealing it. Only 60 of them are giving money to the editor, the 40 others are giving money to the reseller shop (fees) and lowering the acquisition cost of a portion of the 60 ones. The 200 pirates do not pay anything and the editors have given up on them.
Now, with this "no more used game" DRM, honest people might not all buy the game : a few because they dont like DRM but most of them won't buy the game because they won't be able to lower their acquisition price buy reselling it. For the editor, as long as there are still 61 people paying the full price for the game, they win. You now have +39 pirates but you have +1 giving money to the editor.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
download the warez, have a product with superior functionality.
The days of code-wheels, manual page references, etc were bearable. If you bought the game, it wasn't a major hassle.
Relying on internet connectivity, particularly shit that seems to stream data at something like 128kbit (from memory) is just bullshit. Some countries have ISPs that charge for data. Fucked if i'm going to pay for data to play a game I already fucking bought, that isn't an MMORPG!
If publishers put more effort into putting out a decent game, rather than spending millions on the next generation of DRM that will just inevitably be cracked anyway, we'd all be better off.
Back in the day, you'd get incentives to buy the game, like posters, t-shirts, a decent manual or whatever. Now? A nice big "Fuck you".
Well "Fuck you" ubisoft, I'd download the game to play it just out of spite, but my guess is that as with most of the current crop of games coming out, its barely worth the cost in bandwidth...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
What these guys are doing: http://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth.
Sure they are living in their parent's basement, but they seem genuinely talented, both artistically and technologically. Other game developers that are trying to cater to billions have already given up and have nothing to complain about.
good article timothy and useful information
MaxSoft
http://soft.kurdd.com
Oh I know I'm replying to a troll but I've got to say this...piracy is a much bigger problem on consoles then on PC's.
Om, nomnomnom...
Skid Row had to hurry and come forwards with the crack, if only just to protect their copyright and IP, so they don't their crack abused without permission by UBIsoft like ReLoaded had theirs.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/19/0239227
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's something no pirate actually has been seen drawing from. It's also a red herring for two reasons, one artists are still as capable of being inspired to create as before. Two pirates aren't doing it to enrich the public domain, otherwise they'd take a leaf from the OSS guys and actually donate their time and creative resources to enrich the commons by, you know, creating.
"Protect" their property by devaluing it? Yes, devalue. What's the value of a product? By its definition what someone else is willing (and able) to pay for it. No product has an intrinsic value. They have manufacturing cost, but that does not equal their value. I could make a table of pure gold with a manufacturing value of a few million, if not billion, USD, but I doubt I'd find anyone stupid enough to buy it. It does not represent this value.
So value is dependent entirely on the buyer's esteem of the product. And a game that limits me more than a game of equal properties (in this case, the original compared to the cracked game) is less valuable.
So, essentially, DRM means you increase the cost of manufacturing (actually, DRM, since you pay at a per-unit base, is about the ONLY major cost in a game that depends on the units produced/sold, most of the rest of your costs are unit-independent) to lower the value of your product.
I dunno, I am no MBA, but I know that much about business that INCREASING your cost to LOWER the value of your product is ... umm, stupid?
If anything kills PC gaming it's the trend to spend more and more money on things that drive away more and more paying customers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/25/playstation_cracked_wide_open/
Just dont buy the garbage, I dont even care to get some patches from the black market, I simply do not buy their stuff anymore until they stop this scheme.
And believe me I bought more than a handful of games from them the last 10 years!
If it was "cracked in one day" then this DRM scheme wasn't all it was made out to be. It was a simple "cd-check" style DRM that could be cracked by simply removing the checking from the code, or by creating a local server responding in the way the game expects. A real DRM scheme requiring permanent internet connection would of course not include the whole game in the installer, period. The best idea would be to have logic such as NPC AI hosted on remote servers.
I just don't buy that "all DRM will always be cracked within a day". For media perhaps, because of the analog hole. But for logic, you simply can't crack code that you don't have on your computer. You can circumvent it by writing another implementation, but at that point you just cannot be sure that the cracked version is all that the original is. DRM is here to stay, and for games (unlike for media), creating an undefeatable DRM should be really simple, by simply keeping half the product on the sellers side.
The other argument is that all DRM is evil because it is an inconvenience for paying customers and not for the pirates. That may be true, but that is just a fact of life. Inconvenience for honest people is created by dishonest people. The lock on your front door is that kind of inconvenience. You could refuse to buy a door with a lock in it if you want to (since you don't like that YOU are inconvenienced by someone elses dishonesty). But you don't. You buy the door with the lock and never think twice about it.
As far as "permanent internet connection" is concerned, it's just not an inconvenience anymore. Internet connection to a computer is the same as an electricity connection. My computer is completely useless without power, and all but useless without an internet connection. If the power goes down I could whine about the game not saving checkpoints often enough. The same could hold for internet connection. Sure, the electricity requirement is a true requirement while the internet connection is artificial, but it would not annoy me any more when my savegame is lost because of internet outage or a graphics driver failure than when it is lost because of a power blackout.
Now I have faith in mankind :D
...that is utterly worthless to boot.
See, you proof it.
And to remain on-topic: HAHA!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If there existed a method of Digital Rights Management that:
- was completely invisible to the user,
- installed nothing on your client,
- had negligible computational overhead,
- worked perfectly (100% of legitimate copies pass, 100% of illegitimate copies rejected,)
- rigorously respected your privacy,
- added no cost to the product,
- smelled lemon fresh.
Would you be in favor of or oppose this hypothetical implementation of DRM?
My theory:
The fight against piracy is a big-picture Quest for the Holy Grail type affair going all the way up.
The government sponsors publishers to include DRM in their games, which then get cracked eventually. The crackers are tracked down, perhaps publicly persecuted to keep appearances up. Then behind the curtain they receive an offer they can't refuse and become security experts for the government. To develop a "better" DRM, which makes more skilled crackers crawl out from under the woodwork.
"What the GP was referring to, however, was how essentially nothing becomes public domain these days, due to *constant* lobbying by large corporations to extend and restrict copyright, patents, and trademarks (major extensions in the USA happening in 1976 and 1998 -- life+50/70 in 1976 and life+70/95 in 1998, both of these commonly believed to have been passed specifically as a result of Disney lobbying to 'protect' Mickey Mouse). "
And Disney had what to do with patents? You're making the mistake of confusing all three which cover different concepts, and have different requirements as well as different expiration.
Woops! Sony got their arse handed to them.
I mean, they have smart people at Ubisoft.
They must know it is futile to use this kind of DRM to prevent piracy.
So what other purpose might this DRM have?
Well, it might be a ploy to get valuable user statistics, mapping out their demographics.
That way, they don't have to spend $$ on research and have the privilige of studying their subjects in their natural environments.
They would also get more precies statistics because of the larger dataset (basicly everyone who payed and played).
They would pretty much guarantee this dataset by implementing DRM like they did.
Since the dataset is updated constantly they would have immediate information on what their product is doing in the the market and would for instance be able to adjust their marketing strategy on the fly, making it cheaper and more effective.
So i think this is just a way to recover piracy losses, but not necessarily by battling piracy...
You want specifics? Google this:
0841A394BFEBDB60E2F463A10D15BD6B4198C5C0
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You're IMHO seeing the wrong problem, or rather just one half of the problem.
While a system like this won't and didn't stop piracy, it might just achieve what other systems have failed, and that the publishers have been whining for for a decade: it might just revoke a lot of honest customers' consumer rights.
Let's face it, one of the things they _have_ before whined about, and occasionally even tried to prevent, is that you can buy a second hand copy on eBay instead of paying them for it. You know, just for like any other product out there. You can buy a second hand car, a second hand lawnmower, even a second hand gun, but God forbid that you might buy a computer game second hand.
Tying your right to play to an account on their servers, well, pretty much means you can't sell the game without selling the account. If you registered more than one game on one account (I dunno this one, but for example EA's accounts are tied to an email address, and Joe Average only has one email address), it means you have to give someone access to them _all_ when you wanted to sell one game, and might also mean they get to use your DLC points, post in your name, see your details, and depending on how it's implemented it might lock you out while they play on that account. Heck, some of these might apply even without selling it, but even when just letting your kid play the game after you're done with it or viceversa.
It just added a layer of pain in the ass for every Joe Average out there who isn't even considering piracy at all, but just tries to exercises what passes for consumer rights in any other domain.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Others assumed that it would be immediately cracked, as is usually the case, leaving the inconvenience for paying customers and resulting in a superior product for pirates.
Well, I never assumed it would be immediately cracked... But it was only a matter of time. Eventually some bored or determined person out there is going to get around to cracking it. It may take long enough for some impatient people to go out and buy the game instead of pirating it... But it is going to be cracked.
And when that happens, you've got a choice of either paying cash for a game that won't work when your Internet goes down... Paying cash and then breaking the law to crack that game you just bought... Or pirating the game from the start so that you've got a game that works with no Internet for free.
And the publishers wonder why piracy is rampant.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
IBM was the designing force behind the best console DRM up to now. It was small change compared to the amount of work to design the rest of the Cell.
Anyway, you've really, really, cherry picked here. As others have pointed out, you picked a console (as opposed to a PC game), and you picked the one console with the best DRM (maybe you should have averaged it with Microsoft's pitiful first attempt with the original Xbox).
I am thinking exactly like a board member.
"Wait now, we spent how much licensing/writing this scheme to restrict digital rights for people? And it was cracked when!!?"
My line of thought would be: How much profit would we make selling a game without Digital Rights Restrictions versus how much would we make selling a game with Digital Rights Restrictions? Well, let's see, there's the obvious direct cost of licensing/creating the system that we would save. Plus, it doesn't do any good anyway, because the so-called "pirates" are going to crack the system anyway and the vast majority of people who were going to buy the game before are still going to buy the game. Also, we don't risk the PR nightmare of the Digital Rights Restrictions having a bug that could negatively affect their gameplay. Oh, and we can actually use it as a marketing point in selling the game.
Not imposing Digital Rights Restrictions is win-win proposition for both the company and the consumer. The only people who lose out are the people who write Digital Rights Restrictions systems, and as a board member of a company that now has nothing to do with them, I couldn't care less.
Don't forget the most important feature: the gamme suddenly shutting down and dumping you at the desktop without warning or saving, if your internet connection as much as hickups. (Dunno about other providers, but at least T-Online still has at least one mandatory disconnect per day.)
I don't know about you, but if my game doesn't randomly crash to desktop, it's just not the same thing dammit. It's like I'm not even playing an Ubisoft game ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Except DRM on the PS3 does not screw over your normal customers and make the pirated game the supperior version.
And it took how long before it was cracked?
mov ax, 4c00h
int 21h
There are lots of game companies that don't use DRM...and what's more they have come out and made a point of it. Examples: Wolfire, 2dBoy, and Unknown worlds, just to name a few.
now, without having to deal with the immense STUPIDITY of ubisoft management and their beyond stupid 'drm' ?
Read radical news here
that way if you want a cracked version you can have it but have to do it all in a single sitting. inconvenient and makes going legit attractive if you like the game. Didnt they do this with Dirt2?
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
USB Cartridges. Think how cool they could look. Maybe crazy ones with built in physics cards or storage. I'd think that would be pretty cool
DRM is a response to piracy, not the other way around. Pirates are to blame for this. Without increasingly sophisticated DRM these big name single player games would be pirated even more.
That's the reality.
PC gaming is suffering, pretty soon the hardcore gamers won't be able to find their shooters and action games at all, that's where the trend is going.
Games that don't require as much DRM because of the lack of the technical sophistication of the intended audience (casual games) or niche games like the strategy genre where the customers understand they have to pay or have nothing to play at all will be all that's left for the PC.
PC game pirates, you've only got yourselves to blame.
you're not going to run the servers for nearly as long as they currently run authorisation or simple match-making services. Now I REALLY don't want to buy your product, because you're going to render it useless in a few years. I can still play Space Quest.
This all boils down to the developer's / distributor's ethics.
Just like Valve promise that, before hypothetically folding down, they are going to release patches to remove DRM protections from their own steam-powered games, some developers could promise (as in : "it's a part of the contract they signed on with the distributor") that, in case of the distributor shutting down the servers, or the developers bankrupting, a locally-installable server *would* be distributed.
Just the same way as lots of now abandoned MMO can still be player on unofficial servers. Except now, the release of the necessary material to run unofficial servers is part of the initial agreement.
Well that requires developers and distributors which will stick to their promise. And no complex shifting of hands for IP (20 years old software still property of some current company after a long chain of buys/sells, which refuses to release the components, on the grounds that it still exists and thus the "in case of bankrupcy" clause doesn't fulfil. And the original developers nowhere to be found)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
... at least according to their CEO. In general, it does look like "most" of their games are DRM-free, but I was unable to find a clear statement about when and what. The example above is Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom, the DRM in question is Stardock's GOO.
I am currently only buying DRM-free games. I patronize GOG extensively, they explicitly state they never use DRM. The games are older, but they have many good ones, the prices are excellent, and ... NO DRM. I'm very interested in Paradox, but want to be able to know - clearly and explicitly - which games lack DRM
Oh man did I just lul. Great job haxors.
Seriously when will the industry just cut their losses and come to terms that some people will pirate. Get over it.
The way to make an online system uncrackable seems totally straightforward, I wonder if the developers are stupid or they weren't willing to make secure DRM.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"Ha Ha!"
There is another thing about requiring an Internet connection. If you DO make a "foolproof" system requiring an Internet connection to play the game then hackers might resort to being spoilers. What would happen if the hacker community resorted to using a denial of service attack on your servers? I imagine that the legitimate users would get very irate at Ubisoft. Yes, it would be the hackers doing the DOS but the users would blame Ubisoft for putting such a vulnerability in their games.
I went to the site of Paradox Interactive to see what they have and I find that they made the Penumbra series. Those are nice games. Kind of a puzzle first person. Lots of eerie quiet sneaking. Not a lot of fighting. I guess I am a customer of them and didn't even know it. The games were very easy to download and install, so that is cool.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
You actually think that won't be cracked?
Marketing : "Sir, some people are stubbornly refusing to pirate our games. They keep going to stores and handing over money."
Boss : "WHAT ? Do these people not know about BitTorrent ?"
Marketing : "I hear a lot of them talking about 'moral values', whatever that is, and 'wanting developers to get paid'."
Boss : "Hmmm... how about if we convinced everyone that the developers are evil jerks ?"
Marketing : "That could work. I'll draft a proposal for some really onerous DRM."
Boss : "Good, good. I look forward to the day that we finally become free from the blight of paying customers."
I'm not sure what's worse, that you actually typed all that, or that I could actually read the last sentence...
I personally hope these guys go bankrupt. I purchased an older game from them, and it ended up installing hidden device drivers. A class-action lawsuit was apparently brought against them for this, and Ubi then stopped using the "protection" system in question... but they fucked those of us over who had already purchased the game by not delivering a patch to remove it for us. So, here's hoping you go out of business Ubisoft. I was an honest customer who got shafted, and now I hope you go the way of 3D Realms.
Not one technical account of how it was cracked? Are we not nerds?
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
A fundamental problem with DRM is that it's a constant irritant for legitimate users. So, many legitimate users will install the legitimately purchased game, then download the "cracked" version, to bypass the annoyance of DRM. Also, since the DRM is developed independently of the game itself, a frequent source of bugs is conflict between the DRM and the game, so installing a "cracked" version can be a way to overcome bugs. So, a lot of legitimate users will purchase and install the game, then download and install the "cracked" version, and will feel ethically justified in doing so.
Consequently, any game with DRM that frustrates legitimate users will create demand by legitimate users for "cracked" versions ... which will be used by illegitimate users as well. DRM of this sort is self-defeating.
There's a serious problem with your analogy, though:
The game publishers are making money. They're raking it in hand over fist. It's an incredibly lucrative industry.
Which is why they can afford to keep throwing money down the drain alienating their customers and making it more difficult for legitimate purchasers to use their own games: because those same people will keep coming back to buy the next Halo, or Mass Effect, or Sims, or whatever their next game is, whether it be a glorious diamond or a piece of cheap glass.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
To be honest, I don't think you get it. How many regular, normal users are going to google/torrent the hack?
To be honest, I don't think you get it. Do you think a company would bother developing DRM schemes if 99,7% of the buyers didn't care and bought whatever they can ?
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_4.html : ... For 2009, the most pirated PC game as reported in this article was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The PC version had a staggering 4.1 million downloads via torrents alone compared with an estimated 200,000 - 300,000 actual sales via retail and Steam
The report concludes that "...by the end of 2007, there were more than one billion PCs installed around the world; nearly half have pirated software on them."
http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_8.html :
As yet another example of removing DRM not leading to any reduction in piracy, the game Demigod has been pirated so heavily in its initial release period that it has caused the game's servers to effectively go down. Out of the 120,000 connections made to the game's servers, over 100,000 were by confirmed pirates, leaving only around 18,000 legitimate purchasers.
Very interesting article.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
To (probably mis)quote Scott Adams "Well, that didn't take long, even for here"
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Seriously.
As long as DRM makes the legit use of product more annoying than the illegitimate version this is a never ending battle.
The statement. "This DRM is unbreakable." Is always false. Who ever says it should be fired on the spot. For either being an idiot or misleading the shareholders..
When DRM puts additional requirements on the user it will always result in lost sales. People are fundamentally lazy. When it's easier to use the cracked/hacked/broken/mangeled/slightly buggy version you will loose money.
The legit version MUST have more actual value than the pirate version in order to generate real cash flow. For example: There are no real pirate versions of World of Warcraft because only proper versions are the ones that can give access to the real content. Yes it's a different kind of game. But it does illustrates the point very well. The legit versions of the Ubi games do not add value to the customer. As a matter of fact they do the opposite. Thus making the pirate versions more attractive than the real.
Where is the value add compensation? Something that would restore the balance. The legit version adds annoyance of always on net. But it adds the value of ?????.
Online game saves are not a value add. They are again an annoyance. Once those servers go down you don't have access to your save files. And they will go down on occasion. That now becomes and announce rather than a value add.
Being online enhances the game play how? I mean real enhancement. Not sales talk enhancement that a 12 year old kid doesn't care about.
For the N-th time. DRM only succeeds when it either adds value to the user or enables access to value add that exceeds the value loss of the DRM. ( I mean real value add. )
So why buy an annoying product when you can have a better one from a hacker? UBI really shot themselves in the foot with this one.
""But Skippus, people would be able to copy the game from day one!" My contention is that I've saved them tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars and my Digital Rights Restrictions system lasted just one day less than the one they would have otherwise spent so much money on."
Excellent synopsis and nice touch of humor. You can come work for me when I finally get my company going:)
On the serious side, the Movie, Video, Music, Games, and software business really have some wrong-thinking people at the helm, or at least idiot lawyers influencing the top brass. That anyone in a vibrant profitable company would sit around thinking of ways to protect intellectual property from being abused by their paying customers is idiocy in play. Just keep cranking out good stuff, and ignore this fictitious loss-by-piracy of sales that would never materialize anyway, and better yet, think of ways of turning pirated copies into sales leads converting them into paid copies. Musicians or their publishers should be stuffing the P2P networks with lower quality and perhaps shorter versions of their songs to bring on new sales (gosh, sounds like the AM radio controversy 3 generations ago!) Game makers should post FREE versions of their games. Make them shorter, or slightly disabled (enabled enough to get hooked), or better yet, put advertising inside the game, and then again, stuff the P2P networks with these official versions. Getting all draconian and punishing your paying customer base is true lunacy!
Final note, copyright and patent law is a false monopoly granted only by government. The market doesn't need IP protection* and IP protection isn't supported by the market. It's certainly not supported by any legal theories of equity. Games makers or any other purveyor of a virtual product are welcome to do whatever they'd like to increase their sales and profit margins, but everyone should take note and remember that the entire construct of intellectual "property" is an act of fiat by government, originally instituted so that creators have an incentive to be creative. But this rootkit crap and DRM is destructive and is backfiring on the various industries. For proof in the past, check out the section of the Copyright Act called "Compulsory Licensing".
* I'm referring to DMCA restrictions of an individual copying their own purchases, not the wholesale duplication and distribution of bootleg media.
Welp, there's whatever UbiSoft spent on this scheme down the drain. What did they spend on this thing? A million bucks? I hope the one day of protection they got out of it was worth it.
The way I've always seen it is, every pirated copy MIGHT be a lost sale. Sure, some people who would have otherwise bought it will pirate it and not pay. But many of the pirates are people who had zero intention of buying the game anyway, but will give it a spin just to see what it is about if the only cost is one click and a few minutes of bandwidth. A small percentage of those may actually like it enough to pay for it. Myself, I'm not going to pay for nor even pirate Assassin's Creed 2. What does it say when I don't even care enough to show interest in the game for free?
Now, the people who make their living convincing the UbiSofts of the world to buy DRM are of course going to try to assume that every pirate represents a lost sale. "Heck, some of these people would probably have bought a copy for the kids too- so we'll just go ahead and say each pirated copy equals _1.2_ lost sales! That's like a kajillion sales lost! Give us that cool million dollars, and all those pirated copies will immediately convert back to cold, hard cash! You'll be RICH!!!" UbiSoft's decisionmakers have their eyes turn into dollar signs and fork over the million bucks.
Then some guys crack the thing in a day. Does the DRM team give the cool million bucks back if their DRM gets cracked that fast? I seriously doubt it. So all UbiSoft really did was lose a million bucks on DRM and annoy their legitimate customers.
Like many are claiming it is.
the crack will let you get into the game, but will prevent you from progressing past the tutorial mission. It is funny seeing some people bitch that they cannot start a campaign as suggestions to fix this are to buy the game.
Silent Hunter 3 had starforce and there is a stickied thread over on the UBI forums on how to install the game using a crack.
Silent Hunter 4 had securerom on it and on the final patch removed copy protection from the game.
I see no reason to doubt that when the time is right copy protection will be removed from Silent Hunter 5 as well.
With the new graphics and much better modding tools that allow scripting SH5 a year from now will be the best Subsim to date.