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Ubisoft's DRM Cracked — For Real This Time
therufus writes "A few days after the release of Assassin's Creed 2, naughty piracy sites were announcing they had cracked Ubisoft's Online Services Platform. Turns out, that wasn't entirely true. While it was possible to load into the game, players were unable to advance past a certain memory block. But now, it seems Ubisoft will need to draft a new response. A new crack has begun circulating that removes the DRM entirely."
I'm not a fan of 'Piracy' at all, but Ubisoft DRM tactics are draconian, ridiculous, and are just begging for the attention of those who break DRM for fun or profit.
Ubisoft has brought this upon themselves and now they'll use the fact that their "unbreakable" DRM has been broken to justify their further efforts. Asshats!
WTF? This is old news. It was cracked by NinnleCrack, running under Ninnle Linux, some time ago.
Now whenever you buy a copy of one of their games, you will have to schedule a time for an Ubisoft employee to come over and unlock your copy. The employee will stand guard as you play, and as soon as your scheduled time is done, the employee will lock the copy again and leave. If you wish to play at an unscheduled time, that is unfortunate. Also, copies will only include one hour of prepaid Ubisoft employee time. Anything beyond that will cost you $100/hr, including transportation time and costs.
Considering no DRM system will withstand tampering forever, and it's ultimately about delaying the inevitable crack, I guess Ubisoft was successful.
Except they have alienated legitimate customers along with the pirates, well, nevermind...
Skidrow put their own copy protection on the crack because they simply placed the values from the emulator into a dll. It's nice and convenient to have a dll return the values instead of a server however if they had actually cracked then they would have also cracked the other games for which the emulator doesn't currently exist.
So yes, Assassin's Creed 2 is playable but their copy protection is only broken in the sense that AC2 designers decided to make the server-client for this game return static responses that can be collected and eventually make the game playable for pirates.
The only ethical response to ubisoft is not to buy their product, not to use their product, not to infringe upon their product and then tell them you are doing it and tell your friends.
I'm irritated at the pro-piracy attitude, it hurts open source as well. Without respect for at least copyright-driven IP you can't have real opensource that allows the creator to specify how it is propagated (GPL). All you would have would be the BSD, and we saw what Apple did with that eh?
All Skidrow did was re-package the existing community-developed workaround.
The community created a values.db which contains the name/value pairs to defeat Ubi's server checks, and a server emulator, Skidrow's DLL embeds this file and replaces the server-checking with a local access.
Skidrow then takes full credit for the work (in a total douche move) and they also packed their DLL so no-one would detect their deception.
Here is how unbreakable DRM will eventually work:
When internet connections are high enough bandwidths and low enough latencies, you will only have video transferred to you, all game assets will be entirely stored and run on their hardware, never will anything be stored on YOUR end that you will can manipulate.
That is, you will play "unbreakable" games remotely.
Attached to the "readme" file that comes with the hacked content (which can be found here), Skid Row alerted other hackers that the group's methods were safeguarded against reverse-engineering in order to fend off competing hacking groups and Ubisoft itself.
Let me see if I got it ... you are against the draconian practices of ubisoft ... so you crack the game and ... protect the source of your crack?
I guess how you differentiate between hackers and crackers, this guys are nothing but thieves.
And, before anyone replies saying that this is to protect the patch against ubisoft ... ubisoft created the DRM, they don't need to take a look at the crack's code.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
For the record:
The actual hard work was done by a community of people who bought the game. They ran a proxy that logged all the "values" sent from the Ubisoft servers to the game. Each time the game progresses to another mission (or similar), it requires a different set of "values" to determine what game data to load (or a very similar method). The people who logged these values then submitted them to a community database, which collected them and sorted out any fake ones uploaded by Ubisoft employees or griefers.
This community also made a server emulator, which served the "values" to the game upon request. The server emulator, written in python, was a pretty simple HTTP server; the game connected to it by editing the system's "hosts" file and hardcoding DNS responses for ".ubisoft.com" to localhost (where the server emulator runs).
Thus, the game is only crackable once enough people have bought the game and logged all possible values for all possible missions states. It's not a total loss for Ubisoft in a sense -- it prevents "Pre" releases, wherein a release group distributes the game before the actual release date. It also ensures that a certain number of people must buy the game and contribute "values" to the community database; all in all this ends up lengthening the time from game release to full-working pirate release.
SkidRow's new crack is simply an IPC (inter-process communication) method of delivering the "values" to the game, bypassing the network connection to the game. Therefore SkidRow's version doesn't use a server emulator running on localhost, but rather patches the executables of the game and has the "values" hardcoded into the cracked DLLs.
The real issue here is that SkidRow took the "values" database from the community who initially logged them, and pretty much claimed it as their own work. The original cracking community inserted some fake "values" as trackers in order to determine when anyone stole their work and released it.
In 2001, a developer at Insomniac wrote an article about how they went about protecting their new Spyro game. It also took two months to be cracked. But as he says in the article, the goal was not to be unbreakable, but to delay the hackers -- 50 percent of the total sales occurred in the first 2 months.
Effectively, Ubisoft has already won.
Sadly, the only games I play are distributed on the Steam platform which reasonably protects the game... and still lets me play the games I own when I'm off-line.
By Jeff Vogel
Apparently not.
If Ubisoft applies a similar but tweaked version of this DRM to another game, will it take hacker groups like Skid Row the same amount of time to develop a crack? If so, then Ubisoft will be quite happy to continue releasing games that sell for several weeks before their DRM is cracked.
On the other hand if this means Skid Row can now apply the same technique to all of Ubisoft's games, then the company has just wasted a lot of money and frustrated many of their customers all for the sake of one game.
Many of us are using a crack to allow us to play the game when and where we want, but that doesn't mean that we have downloaded a pirated version of the game. The crack works with legitimate purchases, so if you see someone on a train playing the game, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are using a pirated version of the game. It just means they have downloaded a patch from a 3rd party which increases the usability of the program I already paid for.
Dragons Lair was VERY successful- and it had a wee amount of delays..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Lair
The game's enormous contrast with other arcade games of the time created a sensation when it appeared, and was played so heavily that many machines often broke due to the strain of overuse. It was also arguably the most successful game on this medium and is aggressively sought after by collectors.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Put the game mechanics on the server and leave the rendering and sound on the client - there's your perfect "DRM".
Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
Note to Ubisoft and other big game producers: keep treating your customers like potential criminals and they will continue to live up to your expectations. Maybe at some point you will realise that we would have gladly handed over cash for a quality product, but by that time our opinion of you will be so low that even if you all managed to somehow band together and release the best game since X-Com (subjective) we wouldn't even notice. Seriously, these game producers need to get a clue and see where their efforts in DRM have got them so far.
I read that info file yesterday when I saw this story on another site. I thought the same thing, that it was pretty hypocritical of them. However, now I know better. The only reason they hid the crack is because they didn't want anyone to know that all they did was repackage the crack that has been going around for awhile now. http://cs.rin.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=56074&start=45
Certainly, they made some improvement (no longer need to run a server or mess with hosts file) but they want people to think they did it all by themselves, rather than cooperatively with the crack community.
And that insight deserves a business methods patent if I have ever seen on ... oops, you put it in a public forum... well, that kills that little money maker.
I work at Ubisoft as a programmer, which is why I'm posting as an AC. What the next step will be in the DRM, the ramp-up, is gameplay code that is run from the server. So in order to crack that one the pirates will have to fully emulate the server side code. Not the whole of the gameplay code mind you, just a small, but necessary and essential, portion. This should be in effect for the coming summer releases.
For the record I think Ubisoft are being asshat idiots in continuing to ramp up this obscenity of a slap in the face to paying consumers. And I'm not alone, you should see the in-house mailing list flamewars about this (which also means that other employees are freaking greedy douchebags, it's not just the suits.)
This isn't really a crack of the DRM in that it just internalises the server emulation that non-scene groups had already put together so it's not as much hassle to play.
That said, ultimately you can't crack Ubisoft's new DRM any more than you can "crack" World of Warcraft; they are serving parts of the game from their servers and unless you either obtain a copy of that data and emulate the server (which isn't really a crack) you can't get around it. It's not as simple as just bypassing a CD check or setting a function to always return true, they're actually shipping a partial game and as long as their customers will bear it (and given their awful server uptime they're not helping matters) they'll keep doing it.
Once games move into the SAAS realm you can say goodbye to owning *any* part of a game you "buy" as all you'll have is the MMO-esque client application and everything else will be delivered over the wire, doubtless with "Premium" subscriptions available if you want priority access to the game servers to minimize lag & waiting time before you can play.
I wouldn't play Assassin's Creed 2, Command and Conquer 4, or any other game which required a constant internet connection for single player use, regardless of the state of cracks or how low the publisher dropped the price.
Fuck Ubisoft. Fuck EA. They've both lost a paying customer by pulling this bullshit, and I buy a lot of games.
Fuck 'em both.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
if there is any good going to come to society from this, it will be from people like you who stand in deep in the middle of the shit, but do not immerse in it themselves.
Read radical news here
I work for a internet chant service and I can Bit-torrent all day log if I wanted too. I still buy video games that I like because I like to know what I'm getting. As far as DRM is concerned. I don't buy those games, nobody should. I don't' care how good the game is. DRM especially in "single player mode" is not security, it's a threat to my privacy.
EA Sucks ass; Bring Madden Football back to the PC you goat humping SOB's
-DML
Believe it or not after realizing they failed with their internet based DRM they will start to use USB dongles such as this: http://www.elicenser.net/en/
They will say that an internet connection is no longer needed and that you can use the dongle to save your game progress.
Due to the way this dongles work they can be cracked but it takes a huge effort and ammount of time for each different title, so they will have the first year piracy-free.
Do not use the crack and do not play the games with DRM if we want to really see an end to DRM. Even playing the game without buying it can be good publicity that generates sales for those who would complain they are not selling enough. Resisting the temptation to consume products instead of creating our own is the real problem. Instead of consuming things because we feel we need to, if we do not agree with the product we should instead work to create our own. We cannot let self-doubts and temporary failures prevent us from being creative if we are to bring about a new creative renaissance without DRM.
Comparing games to food and drink is just ridiculous. One you can't do without - the other, you think you can't do without because obviously you have more money than sense. Well, some people 'can't live' without heroin either, I'm sure they convince themselves that the drug is more important than food, a roof, friends and family. Good for them, and good for you!
Of course it is like a luxury item that people will stop buying. YOU are addicted to gaming if you think that nobody has the resolve to just unplug from the cycle. I haven't bought or played any games for years - DRM has always been one of my hates because it punishes ME for what everybody else is doing, but primarily because outright bullshitting on the system requirements by every single company made it impossible to judge what to buy, without doing incredibly monotonous research on hardware and benchmark sites which no one should have to be subjected to. Hardly as big or invasive an issue as DRM, but still enough more me to think 'fuck this for a laugh', so just how much worse is DRM in my opinion and in the minds of millions of other people?
I struggle to understand how anyone can be intrested in 15 pages of pie charts and framerates for every single graphics card that has ever been packaged as if it tells you anything more than how much money you owe Nvidia or ATI to keep getting the next-next-gen franchise-ware that EA/Activision/UBI have carefully appropriated unscrupulously from more independent and imaginative companies and proceeded to either bastardise into the recurring sports-themed-shit production line or just senselessly killed off for no other reason that to sit on the rights so that no one else can be a threat to them. Good riddance big gaming companies, you'll be driven into the ground by the same simple minded, overbearing buisness environment that you created to make yourself fat and rich off people's ignorance.
This isn't about price. This is about the freedom of the internet, which is slowly being eroded, and with it our personal freedom. It's easy to take the path of least resistance and simply seek technological circumventions to censorship and other online restrictions. But, while we keep playing with such toys, those that would control knowledge are busy building both the legislative and technological systems that will make this battle that much harder to fight in another decade or so.
d-modding a mistake
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The longer the latency, the worse the user experience. This is because it is a lag of everything, including user interface. You do something, you don't see it happen until later. That is noticeable, and is annoying. Now the problem with latency is that the only real way to combat it is to have the source and destination physically closer to each other. Reason is that light speed is the ultimate limit and while it sound fast, it isn't when talking data latency. Light can orbit the Earth around 8 times per second. Sounds really fast and is, unless you are talking data. To state that another way, that's 125ms. So what that means is that if you want to send data half way around the Earth, you are talking a minimum theoretical latency of above 100ms. Even assuming everything is perfect, that's just how long it would take light in a vacuum to get there and back.
Of course in reality it gets worse. Fiber optic cable has an index of refraction, which means light travels slower in it. It moves at maybe 66% of c or so. Also you don't get to have a nice direct line with fiber. It snakes around mountains, follows railroads, goes down to the bottom of the ocean, etc. It is longer than "as the crow flies." Then of course there's the routers. No matter how good, they are going to add some latency as the process the information and forward it to the right port. Finally there's the fact that an actual data payload takes time itself to transmit.
So you have to have servers distributed near to the clients to maintain a nice low latency and make the system work well. This is a problem for two reasons:
1) Cost. It will cost a hell of a lot more to have servers in data centers all over the world than to try and host them all at one site.
2) Security. This is the biggy. Given that the point of the is copy protection you have a real problem. If everything is at your site, ok you can take measures to do a real good job securing it. However if it is at various ISPs all over the world, that's a problem. All it takes is someone who works at one of those ISPs who also works with a pirate group to get the actual program off your server, since they have physical access that you can't monitor, and then the program is out in the open. Trying to secure against that with hundreds of sites around the world would be impossible.
The gaming industry is not a single entity. Companies like Ubisoft no longer get my money, and those who are better do. If all the big gaming companies started to go the way of Ubisoft, I would just buy games from smaller companies. If I cannot buy a game from a company without getting draconian DRM, I will stick to FOSS games and will probably quit gaming all together.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
Which one works the best for those of us that bought it and hate the DRM?
Had Peerguardian running and forgot about it when I tried launching AC2...oops.
Even Allowing ubi.* did not work entirely, logged in and barfed with "no net, exit
to windows?"...grrr.
Just want to launch and go. C'mon ubi get a clue.
If AC3's DRM is worse (knew AC2 was a matter of time) may have to wait out AC3 and
consider if I should buy or not.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Seriously, if this kind of DRM can get broken so easily anyway, why invest all of the money into making it? Couldn't that money be used for something better? What they should be doing is just going back to classic old CD keys. 90% of the people are still going to be buying the game anyway, you'll always have a minority who pirate and find a way around the system. So why constantly throw money at trying to stop that 10% when older, laxer systems are just as effective AND have the added bonus of not pissing the customer off?
at least by their metrics. The anti-piracy system worked for enough time to cover the period in which the bulk of the sales are made which is what they really care about.
Of course on the downside for them, I *loved* Ruse in beta, but I certainly won't be buying it due to this DRM (even though it's mostly multiplayer over the internet anyway). If it didn't have it I would have pre-ordered it already (I hardly ever pre-order but I really liked the gameplay in the beta). But it's just a game, I can live without it.
They're banking that people like me me are a smaller group than the people who will buy it because they can't pirate it.
And I wouldn't be surprised if they are right.
This has been the obvious anti-piracy answer for years -- we just haven't had the infrastructure to make it happen. Now we've got (or are getting) bandwidth, and between monitoring, filtering, censorship, copyright, and DRM we're not going to have a damn thing to do with it. Middlemen who can't create still won't be denied.
Question: why are there so few high-quality open-source game projects? There are obviously open-source designers, from engine to game design to graphics&sound, but they don't seem to get together and do much -- lots of itty-bitty little projects, some of which are amazing (but still itty-bitty), but very little collaboration. Most of the games that play well (Freeciv, Wesnoth, insert roguelike here) look like septic crap; most of the good graphical content is limited to mods on existing commercial titles (endless Morrowind junk, HL2 mods, etc.) Solid game engines will be burdened with gawdawful sprite and UI work, atrocious modelling, or AM-radio crackly, poorly-balanced sound. Why don't some of the people making gorgeous texture packs and replacement models get together with the people pumping out fun-if-you-ignore-that-it-looks-like-filthy-baboon-arse games and make an AA grade game out of it, instead of trite, nichey stuff and graphic packs that get 622 downloads, like, ever? This is BIG-time true for any PVP game, sports games, and racing games; it'd be doable for many linear content-focused games like platformers, RPGs, and 3rd-person single-player action games, too. Where's the anti-Assasin's Creed project -- a nice big frickin' adventure with 3d graphics that don't look like late-90's PlayStation crap, with mechanics that work well and adhere to SOME conventional control scheme, and reasonable depth without requiring weeks of time hunched over FAQs on how not to die to cockatrice corpses or figure out how to map tertiary portside thruster manifold compression to ctrl-shift-k plus joystick_7?
Am I missing something big? Is there a swath of halfway-decent looking, very-playable games out there? I'm not even demanding a handout; I can seriously do some passable texture and modeling work, especially in terrain, landscaping, and structures, having spent some time doing nature photography. I'd pay back a good game in sweat equity, no problem -- if you MUST HAVE a profit motive from me, I'd like to be able to point prospective employers at a functioning sample of work I contributed to. Where do I sign up?
pirates are just protecting their work from ninja, you all know that
"Calling these rabble revolutionaries is as good as calling rats people"
you could hear this being said in early days of french revolution. look how it turned out.
'movements' do not start with some mouthpiece channel spending funds and beating drums to incite some segment of society against laws that are detrimental to private interests like in u.s.
movements start as a behavior pattern in society. a choice.
piracy is exactly like that, a choice. you wont find the same people stealing cars, despite they are pirating software or games. it is basically a reactionary, instinctive behavior, just like how french were stealing potatoes from king's potato fields during the famine decade of 1780, while all the produce was owned by french aristocrats and food was very expensive. the same people who stole potatoes from those fields wouldnt rob you if they found you in a dark alley.
similarly, current society of this planet doesnt see the reason that they should be forced to pay some certain price because marketing decisions of numerous companies decided that it should be priced as such, and then this price be enforced to public through various laws these corporations purchase in assemblies.
they are 'the market' and they decide what is worth what. definitely NOT the producers of that good/service, coming together and ganging up to arrange prices in a sweet point of profit for them, and then enforcing it. this kind of price fixing happens in every sector without there being a cartel agreement or even any talk in between companies. one does it, the other sees another does it and copies, 3 more copies it and then it becomes the standard of that industry.
example is, manufacturing costs going down to dimes because of manufacturing moving to china, but goods are still being sold from similar prices as before, with HUGE profit margins. one would think that at least one company would come and do serious competition. but, noen is doing it. why ? cartel without agreement.
so, just like in french revolutionary period, or just like how spanish STILL smuggled despite king of spain's private company made it an offense punishable by death, people pirate.
they think that they are paying too much for those goods. something that is that easily reproducable and distributable, shouldnt be that expensive. and here is the result.
the only way to 'combat' piracy is to sell digital goods cheaper. i put the word combat in scare quotes, because you cant fight the people, as in 'we the people'. the people eventually wins.
Read radical news here
those trainers existed because a local engine could be cracked. Tying data to the server changes everything. Even moving a small part of that engine to the server would cause a major problem for the cracker.
Have fun building a trainer for a racing game when the local client is entirely dependent upon the server for the positions of the other cars.
there are even third parties that provide torrent tracking services. They can't tell if you share it with your friends but they can see when millions of people download the game without paying for it.
and when torrents outnumber legit sales by 9:1 which is a common for pc games they can see that the vast majority of people playing their game aren't paying for it.
There is nothing ethical about taking the hard work of others without compensation. Most game programmers work 50-60 hours a week in the months before the game is released. Have some respect for your fellow geek. Buy the console version if you don't like the limitations of the pc version.
towards safe areas like the PS3 which still doesn't have pirated games.
DRM that is tied to hardware and a server connection can be extremely difficult to crack. The more digital revenue is destroyed by pirates the more we move to a future of black boxes where the OS and the content are inseparable. Think app store but with all programs existing on the server and only feeding the user a video stream based on actions.
the pc market is a low priority to them compared to consoles. This is probably a last ditch effort to bring their games to the pc.
as he said they only have to move small amounts of game code to the server. Crackers will either have to get a leak of server code or re-write it themselves. Both are very difficult propositions compared to capturing streamed data.
and all their defenders here who spend their time making endless rationalizations for people that take the work of others without payment.
If the pc didn't have sky high piracy rates then all games would just come on DVDs with securerom at the most. However due to the fact that most pc gamers don't pay for their games the publishers are constantly researching new ways to provide content that is difficult to pirate. For an open platform like the pc that means tying data to a server.
and not a very well designed one. Wait until they start moving game code server side.
I am pretty sure that if I was able to ask every person who posted in this thread directly and in person, they would agree with the following statements.
Piracy will not prevent a top quality game become a failure. People still pay for good games.
Piracy is not the reason crappy games fail. Crappy games just wont be bought anyway.
I suspect that the real effects of piracy are the following.
First, it while it wont prevent something like Starcraft 2 from being a runaway hit, it will very possibly take a game that would be 7 / 10 which might have been modestly profitable, or at least break even, and turn it into a financial failure. This is bad simply because a failed game can kill a smaller game developer, and having more developers able to make a profit will mean more good games.
The other thing that Piracy will do is that it will entirely negate the benefit of any heavy marketing campaign. A slick commercial and splashy billboard / magazine ads will not convince you to buy a game. They will convince you to try it. If you can try the game without buying it, you probably will.
So where the publishers of games are getting hurt the most is on mid quality titles that are heavily marketed. In many cases, the marketing budget of a title will at least equal or exceed the cost of making it. This is especially true for licensed games.
My take on this is that game developers do have a legitimate right to expect a fair chance to make a profit on the game, but the companies should probably look into something other then the typical DRM strategies to protect their IP rights.
What many who pirate games seem to not understand is that you are not going to teach a multi-million dollar corporation any sort of lesson by announcing you will illegally download and use a product because you disagree with the DRM policies. A broken DRM tech only means that they will try another approach.
END COMMUNICATION
Where I come from, we willingly pay money for things we like even given the opportunity to get it for free. Because we want the creators to make a good living and make more of it! And they don't fuck us like bitches in return! I highly recommend anyone concerned with this just turn around, walk away, and spend your energy, and money, on doing something positive for someone who's not trying to fuck you like a bitch. Cause I dont like to get fucked by anyone except the Mrs! There's no point fighting or getting fucked by pricks in suits. There will always be pricks in suits and even if you beat these pricks there will be more pricks lining up to replace them. Until everyone stops playing their little games anyway.
Good.
You are apparently discounting the many THOUSANDS of hours of ACTUAL hard work that were put into MAKING the game... a team of hundreds of people working full-time for YEARS. I'd just like to extend a friendly, personal Fuck You to all pirates out there.
Its depressing that people work so hard to steal the things we make rather than just pay us a fair price for them or go without. We depend on getting paid to pay our mortgages, you know. Piracy really is the main reason that PC gaming is slowly dying -- its well known to all the publishers that its hard to make money on PC games and that 10:1 or 20:1 ratios of pirates to paying customers are common. (We can measure this from hits to our servers, its pretty depressing to see millions of people connecting to our servers on day one for a game that has only sold 100,000 copies at that time).
People like SkidRow and the "community" that collected these database values and made the server emulator, are part of the problem, NOT the solution. Slashdot is so pro-piracy these days that its embarassing to even read the posts here.
Piracy rates of 90% or even 95% do occur for hotly anticipated AAA releases. We've seen this first-hand.
But nobody is claiming that ALL of those pirates will rush out and buy a copy if they can't steal it because of the DRM, obviously that is ridiculous.
Notice that if even a small fraction (like 5 to 10%) of the pirates who are prevented from pirating, are willing to go out and buy it instead, then the game can sell substantially more copies at retail.
Assume for a moment a 50% piracy rate (which is much lower than the actual rate for a game like Assassin's Creed 2 would be, I assure you). If you can convert 10% of those pirates into paying customers, you've just increased sales by 20%! Of course some fraction of your customers will also be off-put by the DRM, but that fraction is hopefully smaller than 20%. (In practice its quite small, and most of them seem to live on sites like Slashdot.)
Anyway, I don't personally think that this restrictive DRM is a good idea at all, but you should consider it as a last-ditch effort by Ubisoft to salvage the market for PC games (i.e. try to convince people to actually pay for them) before they give up on it entirely.
These people value skill and care about giving credit for it. They do not care about stealing a product while expressly leaving the credit where it's due. Their value system is contiguous and non-contradictory, hence not hypocritical.
This has been discussed ad nauseam, but like the guts of the Earth, it emerges as a volcano here or an earthquake there. I have worked as a programmer. I can feel the pain of the companies who see the product of their hard work being used for free because some people think it's too expensive (some people wouldn't pay even a cent, but that's pricing). I can understand what they do: Anti-piracing measures. DRM is not new in a sense: Key disks, parallel port keys, code cards and other software protection methods have been with us almost as long as the PC. But that is not the answer. Software protection is a nuisance for legitimate users and does not deter non-legitimate users. We have seen it even in company-critical software, like accounting or payroll; nevermind in games! What is the solution, if you ask me? I lay no claim to the universal solution but for many software products, I even dare say most software, pricing is the key. Some people does, but the lower the price point, the less problems. I'm not willing to pay $50 or more for a game. Or $500 for a single-employee business accounting software. But I would happily pay (or wouldn't bother piracing if you will) something that costs say $9.99 and comes with Right Thing Satisfaction Guarantee (TM). Maybe the pricing has been set so early in the spreadsheet that the suits won't change it no matter what. Or there are clever marketing guys that say that is the sweet spot. I don't know. I'd just bet a beer against them that they make more money at a lower price point. Same thing, incidentally, with music - but that's another story and must be told at some other time.
...I get to buy Assassin's Creed 2.
I own only games I can play offline and without activation - if it means I have to crack the retail version, so be it! After all, I legally bought the game, and I want to still be able to play it whenever I feel the urge, even if that's ten years from now.
Just for the record, I don't own any games I haven't bought in a retail box (I like to show them off).
Non-supporter of Online Activation and any other draconian DRM