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."

Comments

Re:Skidrow didn't do the hard work

[jeremyp]

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.

One group of pirates being ripped off by another group of pirates is not an issue, it's funny.

The next step (an insider's view)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re:The next step (an insider's view)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Please leak them.

Re:There WILL be unbreakable DRM, heres how:

[Attila Dimedici]

Ever wonder why we have to haggle on prices? Because motherfuckers are greedy.

There is something to what you say, of course the necessary corollary is that they are also stupid. I run into this quite a bit. A company that charges a "fair" markup on its costs will do better in the long run than a company that haggles to get every dime. It is why haggling went away for a long time in America (and elsewhere, but I am less familiar with the economics of this sort elsewhere). Quaker merchants in the colonial era sold their merchandise for what they believed to be a fair markup over their cost. Everybody knew that when you went to a Quaker merchant, you paid the same amount as the next guy no matter how good of a haggler you were. They also knew that the Quaker's markup was not excessive. Additionally, the Quaker merchants response to people who wanted to haggle was, "That's my price, if you don't want to pay it, go to somebody else." This meant that the merchants who haggled only got the customers who were good hagglers (eventually, as people who weren't good hagglers realized they were paying more than from the Quaker merchants) and therefore could not make as much money as the Quakers (or other non-Quakers who followed the same model).