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Ubisoft's Draconian DRM Patched?
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that Ubisoft's controversial DRM scheme launched last year that required players to have a permanent connection to the Internet has been patched to no longer stop the game when connectivity drops, though an Internet connection is still required when starting the game."
DRM shouldn't get in the way of enjoying the game for legal owners. I hated companies that made my old 1541 disk drive hammer itself into oblivion with their crap copy protection. I'd end up finding a cracked copy that would load in 15 seconds instead of 4 and a half minutes. I don't mind paying for something useful but I hate buying crippled shit. I really don't play games anymore but if I did I wouldn't want anything that forced me to put up with a bunch on needless BS.
"When it works" isn't what bothers me. What bothers me is this disclaimer at the bottom of the steam page:
> A PERMANENT HIGH SPEED INTERNET CONNECTION AND CREATION OF A UBISOFT ACCOUNT ARE REQUIRED TO PLAY THIS VIDEO GAME AT ALL TIMES AND TO UNLOCK EXCLUSIVE CONTENT. SUCH CONTENT MAY ONLY BE UNLOCKED ONE SINGLE TIME WITH A UNIQUE KEY. YOU MUST BE AT LEAST 13 TO CREATE A UBISOFT ACCOUNT WITHOUT PARENTAL CONSENT. UBISOFT MAY CANCEL ACCESS TO ONLINE FEATURES UPON A 30-DAY PRIOR NOTICE PUBLISHED AT http://assassinscreed.com/ ... which to me says, "we can nuke your access to the game at any point in time, provided we give you 30 days notice on a website you're never going to check."
I own AC1, but I don't own AC2 or HAWX 2 for this very reason.
DRM is likely here to stay, at least to some degree, but this frightens the ever living crap out of me. Why would I throw money at a game where they can cut off access to it at any point in time for ALL of their customers, just because they don't want to pay the bill on those servers anymore?
Crackers get the better stuff while legal users getting banned.
The guy who thought this up is a dope.
"Hey, let's make our product shittier and harder to use, I bet that will make us some money!"
I hope Ubisoft fires the moron who first pitched this idea to them over a year ago. I haven't purchased an Ubisoft game since they announced this last February.
Why would I throw money at a game where they can cut off access to it at any point in time for ALL of their customers, just because they don't want to pay the bill on those servers anymore?
So don't. The more of us who refuse to buy games which allow them to cut off users at any time, the less games will be released with such draconian DRM.
Personally I now only buy games that are DRM-free, or games which only use Steam for DRM as it can be run in offline mode.
or games which only use Steam for DRM
Steam cultist remind me of Apple fanboys. "Oh but it's Steam, it's GOOD DRM!" Hilarious! It's still DRM that can disable your games at any time of their chosing.
Reminds me of a UserFriendly.org comic from a few years ago...went something like this:
"Someone is force-feeding you 5 bricks while kneeing you in the crotch. Suddenly, they decide to feed you only FOUR bricks. Do you THANK them?!?"
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
Personally, I only make an exception for steam when it's a ridiculous price, or I'm only interested in the data files.
Personally I don't remember the last time I paid more than $9.99 for any game, be it from Steam, Gog or retail. The market is so competitive these days there's really no need to pay more than that.
That's funny, they conclude with
"Well as a publisher I’d have to ask myself why bother releasing a game for the PC at all? Why don’t I just give it away for free?"
After stating a minute earlier that the PC version made nine and a half million euros in sales. Given it's on an xbox already, the art and level design is all done, etc, etc. Yes why not not take 9 million euros that's on the table, that'd be rational.
As long as the people still buy the games from Ubisoft, they will not drop any DRM. My guess is that it was calculated (i.e. x% are pirats, y% are pissed, z% will still buy) and it makes more profit with the DRM then without. A lot of people just don't care until the servers are stopped or changed for a new game. In that case it will be just a press release "We are very very sorry but we have to terminate the activation service. Look at the EULA it's perfectly legal and you can do shit about it. So please just forgot this game and buy our new games now with more DRM because the pirates are forcing us to protect our IP.".
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Whether Steam is or can be cracked is irrelevant, Steam is helping to push us farther and farther down the path of us "leasing" our games instead of buying them. As it stands now, when I "buy" a Steam game I really have no idea whether I'll be able to play the game five years from now or even a month from now when the game makes its mandatory check in with their servers. All I have to go on is the good will of some faceless corporate entity and the assurances of Steam fans that this could never happen or that there will be some wonderful work around that will be less convenient than just being able to install my game and play like I should be able to.
The worst part is, it's as easy pirating a game today as it was 10 years ago when all that was on games was Safedisc. Really brings home how ridiculous all of these inconvenient measures are, right?
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When they shipped a single product with this, they went off my vendor list.
Forever.
There are way too many companies making games for me to deal with one like that. Same deal as with Belkin and their router which randomly redirected sessions to an advertisement. You screw up that blatantly or obviously, even once, and you're off the vendor list unless you are a genuine monopoly on something I really need.
Since Ubisoft can never be a monopoly on much of anything, they're gone.
Note that this is not an attempt to make them behave better. That would be "off the vendor list until you fix this". That is a recipe for companies like Amazon, which patent troll and spam, then back off a little bit until the complaints die down. I don't want to deal with companies I have to watch constantly because they've learned to just go ahead and do evil stuff and see who complains.
For utterly replaceable companies, the policy is "you're gone, bye". If they eventually die, great! Everyone wins. If they merely stop selling me stuff, because I don't buy from them, at least I win.
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When EA starts to take away all of Ubisoft's sales. Now maybe I'm wrong, maybe Ubisoft's sales won't be impacted, however the fact that they patched it implies that they have. Perhaps their new games have not sold as well on the PC as they wanted. They figured with their new DRM they'd have far more sales, and in fact have had significantly less. If that's the case, and people keep boycotting it, it may go away eventually.
After all EA has backed WAY off on their PC DRM and they seem to be doing quite well. They seem to have found a balance between checking for pirated copies but that doesn't interfere with legit uses at all.
I can speak only for myself, but I won't buy Ubisoft's new games. Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers 7 were on my list to buy, but I have not sue to the DRM. I didn't pirate them instead, I've just given them a miss. There are plenty of good games out there, I have games I've not yet even installed that I own, so I do not lack for options. If others do like myself, well it'll continue to hurt Ubisoft and in fact have the opposite effect of what they want. Their DRM will cost them more money to implement (as it is fairly complicated) but they'll get less sales as a result.
I'll meet companies half way. I can accept some DRM. Steamworks is ok, for example. However it can't interfere with my ability to play and enjoy the game. Requiring a net connection to play counts. Part of the reason to have single player games is to have something to play when my net connection dies (which let's not kid ourselves still happens even with good ones) or when I'm traveling.
I miss two things about disc-and-box games: Being able to resell them, and the box. I do prefer my first-sale doctrines un-eroded, and I'm sitting in front of a bookshelf of old MicroProse games.
I liked a suggestion I saw recently on how to reclaim your first sale rights on Steam games. Simply create a new Steam account each time you buy a game from them (yay for unlimited GMail addresses). Then if you get tired of a game and want to resell it, sell the account it is tied to. Steam ToS says that you can't do that? Well, too bad for Steam. If corporations go to convoluted lengths to take away rights, then the customers can return the favor and go to whatever lengths are needed to reclaim those rights.
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I'll add another "legal user gets screwed" anecdote to yours showing why this crap sucks: Older Games. My older games play just fine on Windows 7 HP X64, hell thanks to MSFT's backwards compatibility they work without a hitch. What DOESN'T work is the &*^%*^&%*&%^* ring 0 DRM garbage! If you are lucky all you get is classic "insert disc" even though the disc IS inserted, and if you are not? Well lets just say I hope you have a dual boot or a very recent backup, because the ring 0 crap will turn your OS into a crashing unstable nightmare.
WARNING: Many of the older SecuROM and Starforce ring 0 "drivers" WILL NOT UNINSTALL ON X64! which means if it makes your OS an unstable mess you better be able to dual boot to rip it out from another OS, or be ready to restore from backup. Their "uninstallers" hosted on their websites DO NOT WORK ON X64, yet their garbage ring 0 DRM crap will happily try to jam its X86 buggy poo code right into your X64 kernel. What fun! How they are allowed to get away with that kind of behavior I don't know, because it IS malware, no different than Sony's rootkit or any other nasty your would pick up from the web. Can you uninstall it? Nope, just like malware. Does it cause instability? Yep, again just like malware. Finally do you have to have detailed knowledge of its inner workings just to remove it, such as which reg keys to toss or which hidden files are buried deep in system folders? Yep, strike three and you're out. If it walks like a duck and quacks it is a fricking duck folks.
That is why I pretty much shop exclusively at Good Old Games now. I like to be able to replay a game I liked, not just shitcan it because I have a new OS or the company doesn't "support" it anymore. With GOG there is NO DRM, NO phoning home, No limits to how many machines I can install it to that I own, NO limits to how many times I can redownload it and NO *&^%$*&$*& "Game Client" or other BS I have to run in the background just to use what I fricking paid for. If you haven't tried them they are having a massive holiday sale with nearly 300 games on sale, many of them half off their already cheap prices. They have something for everyone, shooters, RPGs, flight sims (including IL2 with all the expansions built in), puzzlers, platformers, you name it. So support the company that actually treats you like a customer and not a criminal, buy from GOG. This is a classic example where we can "vote with our dollars" and show companies that placing their games on GOG is a wise move. Oh and all games have been tested on X64 as well as X86 so no troubles! It all "just works" OOTB, but if you do run into a glitch their forums are top notch. Enjoy some DRM free gaming today!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.