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Ubisoft Considers Always-Connected DRM "A Success"
Ubisoft made headlines a couple days ago for bringing back their restrictive DRM for an upcoming racing game. Speaking with PCGamer in response to the overwhelmingly negative feedback to this news, a Ubisoft representative said the company has seen "a clear reduction in piracy of our titles which required a persistent online connection," adding, "from that point of view the requirement is a success." One wonders how they measured this, and how they compare it to sales lost due to the bad press it's generated.
I spend much less on games now
I hope you succeed all the way to bankruptcy
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
While most software development companies (Microsoft as the biggest example) had long ago given up copy-protection for software, game development companies seemed to be a strange exception to the rule.
But it's no anomaly: As games have drifted more toward the category of movies and away from the category of software, it's only natural that they've begun to see things the MAFIAA way.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
but perhaps they should spend more time and energy on making games that are worth paying for, and less time and energy on making people regret paying for their games?
Or an overall lack of interest? Ubisoft hasn't been putting much good out for a while now.
Ubisoft has created the perfect DRM system.
Combine horrible DRM with horrible gameplay and no one will pirate it. Of course no one will play it either, but hey, it's the perfect DRM system.
I almost feel as though I should be thanking them for all the time and money they are saving me.
Most game companies (Ubisoft and EA for certain, Activision and the rest highly likely) have API's that have the app phone home and send metrics / telemetry data back about the usage stats. This is even done in games that have no multi-player component. Some of this is done for determining how much ad revenue is generated from ingame advertisements. Some of it is just marketing and research data. (ie: If only 2% of users actually use the mode that took 15% of the development resources to create, chances are that the mode will be dropped or at least not developed any further. If 90% of users die in the room with 13 snipers, they may patch the game to remove some snipers). I suspect that some portion of this data includes unique user id / cd keys.
I would expect that titles with a great deal of piracy are somehow detected by this. If they know that they have actually sold X units through retail, and they have X+Y connections, then the number of pirated instances is Y.
Lets say a game without this DRM has 150 000 users, and that 75000 users are legit. If they are taking a beating in the press, but the number of legit users has increased, the system is a success. Ubisoft is happier to have 80 000 legit users in a pool of 90 000 total users, even if they drove off 46% of the total user base to do it.
Losing a user means nothing except in subscription based games. Losing a sale means a whole lot more.
END COMMUNICATION
I can play HL2 (or any other Steam game) for the PC for up to a month offline after initially activating it.
I can't play Assassin's Creed 2 or Driver: San Francisco for the PC offline for even 1 second.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
...take that crack and blow it out their authentication?
When Ubisoft makes it so a pirated version of their game provides better functionality and convenience than their own product, it is safe to say that they are NOT GETTING IT.
Gee, Ubisoft, I can give you money and be stuck with crippling and inconvenient DRM, or for free I can download a nice clean cracked copy that will play at once conveniently whenever and wherever I want it to. Decisions, decisions.
I blame MBAs. There is something in their sense of entitlement and smug assurance they know the best no matter what the facts may dictate that leads them to live out The Peter Principle and rise to levels of authority where they have no competence. I'll betcha there's some MBA or group of MBAs telling Ubisoft to stand firm on the DRM.
In the meantime, Valve will take my money without the crazy bullshit DRM and I can play my games even if the Internet is down. If I want to try an Ubisoft game, I'll know where to go.
Note how NOTHING is said about sales, only that piracy has decreased. Less piracy does not equal more sales, in fact it could have been less piracy AND less sales (or just average sales).
The most important data was missing :P
... is: never admit failure. Just talk about what a wonderful success whatever you're being asked about has been. If the product really is a failure, keep talking about its success until the people who make the decisions get around to canceling it. After that, if you're asked about it, dismiss it as yesterday's news and change the subject to what wonderful successes your other products are.
The Mac Cube, for instance, was a major stinkburger. Did Apple ever say anything to that effect publicly? Nope. They were always bright and sunny about how well the Cube was doing, until the day they killed it. At which point inquiries about the failure of the Cube were answered with glittering stories of how well their other Macs were selling.
In other words -- what a company's spokesperson says about the success or failure of something like a DRM system is meaningless. They will always say it is a great success. The only way to learn the truth is to watch whether the company puts more effort and money behind it, or less.
Read my blog.
Only a month? I've seen computers go for ~9 months w/o an internet connection still able to play steam games offline. Technically, I think you can go as long as you want, Steam just has a minor issue where it deauthenticates for some reason (incidentally, I believe you can backup the user authorization files and reload them if this happens.)
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
I know so many people who used to pirate music before music became DRM-free. Then Apple got through to the studios, and people still pirated because they didn't want to deal with iTunes. Finally, when Amazon started offering mp3s and no crappy software to download, 8/11 of the people I still keep in touch with switched. There were two big changes: they'd all grown up and could now afford music, and the music was easy to buy, download, and use. No messing with bloated programs, no DRM restricting where you could play the songs, no problems.
I feel largely the same way about movies and TV. Right now, I use Netflix and Hulu with smatterings of Redbox to get my video media, as well as OTA signals. I'd buy digital downloads of movies and TV shows from Amazon in a heartbeat if I could play them anywhere, any time, without an Internet connection. I've been tempted many times to buy them anyway, however because they won't play on my iPad or offline laptop, I won't. I could buy from Apple, but those videos won't play on my laptop at all. So I won't buy there, either.
I genuinely want to give these people my money. They just don't (yet) offer a product I'm willing to pay for. So instead, I use free or cheap options that almost certainly don't help them.
Assuming, of course that none of the pirate strategies involved short-circuiting the phone-home feature altogether, or communicating with a dummy server. Otherwise they can't see the pirate instances at all. Which would render their estimates on the optimistic side, at best.
The thing to remember is that some people at Ubisoft has spent a hell of a lot of Ubi's money on this strategy. These guys are seriously invested in DRM being successful. Or at least appearing to be successful. It stands to reason they're going to try and spin it as a success.
The interesting thing to note however is that they're telling us how piracy rates have dropped due to DRM, rather than how sales have risen for DRM'd titles. If sales had so risen, they'd be fools not to shout it from the rooftops.
Since they're not doing that, I find myself wondering if some poor sod has been given one last chance to salvage his or her career by showing that always-on DRM isn't just the expensive, ineffective sales killer it appears to be.
Well, except that when you pollute your brand identity enough, all lost users are lost sales. Because if people start to think "Ubisoft" == "can't play my game because the servers are always down" == "waste of money", then they don't buy any more Ubisoft games, and it's not just one lost sale, but all the future sales they might have made to that user. Apply that across a significant percentage of the brand's userbase, and the bottom line starts to hurt.
But nevertheless, I take your point. And yet what I'm not hearing from Ubi is "sales are rising despite DRM".
Interesting.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!