Thanks to DRM, Some Ubisoft Games Won't Work Next Week

hypnosec writes "Several of Ubisoft's biggest titles won't be playable as of next week thanks to a server move by the publisher and the restrictive DRM that was used in their development. This isn't just multiplayer either. Because Ubisoft thought it would be a smart plan to use always on DRM for even the single player portion of games like Assassin's Creed, even the single player portion of that title won't be playable during the server move. Some of the other games affected by this move will be Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7. The Mac games that will be broken during this period are Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell Conviction and The Settlers. This move was announced this week as part of a community letter, with Ubisoft describing how the data servers for many of the publisher's online services would be migrated from third party facilities to a new location starting on the 7th February. The publisher didn't reveal how long the transfer would take."

Comments

I Must Be Missing Something Here

[eldavojohn]

1. Install software at new site.
2. Test software at new site.
3. Lock writes and edits to old database.
4. Dump old database.
5. Migrate old database to new site and populate.
6. Switch DNS or whatever directs traffic to point at new site.

That should be a matter of minutes and since I would guess this is largely just a reading and verifying service, there shouldn't even be an interruption for game validation. There are other strategies to employ if that database dump takes a long time but nothing that should require an unknown downtime.

Uh, I do this stuff with two-bit websites that I don't even make a profit on. What the hell is money monger Ubisoft doing?

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[mcavic]

That would require duplicate hardware at the new site. It's hard to convince people to shell out, even when their pockets are deep.

The real question is why you need DRM on a game (or anything else) that's been purchased outright. And a related question, why do you need an Internet connection to play a single player game?

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[Drinking Bleach]

Not hiring you, apparently. In seriousness, it is a very good question. I've done similar things not just for sites that don't make any money, but for sites that just sink more money than they ever have hope to make. Ubisoft is just showing a prime example of their incompetence here.

oh and since it's probably oblig: Guess who this move affects the least? the pirates.

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[Moryath]

Are you kidding?

This is the basic problem with DRM. It treats every customer as if they were a criminal.

Pirated game: always works.
Non-pirated game: customers suffer through shit like this.

And the companies wonder why things like no-CD cracks have been rampant basically forever? I mean fuck, we wound up hand-rewriting the stupid "black text on dark fucking red" sheets from games like Zak McCracken in the old days, and it wasn't a question of piracy, it was just so we didn't have to stand under a 300W floodlight to read the goddamn sheet!

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[Kenja]

The whole point is that they dont think they have customers. They have thieves who have been thwarted.

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[Firehed]

The procedure is reasonably accurate. Although to further minimize downtime, you dump your pre-move database while things are still running, keep the remote site up with replication, and don't write-lock it until you've switched your DNS (you've been dropping the TTL over the last couple days leading up to the move, right?) and put a static "site moving, refresh in a minute" page up on the old site. Obviously too simple for something of Facebook scale, but it worked quite well for a site with a handful of servers.

Of course, Ubi's setup for DRM servers will likely be wildly different than a bunch of web servers and a couple of DBs. I imagine a bunch of open connections with almost no data flowing over them

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[alen]

this involves spending money to support games that have already been sold

the smart way is to turn off the servers
load into truck
move to new DC
unload
rack them
turn on and change configs

sure people can't play the game but the revenue is ours already. not like they can return it

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[ae1294]

It doesn't matter what mechanism Unisoft use.
The technology is available today to make the impact of this change be no longer than it takes BGP to converge on the internet if they move the IP addresses with them... or around the duration of a TTL expiry for a DNS record.

There is NO reason why it has to be any longer ..

No there is a reason. UBISOFT DOESN'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS ABOUT THEIR CUSTOMERS.

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[Technician]

MS is guilty of this dumb move early on. Back when optical mice where the new item, I bought a MS optical mouse for a system I was building on my coffee table. In the software installation, the optical mouse driver hung up the install looking for an Internet connection to register the software. I was like WTF and returned the mouse as defective and unable to function on a stand alone system.

Not everyone who plays stand alone games are connected with an always on connection. Many locations are still on dial up. Multiple machines mean many are not connected while waiting for the phone line. Tying up the phone line for hours is not an option either.

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[Hatta]

I'm not a gamer, but I was wondering why some clever geek hasn't just fired up snort to see what their server's saying to the game, then built a 'bot that interacted in the same way with it locally.

The same thing that prevents some clever geek from just firing up snort to see what your bank's server is saying to your browser, and building a bot that interacted with it in the same way locally.

I have no idea if they've actually done it properly, but public key cryptography can be used to prevent exactly the attack you described.

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[idontgno]

And that's a critical point. Support is not a revenue center. If they could get away with it, a large fraction of business would wash its hands and walk away.

If their own revenues (like, e-commerce servers) were at risk during this transition, you can be for damn sure that there would be a live warm cutover of a full parallel installation at the new site, with dual operations and a slow de-constitution plan at the old site for fallback purposes.

But a DRM server? Meh. I suppose we should feel grateful they're bothering to stand the things back up at all.

Which is why I don't buy single-player software which requires a live phone-home. Even Steam is pretty close to verboten, though not necessarily (since the games I'm thinking of can run without Steam authentication, at least for a while).

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[Jason Levine]

It's not whether you have it or don't have it, but whether you are willing to put down money for it and whether the money you are willing to put down is what the seller is asking. Suppose you were willing to purchase Photoshop for $100 but Adobe won't sell it to you for less than $500. If you go out and pirate it, your action is not a lost sale. Absent any pirated copies of Photoshop, you wouldn't have plunked down $500 for it. Perhaps you'd have gone with Paint Shop Pro for $100 or GIMP for free, but you wouldn't have given Adobe your money. (In an odd way, your pirating could be a "lost sale" for one of Adobe's competitors, but only in the most abstract sense.) However, if you would have been willing to pay Adobe's price for Photoshop, but decided to save that cash and pirate the software instead, then your actions would validly be a lost sale.

The problem is that many content owners see pirates and think "these are all lost sales." In reality, some are lost sales and some aren't. Furthermore, some use piracy as a "trial version." If they like the pirated version, they'll pay for the non-pirated version in order to give money to the creator of the product. For these people, piracy actually increases purchases because they might not have bought the item had they not had the "trial version" via piracy.

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[Hatta]

You're right. But if you're going to modify the game executable it makes more sense to remove the protection entirely, than it does to reverse engineer the cryptography and reimplement the authentication server.

Re:I Must Be Missing Something Here

[AmiMoJo]

This really harms brick and mortar game shops too. I can't just go in and buy a game I like the look of any more, I have to research it online first to see if the DRM will fuck up my PC or make it too much of a hassle to bother with. And that usually means reading Amazon reviews, and since I'm there already now I might as well just order it from them too.

You get what you pay for

[argStyopa]

Complaints about this will NEVER MATTER until it impacts the bottom line.

STOP BUYING UBI GAMES.

Unless and until publishers see a recognizable impact on their sales that they can attribute to repressive DRM, they won't stop.

And remember, a lot of these guys BELIEVE the bullshit line about every pirated game is a "lost sale" so the negative impact of DRM would have to be a pretty massive number.

Re:You get what you pay for

[RogueyWon]

This is what I did - across all platforms for games whose PC release contains this particular DRM. Actually, it's been surprisingly easy. Despite consuming games at a voracious pace (see my various journal posts etc), it's been quite striking how few of the Ubisoft franchises I actually care about. There have been times I've been vaguely irritated to be missing the Assassin's Creed sequels, which do look interesting (better than the first one, which I played on PS3 before the DRM plans were known), but even there... there's no shortage of alternatives.

I did buy one game by accident which included an "always online" DRM requirement - Command & Conquer 4. It wasn't made particularly clear when you bought the thing and, with it not being an Ubisoft game, I assumed it wouldn't be pulling a stunt like that. Ultimately, though, the best form of copy protection that C&C4 had was the fact that it was so utterly shit that nobody would want to play it (and I say that as somebody who liked C&C3).

I just...

[trunicated]

There's just so much wrong with this... it's amazing...

• They're locking users out of game they have paid for
• They're unable to move a set of servers without preventing downtime for customer facing attributes
• They're completely oblivious to the reasons why these are bad things

It just leaves me completely flabbergasted. I can't imagine this entire process coming to this point without someone, somewhere in the decision process saying "Who gives a shit what they think? Just do whatever's cheapest right now"

Total FAIL

[NeutronCowboy]

Failure in implementation of DRM, failure in how to build the DR portion of the datacenter, failure on how to do the transition, failure on how to provide some measure of compensation for intentionally breaking your customers' games.

Hello Ubisoft. Meet Sony. They'll show you around my shitlist.

Reward the pirates

[MetalliQaZ]

Since their DRM is ineffective at actually stopping pirates, here we have the perfect example of "defective by design". Anybody with a DRM-cracked pirated version will not have any disruption. Nice job, Ubi.

I get heated over this kind of thing every time I pop in a DVD from Netflix. They send you discs without any special features that are loaded with up to 15 minutes of unskippable advertisements and previews. If I had just downloaded the move, I could jump right in. I am willing to pay, but I see nothing but disincentives to do so! Fools.

Far Cry 3

[headkase]

I really want to buy Far Cry 3. Chances are however I will not be. Because Ubisoft is no doubt going to put their "always on" DRM on it. This article is the exact reason that that is unacceptable to me. So, Ubisoft can go about all they want championing how they're "putting it to those evil pirates" (roll-eyes) but in the mean-time they are losing out on me, yes, the person who wants the game but isn't going to submit to their idiocy. So, I lose because: no executive with a testosterone problem is going to back-off and admit he has shit for brains. And the cycle continues.

And as Gabe Newell so succinctly put it: Piracy is a Service Problem. So what's Ubisoft doing? Creating more value in the pirated versions. Way to go guys, golf-clap.

DRM works

[sakdoctor]

First I stopped buying.
Then I stopped pirating.
Then I stopped caring.

"Delivering better uptime"?

[daveewart]

You can "deliver better uptime" by not using DRM in the first place. Voila, 100% 'uptime' with no infrastructure required.

You wouldn't steal...

[SJHillman]

You wouldn't buy a new car that you had to call the dealer for permission every time you wanted to go for a drive.

You wouldn't buy a handbag that you had to ask the clerk to open for you every time you wanted to take money out.

You wouldn't buy a TV if you had to wait for permission from Time Warner just to watch the commercials.

So why buy DRM?

Brought to you by the Media Consumer Association of America.

Re:You wouldn't steal...

[mhajicek]

And they wonder why I won't buy Diablo III.

Re:Thanks to DRM, I stole your FIRST POST

[durrr]

I hope someone ambushes the convoy and destroys their servers. The backlash from "lol sorry your DRM games are broken forever" would be the most hilarious ever in the history of DRM.

Re:Tempest in a teacup

[ledow]

So what you're saying is that Ubisoft don't already have a hot-backup to these database that is customer- and business-critical and needs to be up 24/7? They don't have a testing regime with a live copy of the dataset to test against? They couldn't have performed the migration piecemeal? They couldn't have done the migration in the background while the main servers take the brunt of the traffic and then - when and only when it was tested and working - started the background database serving queries instead?

Don't talk shit. This is a large system - millions of customers, always on, etc.etc. It's cost millions of dollars. If you need to take it down for more than a day (especially for PLANNED maintenance), it means you didn't implement it properly, don't test it properly, didn't even spec it properly, don't manage it properly and don't care about your customers. This is why redundant systems exist - for exactly these sorts of systems.

Do maintenance by all means, but taking it OFFLINE to do so with no backup system? That's just shoddy whether you're migrating a handful of MySQL instances or the back end of a large bank.

Re:They need it before you can start playing

[dissy]

I don't get why people who normally hate DRM see Steam as acceptable.

That one is easy!
People who hate DRM do not buy Steam games. At all.

Most people do not hate DRM specifically, what they hate is not being able to play a game they paid money for. If DRM is the thing stopping you from playing it, then DRM is the cause of the problem. If it is another thing stopping you, then the other thing is the cause of the problem.
In this sense, Steam has never been a problem, as this doesn't happen.

Will that remain so for all of eternity? I can't say, and don't know. But they have so far given me no reason to think otherwise.
If they ever do change to more restrictive DRM, I will simply krack what games I do have and never make another purchase from them again.
They are fully aware of this, and don't want to lose me and others like me as a customer, so they have plenty of reason NOT to make such a change, and exactly zero reason to do so.

I'll even give you my latest example. Skyrim, the all new hotness of RPGs. I bought mine off Steam.

I can either run the SkyrimLauncher.exe that the shortcut points to (As does the Steam submenu item) and access the steam community while playing.
OR
I can launch TESV.exe in the same directory, and bypass everything steam related.

In fact I have mods installed, one of which is a scripting extender (SKSE for those curious), which is a wrapper around TESV.exe.
I do not have default-allow rules for any executable in that folder, my firewall asks me each time. It has never done this in three months. In fact a week from tomorrow will be exactly three months to the day. There is no checking in, there is no verification, no Internet needed.

Obviously I needed connectivity to download the thing, and it was activated and registered with them then for updates.
It won't be connecting to Steam again until the next major 1.4 patch is released, and only then because I want the update.

Other than multiplayer only games, which obviously must be online to even use, Steam does not prevent you from running games you buy.
And that is what most of us hate. Most don't hate DRM because it is DRM. We hate DRM when it prevents us from using what we purchased.

Ubisoft is a different ballpark all together, as this article shows.
I don't mind activating or registering a game after downloading it. I'm clearly already online, so it's not a problem. If the company doesn't bug me after the purchase, then there is no problem.

Some people are far extreams. Either they hate all DRM with a passion and avoid all DRM.. Or they could care less and buy whatever has the most pretty graphic on the box.
But I believe most people are more in the middle, and would agree with me on this.