I wonder if this is Ubisoft's way of killing off its PC gaming arm (and possibly having a go at killing off PC gaming in general).
I mean, lets look at the platforms. The XBox 360, PS3 and Wii are all single hardware platforms, yes there are small differences like the existence or size of a hard disk, but one Xbox 360 is (to game developers) pretty much the same as another, same with PS3 and Wii. If you look at PC's you have DirextX 9, 10 and 11, Windows XP, Vista and 7 and nVidia and ATI video cards just to start. Thats 14 different possible combinations with just those three options. Developing for and supporting (though you wonder if any games company actually invests in customer support) that kind of target hardware has got to be more expensive than console targets. What better way to get out of the market than saying its rife with pirated games, very few people are buying our games any more, its not worth the investment.
Of course with DRM this vile you'll incur more support costs for people who bought the game and have problems with DRM, you'll drive people to buy the game and crack it (exposing honest people to the seedy underworld of the game pirates) and even cause people who would have bought it just to download a copy. Honest people will be branded and thieves because of bugs in the DRM (I'm looking at you Microsoft) and Ubisoft will either go bust, pull out of the PC market or retire older buggy versions of their DRM (or maybe just disable a game because its too old) and in the process removing access to the games for people who have paid money for them while the pirates play on. I wouldn't bet on Assassins Creed II being playable in 3 years without a crack.
I will admit I was a naysayer with Steam but I've grown to like that platform now. In general it doesn't get in the way, you can spot games that have additional DRM and avoid them (and DLC that sneakily adds DRM, I'm looking at you Borderlands), you can still play your games while offline and Valve have shown they can run the service reliably (apart from those pesky release days where everything slows to a crawl). But the difference between Steam and Ubisoft DRM is simply this, Stream has a huge benefit. I can buy a game and any time in the future download the latest version of that game and patches can be applied automatically, no more searching around for the latest version. Where is the benefit to the end user of this DRM?
Its not often I can say there is a game company worse than EA, Ubisoft have claimed that title.
I was looking forward to Assasins Creed II, but I’m voting with my money and not buying it or any other game with this DRM in it. Bye Bye Ubisoft.
No, were not willing to pay for it (generally), but when suppliers that brings in Gray Imports gets slammed against the wall by the manufacturers of said products, you can't get them any more at decent prices and your stuck with whatever stupid rate the OM decides on.
This isn't what the market will tolerate, this is what the market is being gouged for.
Not quite how it works here in the UK. Most operators have quota limited services and a few have "unlimited" services limited by an Fair Usage Policy. Some quota services will warn you as you approach your quota so you know that this is happening, some don't. Most have a little leeway so you can go slightly over quota without a problem and some allow you to buy extra quota at a fixed price per MB or GB. No quota based services would cut you off at 90% of your quota, if they did Oftel (the UK telecommunications regulator) would have something to say, though they are pretty much toothless these days.
The "Unlimited" services annoy me but as long as the adverts say they are subject to an FUP, Oftel will allow them to use the "Unlimited" claim. The service I'm currently on claims to be unlimited at ADSL2 speeds, subject to an FUP. The FUP states that if they think I'm using too much bandwidth over any consecutive two month period they can warm me to back off. If I fail to reduce my usage within seven days of the email they will throttle the connection for a month (first "offence" as it were). The really annoying bit is the FUP doesn't give a figure for what is considered too much, in the words of an email sent to a user recently and posted on adslguide's forums:
We do not cap our service or set a defined usage limit, just simply asking all our customers to be fair and considerate in the way in which they use the service. Which basically means they can decide any level they like is excessive without warning. Having said that, the collective experience of users generally show that 500GB per month is the warning level though I know some people who use will in excess of that.
Its not just Canada, here in the UK we (and I'd guess most non-USA countries) don't get access to TV shows or movies either. So while Jobs is boasting in keynotes about the number of tv episodes or movies available at the iTunes store we are wondering if we will ever see them and if Jobs realizes theres a whole world outside of the US.
Traffic master does not (or at least didn't the last time I looked into it) recognise individual cars, instead their systems are only interesting in vehicle flow (ie everythings stopped on the motorway, best avoid). You can certainly do that without recognising cars.
Frankly they dont have to make it admissable in court, all they have to do is refuse to pay up when you make a claim and theres very little you can do if they refuse.
A workmate of mine recently made a claim on his insurance, but because his possetions in total (not just the nicked ones) were valued at twice the value of his policy, his insurance company only paid out half the worth of the items stolen. There was absolutley nothing he acould do about it.
As it is, I'm sure that this will not be popular woth policy holders, there is no way in hell anyone is wiring me up to a lie detector machine. The bank might find that they loose more money in canceled policies than they save in detecting fraud.
I don't think the promotion of Terminal Server alone would be enough to kill of the PC, for example I doubt many people would want to have to buy a TS server just so they can write letters etc at home, and certainly without 100% coverage of flat rate always on internet connections, connecting to a central server all the time isn't going to be popular, and have you ever tried playing a game on it?
The thing here is that by pushing TS in this way isn't stopping a user from choosing and alternative, but by creating a system where open source software cannot gain access to common media formats, MS is effectively saying buy or software and hardware or never play and MP3 or AVI etc on you PC again.
And while they may not gain a monopoly over other server OS's, you can bet that licensing to other desktop and embedded OS other than their own will be very low down the list or priorities.
Oh, and is that competitor in whichever market gaining to much dominance? Easy, revoke their Palladium license and watch them disappear. Do you think MS, who has already been convicted of using unfair business practices to gain and maintain a monopoly in the computing world would be able to resist that kind of power?
Its not that I dislike MS (which I do), I just don't trust them either.
I think we have to be careful not to assume that this scheme by Microsoft wont work simply because of market forces alone. Infact it may just be those forces that cause it to be a success. You can bet the MPAA and RIAA will sign on to this one, they want to protect there digital rights so having a system which just does not allow the end user to copy a music file (even if it is within fair use rights) will be a big plus to them.
Then what? You have a PC which you can either use to gain (limited) access to audio and visual materials distributed by an official source, or you can install and Open Source OS, such as Linux and *BSD etc, on it and never see any content again, even if you want to pay for it. I think its a fair bet that most people would find the latter option unacceptable, and as MS has the only desktop OS that supports this system then what are they going to do?
As for server, I'm sure MS can easily make sure that this system can get into server OS other than its own (think Solaris, AIX etc) and probably make a profit out of it in the process, and still make sure that Linux never comes close to getting support for it. This also would alow them to say that there not in a monopoly because other server OS's have support for it.
This has to be the senario that MS is looking for to kill off the Open Source competition, and actually get away with it.
Watch out people, the next big "inovation" from Microsoft could just kill off the general purpose personal computer for ever.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if this is Ubisoft's way of killing off its PC gaming arm (and possibly having a go at killing off PC gaming in general).
I mean, lets look at the platforms. The XBox 360, PS3 and Wii are all single hardware platforms, yes there are small differences like the existence or size of a hard disk, but one Xbox 360 is (to game developers) pretty much the same as another, same with PS3 and Wii. If you look at PC's you have DirextX 9, 10 and 11, Windows XP, Vista and 7 and nVidia and ATI video cards just to start. Thats 14 different possible combinations with just those three options. Developing for and supporting (though you wonder if any games company actually invests in customer support) that kind of target hardware has got to be more expensive than console targets. What better way to get out of the market than saying its rife with pirated games, very few people are buying our games any more, its not worth the investment.
Of course with DRM this vile you'll incur more support costs for people who bought the game and have problems with DRM, you'll drive people to buy the game and crack it (exposing honest people to the seedy underworld of the game pirates) and even cause people who would have bought it just to download a copy. Honest people will be branded and thieves because of bugs in the DRM (I'm looking at you Microsoft) and Ubisoft will either go bust, pull out of the PC market or retire older buggy versions of their DRM (or maybe just disable a game because its too old) and in the process removing access to the games for people who have paid money for them while the pirates play on. I wouldn't bet on Assassins Creed II being playable in 3 years without a crack.
I will admit I was a naysayer with Steam but I've grown to like that platform now. In general it doesn't get in the way, you can spot games that have additional DRM and avoid them (and DLC that sneakily adds DRM, I'm looking at you Borderlands), you can still play your games while offline and Valve have shown they can run the service reliably (apart from those pesky release days where everything slows to a crawl). But the difference between Steam and Ubisoft DRM is simply this, Stream has a huge benefit. I can buy a game and any time in the future download the latest version of that game and patches can be applied automatically, no more searching around for the latest version. Where is the benefit to the end user of this DRM?
Its not often I can say there is a game company worse than EA, Ubisoft have claimed that title.
I was looking forward to Assasins Creed II, but I’m voting with my money and not buying it or any other game with this DRM in it. Bye Bye Ubisoft.
No, were not willing to pay for it (generally), but when suppliers that brings in Gray Imports gets slammed against the wall by the manufacturers of said products, you can't get them any more at decent prices and your stuck with whatever stupid rate the OM decides on.
This isn't what the market will tolerate, this is what the market is being gouged for.
I think this would prove the point.
The "Unlimited" services annoy me but as long as the adverts say they are subject to an FUP, Oftel will allow them to use the "Unlimited" claim. The service I'm currently on claims to be unlimited at ADSL2 speeds, subject to an FUP. The FUP states that if they think I'm using too much bandwidth over any consecutive two month period they can warm me to back off. If I fail to reduce my usage within seven days of the email they will throttle the connection for a month (first "offence" as it were). The really annoying bit is the FUP doesn't give a figure for what is considered too much, in the words of an email sent to a user recently and posted on adslguide's forums: We do not cap our service or set a defined usage limit, just simply asking all our customers to be fair and considerate in the way in which they use the service. Which basically means they can decide any level they like is excessive without warning. Having said that, the collective experience of users generally show that 500GB per month is the warning level though I know some people who use will in excess of that.
But will they be able to skip the adverts?
Its not just Canada, here in the UK we (and I'd guess most non-USA countries) don't get access to TV shows or movies either. So while Jobs is boasting in keynotes about the number of tv episodes or movies available at the iTunes store we are wondering if we will ever see them and if Jobs realizes theres a whole world outside of the US.
Traffic master does not (or at least didn't the last time I looked into it) recognise individual cars, instead their systems are only interesting in vehicle flow (ie everythings stopped on the motorway, best avoid). You can certainly do that without recognising cars.
Try the report for the last 24 hours, not the big yellow blocks.
x ?Period=RH24
http://scoreboard.keynote.com/scoreboard/Main.asp
..unlike the books.
Frankly they dont have to make it admissable in court, all they have to do is refuse to pay up when you make a claim and theres very little you can do if they refuse.
A workmate of mine recently made a claim on his insurance, but because his possetions in total (not just the nicked ones) were valued at twice the value of his policy, his insurance company only paid out half the worth of the items stolen. There was absolutley nothing he acould do about it.
As it is, I'm sure that this will not be popular woth policy holders, there is no way in hell anyone is wiring me up to a lie detector machine. The bank might find that they loose more money in canceled policies than they save in detecting fraud.
I don't think the promotion of Terminal Server alone would be enough to kill of the PC, for example I doubt many people would want to have to buy a TS server just so they can write letters etc at home, and certainly without 100% coverage of flat rate always on internet connections, connecting to a central server all the time isn't going to be popular, and have you ever tried playing a game on it?
The thing here is that by pushing TS in this way isn't stopping a user from choosing and alternative, but by creating a system where open source software cannot gain access to common media formats, MS is effectively saying buy or software and hardware or never play and MP3 or AVI etc on you PC again.
And while they may not gain a monopoly over other server OS's, you can bet that licensing to other desktop and embedded OS other than their own will be very low down the list or priorities.
Oh, and is that competitor in whichever market gaining to much dominance? Easy, revoke their Palladium license and watch them disappear. Do you think MS, who has already been convicted of using unfair business practices to gain and maintain a monopoly in the computing world would be able to resist that kind of power?
Its not that I dislike MS (which I do), I just don't trust them either.
I think we have to be careful not to assume that this scheme by Microsoft wont work simply because of market forces alone. Infact it may just be those forces that cause it to be a success. You can bet the MPAA and RIAA will sign on to this one, they want to protect there digital rights so having a system which just does not allow the end user to copy a music file (even if it is within fair use rights) will be a big plus to them.
Then what? You have a PC which you can either use to gain (limited) access to audio and visual materials distributed by an official source, or you can install and Open Source OS, such as Linux and *BSD etc, on it and never see any content again, even if you want to pay for it. I think its a fair bet that most people would find the latter option unacceptable, and as MS has the only desktop OS that supports this system then what are they going to do?
As for server, I'm sure MS can easily make sure that this system can get into server OS other than its own (think Solaris, AIX etc) and probably make a profit out of it in the process, and still make sure that Linux never comes close to getting support for it. This also would alow them to say that there not in a monopoly because other server OS's have support for it.
This has to be the senario that MS is looking for to kill off the Open Source competition, and actually get away with it.
Watch out people, the next big "inovation" from Microsoft could just kill off the general purpose personal computer for ever.