Ubisoft putting in new piracy measures in its games

[sscadmin]

Well the gaming companies are trying to crack down on piracy and I think in the end they will loose honest customers, because the pirate/hackers will find a way around it eventually. Not often you have a company that is willing to cut its own sales with stuff like this :)Oh you have to read this....
Quote:
If you're sick of heavy-handed anti-piracy measures creeping their way into your games, get ready for a real shock. Beginning next month, PC games from top publisher Ubisoft will require a constant, uninterrupted Internet connection to play -- regardless of whether or not you're using any online functions.Debuting on upcoming PC releases Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, the new technology doesn't just require an initial online check-in like many current PC games. Without a live Internet link, you won't even be able to start the game, and if your connection drops while you're playing for any reason, you'll be kicked out of the game and potentially lose your progress. Dial-up users, needless to say, need not apply.PC Gamer's Tom Francis investigated, and wasn't pleased with his findings."If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers'. The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen - all my progress since it last autosaved was lost," he said in a blog posting.That's not the worst of it, either. If Ubisoft's servers go down or are unreachable, every single player of the game will be dumped out and won't be able to carry on playing until the problem is resolved.It's not the first time a major publisher has resorted to extreme measures in an attempt to prevent piracy. EA's 2008 release Spore came with anti-copying measures that seemed draconian at the time: it checked in with an EA server every ten days and limited the number of times you could install the game. A huge consumer backlash followed, and EA removed the offending tech -- but Spore still ended up as the year's most pirated game.Sadly, harsh anti-piracy measures like Ubisoft's inevitably end up hurting legitimate customers rather than the pirates at which they're aimed. Illegally downloaded versions of games generally have copy-protection methods like this removed entirely.Will you be buying games with Ubisoft's new anti-piracy tech? Let us know in the comments.
Any thoughts?Links to articles on the topic:http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/new-copy-protection-technology-outrages-gamers/1389931http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/02/18/0719256/Ubisofts-Constant-Net-Connection-DRM-Confirmed?art_pos=1

[Bouitaz]

It seems like they want to alienate their customers, and by doing so, lose a huge potential income.Which, ironically enough, is what they want to prevent.It's just sad.I wonder what will happen first, their demise, or their surrender.Unless they somehow succeed in fooling people into giving in to their draconian measures.I would not be surprised by that either, sadly.

[sscadmin]

I bet you this protection scheme will be patched once they get their quarterly statement and they see that hardly anyone buys their games. One of the articles had a good point, what about the laptop gamer? Generally your wireless connection isn't free everywhere or you have no access at all. So now a gamer cannot play their favorite game.Personally the gaming companies should all just charge a flat fee. People pay per month to download and play any game they want in their catalog.

[SolCommand]

How much you wanna bet the hackers will find a work-around for this "feature" in a couple of days ? And once that happens even honest customers will use this "patch" for their game cause I for one don't like to allow ANYTHING from my pc access the internet unless it HAS to, example Antivirus Updates .... all the remaining software gets blocked.

[Pinback]

Piracy might be killing PC games,but the the games industry is doing a pretty good job as well.I won't be buying any Ubisoft PC games,maybe get the console versions.Then again that might be the wholeidea behind theses DRM.

[Geraldine]

I had a nightmare of a time trying to get the Steam version of Bioshock 2 to work because of the stupid DRM not "allowing" me access to the save games on XP. In the end I gave up and re-downloaded the game onto Vista were it worked, but with a drop in the frame rate. Ubisoft will soon learn (as 2K is doing now with Bioshock) that this is not the way to go. They will only hurt their honest paying customers, anyway the pirates will have the game hacked on the day of release, that much is certain. As for Ubisoft, I think this is a publicity stunt and this DRM of theirs wont last a month. If they don't withdraw it, they might as well stop making PC games. I wouldn't buy them, that's for sure with that DRM in place, which is a shame because I enjoyed Assassin's Creed 1. :(Oh, in case anyone is wondering what DRM means, it stands for Digital Rights Management. Basically it's software code built intro a game which attempts to verify the game is a legally purchased copy. Popular methods used to include disk checks, now (annoyingly) when a game is first installed, online checks are becoming more common. What Ubisoft are doing is performing this check constantly. Vote with your wallets (or purse in my case) people. These companies will soon get the message.

[Mogymog]

Ubisoft is an idiotic company anyway. I dont own any of their games, legal or otherwise, and I've only played a few of their. Their coding and QA is worth then Bethseda's.. and Hell, Ubisoft are so lame, they actually have in the past, released products buggy for the sole purpose of getting the 'pirates' to fix it, then claiming the fix as their own. So if they wanna alienate, well good job!

[SolCommand]

I sense someone's not a Ubisoft fan They do have some cool games and a few more to come (assassin's creed for example) but that doesn't change the fact that this "feature" SUCKS.

[Bouitaz]

Geraldine wrote:
Digital Rights Management
A much more apt name is Digital Restrictions Management. ,)

[Pinback]

I think two thing might happen with this.1 Ubisoft will quietly drop it after there next quarterly report.2 Ubisoft will announced that they will not be doing any more PC games because of poor sales.Just another thought,how long before we see this sort of DRM on the consoles.

[sscadmin]

Well on the PS3 no one has cracked its security so there is no piracy currently on the PS3. BluRay is a lot more secure media and since you can get a drive for like $50 now I would suspect game devs to start using this very soon. And sense BR discs hole from 25-50gb it isn't really feasible to download that big of a file for a game.

[Geraldine]

PINBACK wrote:
Just another thought,how long before we see this sort of DRM on the consoles.
Probably after the PC gaming market finally dies, then the pirates will move over en-mass to those platforms, even the PS3. If a DRM can be made, it can be broken. That's been a constant fact throughout gaming history and it's also been a constant fact, that its the honest buying public who suffer because of it. My opinion is, that if you don't want to pay for your games, then look for an open source alternative

[SolCommand]

The PS3 has been hacked a wile ago, it's just the those that did it haven't shared the techniques with the rest of the world.

[Pinback]

Can't see blue ray being much of an anti piracy device,as I can remember back in the early ninetieswhen they made the move from 3.5 inch disk to CD.The games industry confidently claimedthat no one would ever be able to copy 650mb. Unfortunatly I think we going to see a lot more ofthis sort of DRM.

[volrider]

I remember hearing, shortly after either DVD or Bluray came out, I forget which, that people had cracked that format in like 3 to 5 weeks! If it was DVD, I suspect Bluray is cracked by now.

[Bullwinkle]

The irony about DRM is that it drives legitimate customers to the bittorrent scene. It is easier and faster to download a torrent than it is to record a TV show on a Tivo or DVR. The same is true for software. When I buy a game, the very first thing that I do is to break the copy protection so that I don't have to have wait for the DVD check every time I run it. In spite of a tremendous amount of disinformation from the RIAA (and other so-called "legitimate" sources with dishonest intentions), downloading torrents is not at all illegal or even immoral. It has become a necessary form of self-defense for customers. Licensing, of course, is another issue. But the best way to handle licensing is to make it attractive to the customer. Most people will gladly buy a license if it gives them good value. The few who never buy licenses are not potential customers anyway. For example, how many paperback books are sold each year? Paperbacks are easy to copy... but nobody bothers to copy them because it is cheaper and easier to just buy the book than it is to bootleg it. It is hard to imagine that I would ever purchase a copy-protected blu-ray disc. But I can easily imagine buying an unprotected blu-ray rather than consuming 50 GB of bandwidth, disk space, and my time to copy it.The only real, effective, form of "protection" that media developers will ever have is to provide superior value to their customers with the original media.

[sscadmin]

I really enjoy my Netflix subscription and have live streaming and it would be almost perfect if I could get some local channels. I would have no need for cable tv whatsoever. Netflix provides a great deal of content for my $17 a month. I get the bluray rentals and I get access to their entire streaming library. I hardly ever use a torrent to get any media unless it is a movie that I cannot get via netflix or its real old. But torrents do have their advantages like that pic above states you wait most times 5mins just to get to the menu screen . I think the tv/movie companies just need to stream all their content and just have people pay a monthly fee. If the fee was low enough it would reduce piracy and people would pay for it. People will pay for something that is good. But if your jerking their chain there going to find a way to circumvent you.I even think .99 per episode for a tv show is too expensive for the masses. But if they put it to .25 per episode (increased price for higher quality) then more and more would purchase it.

[Bullwinkle]

Darkone wrote:
I really enjoy my Netflix subscription ... Netflix provides a great deal of content for my $17 a month... People will pay for something that is good. But if your jerking their chain there going to find a way to circumvent you.
Yes; excellent example.I know that I said "torrents" but you said it better, D1. I really meant "alternative distribution": Netflix, Hulu, P2P, torrents, and bootleg dealers are common examples.Eventually people will figure out how to share their Tivo/DVR/MediaCenter files. That will add another source.
Darkone wrote:
I even think .99 per episode for a tv show is too expensive for the masses. But if they put it to .25 per episode (increased price for higher quality) then more and more would purchase it.
Right. Netflix exists only because the purchase price for DVDs is prohibitive for a large part of the market. Obviously there are enough people willing to pay $15 bucks or more for a DVD that it is a good business for some stores, but the number of those stores is shrinking rapidly. It was not all that long ago that HMV had huge, multi-story, buildings dedicated to selling media. Now there are a couple of isles at Best Buy and Wal-Mart while Blockbuster, Videosmith, HMV, Strawberries, and many other chains are extinct.

[Stardreamer]

Bouitaz said:

Quote:
A much more apt name is Digital Restrictions Management
DRM = Don't Re-sell Me.

[sscadmin]

That's the next huge issue for game companies is the used game market. Games are so flashy but lack content personally so they don't have enough re-playability to warrant a full price purchase.