By Alec Meer on February 19th, 2010 at 4:34 pm.
Time to crack open the lid of this frightening Pandora’s box again… PC Gamer have arranged a follow-up interview with Ubisoft about their monstrous constant-connection DRM system. You know, the one that nearly 800 RPS readers have said understandably upset things about. While it clarifies and confirms how the horrid thing works, frankly it’s unclear why Ubisoft agreed to do the interview, given they pointedly fail to address gamers’ concerns in it. Instead, they repeatedly confirm the various everyday situations in which the game you’ve paid for will be denied to you, roundly proving that yes, it is as bad as everyone fears. But it’s okay, because they say they love PC gaming. Well, maybe they do, but they’ve got a bloody funny way of showing it.
I’ve been boring everyone I’ve spoken to about this nasty mess with this little observation, but it seems to me one of the (many) essential flaws with Ubisoft’s plan is that it’s adding online requirement to something that isn’t intrinsically an online product. We don’t have this problem with an MMO, with a browser game such as EA’S Tiger Woods Online project, or even to some extent (the offline mode can’t be trusted) with Steam, because they are innately products of the internet. We expect them to require us to be online, and moreover the fact they are online is why we like them.
They make a virtue of it, and they are easy to obtain, play and update because of it. Ubisoft, by contrast, are simply employing the internet as shackles around the wrists of something that isn’t otherwise of the internet. The sustained online check has been built as an ugly addition, not a natural spine, to these games. If Assassin’s Creed 2 was a streaming game, if there were visible leaderboards or player-made content throughout it (I’m just shouting totally random examples there), this wouldn’t seem so disproportionate and unnecessary a system. And no, the cloud saving system isn’t anything like justification enough for the game to be constantly talking to a server. That’s not a convenience anyone realistically needs.
Personally (i.e. my take is certainly not the RPS Group Consensus), I can at least understand why publishers are flailing for a response to what they blame for declining brick and mortar PC game sales. A developer is interested in making the best game they can; a publisher is not. Big publishers do not care about games, no matter how breezy their slogans or exclamation mark-packed their press releases. They only care about the bottom line that games can earn; that is, after all, their raison d’etre. That’s fair enough. Right now, in PC gaming, that bottom line is endangered, and so they’re trying to protect it. We’re foolish to expect anything else; appealing to principle or sympathy is all but pointless. Calling them names is pointless. But we do have to stop them crossing a certain line, and to do so we need to prove that expensive investment in DRM is not increasing their profits.
Which makes this a fascinating, potentially landmark event in gaming history. In this case, Ubisoft have not simply been excessive . They’ve made a mistake, an error of judgement (or so the interview’s resounding failure to address how unrealistic it is to expect 100% reliable net connections suggests) which steps over a fundamental line of convenience that prior DRM heavy-handedness hasn’t come anywhere near.
This isn’t only going to upset the people who turn a funny colour whenever DRM is mentioned, those admirably principled few who are, alas, easily dismissed by businessmen because they’re just a few thousand guys shouting at the internet. It’s going to affect *anyone* from that much larger world beyond ours who buys the game and tries to play it on the move, has a flaky ISP or sub-optimal wifi. It’s going to be returned en masse, retailers are going to be complained to, angry middle-aged men are going to ring up magazines and vent…
At least, that’s what should happen, and that’s where you merry band of heroes come in. The key is not to purely be furious, and it’s not simply even to vow you’ll never buy these games (especially if you weren’t going to anyway), but rather to ensure that people are fully aware of the restrictions this system means.
That energy you’re intending to spend on leaving a comment about how much you despise Ubisoft for this? Don’t waste it here, squandered on hate that goes nowhere but your keyboard. Go spend it on calmly explaining what it really means to someone who might unwittingly buy one of these games. Let those potential customers who don’t instantly pick up online scandal, or who aren’t web- or tech-savvy enough to know how to comb through the surface screaming and find the meat of the argument know why this system will prevent them from enjoying something they’ve paid for. That’s what this is about.
19/02/2010 at 16:49 jsutcliffe says:
At your behest, I just talked an ear off the poor freelancer guy next to me about the new DRM. I don’t think he’s a gamer, but he was polite about it. One person: edumacated.
19/02/2010 at 16:51 Lucky Main Street says:
This image is about movies, but the logic is the same: http://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg. DRM is part of a feedback loop that leads to more piracy.
19/02/2010 at 17:17 Demon Beaver says:
Nice picture!
19/02/2010 at 17:32 jonfitt says:
That picture fits well with their supposed benefits:
The first: you don’t need a disc. The second: that you can install the game on as many PCs as you like, as many times as you like. And the third: the automatic uploading of savegames to Ubisoft’s servers.
I hate game pirates as much as the next rational adult, but it doesn’t take a genius to spot which two of those are not really customer benefits so much as removing pre-existing customer hating.
19/02/2010 at 18:02 hoff says:
I’ll just leave this here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/b3els/the_man_represents_pirates_the_car_represents/
19/02/2010 at 18:42 Bhazor says:
Do I hate pirates? No.
Do I hate self righteous pirates who use minor inconveniences, like animated menus or having to fast forward, to legitimise what they do? Hell yes.
This is an issue because it could actually stop you using the product. But that picture just makes me want to kick in Cory Doctorow’s window.
19/02/2010 at 19:18 jsutcliffe says:
@bhazor
If you want help breaking Doctorow’s window, let me know. I’d be happy to help.
19/02/2010 at 20:09 Nalano says:
You paid for that inconvenience.
That’s insult piled on top of injury.
You paid for it. With your money!
Like you gave a guy a fiver to scuff your shoes.
How does that make you feel?
19/02/2010 at 23:29 DJ Phantoon says:
Like Modern Warfare 2: If you are gonna boycott it, don’t pirate it. Ignore it. I know, I know, this means self control. But honestly? There’s better games out.
I regularly buy a legitimate copy then get the pirated version, because the pirated version is better. Don’t support Ubisoft in any way. Don’t play the game. As said before (was it Kieron?), word of mouth will make people want to buy those games.
There isn’t a such thing as consumer rights, obviously. Or Ubisoft wouldn’t be able to do this. And don’t let your friends play it either. Have some dignity. Friends don’t let friends play Ubisoft games.
20/02/2010 at 05:51 bill says:
Nice picture. Someone should email it to ubisoft.
I don’t think it justifies piracy, but it does point out the idiocy of the publisher’s approach.
I remember going to watch the first Narnia movie at the cinema. I had to sit through almost 30 minutes of adverts and trailers because it was a highly anticipated release. At least half of those adverts were Narnia-tie-ins, so i’d already seen most of the good parts before the movie started.
At the end of the adverts we got a very obnoxious and loud “don’t pirate!!” advert that honestly gave me a headache. then more trailers. Then we got the trailer which started with a small video and went “some people will be watching this on a small screen with people walking infront of the camera, while some will watch it on the BIG SCREEN!” just as lots of people were walking infront of me. At that point I seriously WANTED to be one of those people watching it on the small screen at home.
Then the movie sucked anyway.
And I won’t even start on the DVD series of 24 that had full volume unskippable anti-piracy ads before EVERY episode!
19/02/2010 at 16:52 Adz says:
See, what they completely fail to realise is that people WANT to be able to play offline, and will find ways to do it. Just like every other DRM, it will be broken by pirates and cracks will be released.
Genuine paying customers will look for ways to play offline and will come across cracks for the game. Sure, getting one or two cracks for games they’ve bought is (arguably) fair enough, but once you open the door to piracy, principles don’t provide much resistance against the ease of getting an entire game for free.
Ubisoft hasn’t just opened the door. They’ve knocked it down with a steamroller.
19/02/2010 at 16:55 Ian says:
DRM doesn’t get me frothing at the mouth like many. Indeed, much of it doesn’t bother me at all, but this one is clearly brainstupid and I shall be telling folks about it.
19/02/2010 at 17:49 Riaktion says:
I mirror this stand point… no if only all my friends hadn’t migrated away from the PC to consoles already… sigh…
19/02/2010 at 16:56 int says:
As someone with a really unstable Internet connection, this saddens me. I liked AC, repetitive but fun.
I doubt I will buy the sequel.
19/02/2010 at 16:57 Mr_Day says:
It is begining to look like the anti piracy methods Ubisoft are employing will have a knock on effect when it comes to their game being reviewed – if I were a journalist reviewing AC2, and dodgy internet connection kept me from enjoying the game, you can bet your pirate hat I’d mention it in the text.
Between “We were promised a Leonardo DaVinci flying contraption to pootle in, and not just for one mission” and “My main problem would be that this isn’t Thief. A problem, I might add, most games suffer from. Except Thief, obviously.”*
Bioshock 2 has, what, 3 different DRM systems in place when you play (according to Penny Arcade) but I didn’t notice them, so I really don’t care. When it becomes either obtrusive to the game, or as it sounds here detrimental to the experience, they should probably take a look at what they are doing and consider if it is worth it. Let’s face it, a lot of PC owners probably already own AC2 on a console of some description, which will surely account for a measure of the low PC sales.
* Again, here, I am just being a dick.
19/02/2010 at 17:01 Lucky Main Street says:
Not to mention that things like this have the potential to CREATE pirates, because people will need to find workarounds for using the product in the manner they want (i.e. offline). If people need to scour the net to find cracks for products they’ve legitimately purchased, they’ll find those websites that offer cracks and games that don’t need these kind of workarounds.
19/02/2010 at 17:05 Mr_Day says:
*puts hand up*
I get nocd cracks for games NOT because I pirate them, but because I like the convenience of not having to dig out a disc for a game which doesn’t really need the disc in to be played.
I sure as hell would, in the event of wanting an ubisoft game, look for the workaround to this internet only gameplay, if at any point it became a noticeable hindrance.
20/02/2010 at 05:55 bill says:
so you’re saying DRM is a gateway drug to Piracy?
19/02/2010 at 17:02 HermitUK says:
My favourite part of the PCG Interview is their attempt to dodge the question about patching out DRM should the servers ever go offline for good. “That’s written into the goal of the overall plan of the thing” may be the greatest bit of fluffy, question dodging nonsense ever.
19/02/2010 at 17:15 Lambchops says:
I’m totally going to use that line in the future to try to justify myself – what could possibly go wrong?
19/02/2010 at 17:03 tapanister says:
Holy shit, I’ve never seen a respected journalist on a respected gaming blog actually call for the boycott of a game. Well said, Meer.
19/02/2010 at 17:06 Lambchops says:
I concur with Ian here. I’ve not found myself inconvenienced by DRM in the past but this is clearly a ridiculously heavy handed effort.
It’s almost the kind of thing you could imagine ending up on watchdog when what will be desribed as “an angry parent” buys something for their kid that doesn’t work 100% of the time.
19/02/2010 at 17:06 Alexander says:
As much as I would like to remain positive I get this nauseating feeling that no matter what action the angry internet crowds take privately this will simply be a matter of the uneducated masses not noticing their rectal enlargement procedure touted as the next big win, leaving us no other options than to bite our lip or take a stance ourselves.
This issue seriously brings me into a perpetual state of not so happy; the only short term solution would be for this to bomb virally into the real world in order to have any practical consequences.
19/02/2010 at 17:09 the wiseass says:
Two things:
1. I do not wish game publishers to monitor my gaming habits, how many hours I play a certain game, what games I play and how I play them. My privacy is sacrosanct, goddammit!
2. More and more PC games that I’m playing are coming from the indie corner. At least these guys don’t screw with you, their games have no intrusive DRM and usually feature a greater creative value. I admit, there may be some rough edges sometimes and they may be a little short, but most of them are perfectly fine for my daily gaming fix.
19/02/2010 at 17:09 Flimgoblin says:
Assuming no massive turn-around from Ubisoft, probably need to up the ‘Children eaten by DRM today’ counter a bit.
I guess they’re out there pushing the boundaries: what level of absurd inconvenience will gamers put up with before they just stop buying the games: CD check – Not too much rage, limited installs – some rage, online check – a bit more rage, online over the shoulder nanny – *snap*.
Maybe they’re playing the %ages, maybe only 20% of their customers will realise about the DRM and be sensible enough to give the game a wide berth, and they’re hoping that they’ll manage to prevent enough pirates that the 1/1000 of them* that decide to buy the game when unable to get a free copy will translate to more than that 20%… or perhaps they’ve just believed their own rhetoric that every pirate copy prevented is a sale regained…
* estimate as per 2dBoy’s experience with World of Goo. Though some empirical research on file sharing for mp3s estimated approxmiately 1/5000.
19/02/2010 at 17:10 wat says:
This was never about piracy – Remember, pirates just install a crack and be done with it.
This was always about complete control over the distribution chain, and about ruining what little was left of the used PC games market.
20/02/2010 at 00:32 destroy.all.monsters says:
This a thousand times this. How the typical knee jerk anti-pirate (who are in effect actually anti-consumer) folks continue to miss this very fact is either a testimony to their myopia or their insistence that capitalism is a form of religion.
20/02/2010 at 05:46 Nalano says:
Indeed.
To repost what I wrote on Shamus Young’s article on this topic:
These publishers are so invested in making sure pirates don’t win that they’ve lost all sight of making sure customers do. This scorched-earth policy underlies how much they miss the point: They’re exploiting the customers and the customers react by exploiting them back.
The message was heard loud and clear for years: “Console gamers are more gullible a market than you. You will accept our crappy console ports and you will buy them six months late and you will pay full price for inefficient code. We do this because you have supported us and made us the big companies we are.”
How RIAA of them. Sounds like Metallica’s infamous argument.
The fanboys that accept the official word and blame this sort of action on pirates are not working in their own self-interest – they’re practically unwitting collaborators.
The ‘principled’ customers who say that we should all shoot ourselves in the foot by simply not partaking at all are fooling nobody, least of all themselves, that such will make a difference in the publishers’ eyes.
It’s not a moral issue. It’s an economic one. Ubisoft is poisoning the well it drinks from. Just because they as a business wrap themselves in the flag of moral righteousness does not mean they’re not really bad at business.
19/02/2010 at 17:15 Llama says:
I just thought of something. Anyone with a botnet can now prevent every PC gamer in the world from playing AC2. If someone would do a denial of service attack on the ubi servers the game would be unplayable for everyone.
And that’s just if someone wants to be a dick about it. Just think of steam for instance. That collapses under its own weight every time a big game launch comes around. What if the ubi server cant handle the legitimate traffic.
DOESNT UBISOFT SEE THIS IS MADNESS
19/02/2010 at 18:19 dadioflex says:
Brilliant point.
I almost hope someone decides to be a dick and does it.
19/02/2010 at 21:26 Blackberries says:
I’ve said previously that I’m wondering what the launch for this game will be like. Haven’t games which require online activation had trouble with systems being overwhelmed at launch in the past? Will Assassin’s Creed 2 be unplayable for the first week after it’s released?
19/02/2010 at 17:17 Jad says:
On the “not of the internet” observation, I wrote up an analogy yesterday that I’d like to share. I do intend to use this around more mainstream gamers if possible:
If you are listening to music on the radio, you need a radio signal. If you go underground and lose your radio signal, you cannot continue listening to that music. This makes sense.
If you are listening to your own music on your iPod, you do not need a radio signal. If Apple required you to have a radio signal to listen to your iPod, people would be angry, because that would make no sense.
If you are watching a movie on HBO, you need cable TV service. If you lose your cable TV service, you cannot continue watching that movie. This make sense.
If you are watching a movie on a DVD, you do not need cable TV service. If the DVD manufacturer required you to have a cable TV service to watch a DVD, people would be angry, because that would make no sense.
If you are playing an online multiplayer game like WoW, you need a working internet connection. If you lose your internet connection, you cannot continue playing that game. This makes sense.
If you are playing a singleplayer game like Assassin’s Creed 2, you should not need an internet connection. Since Ubisoft is requiring you to have an internet connection to play AC2, people are angry, because that makes no sense.
19/02/2010 at 17:25 John Peat says:
Thumbs up for Jad there :)
19/02/2010 at 18:03 arqueturus says:
Unless Ubisoft consider use of their software a service which is probably what the EULA will state.
It’s their choice how they interpret their own goods.
I’m not going to be buying it because I don’t consider them a service though.
19/02/2010 at 17:18 Dean says:
Perhaps, don’t boycott it. Buy it, then return it. Far more effective.
Still, this DRM is so draconion you have to assume Ubisoft are not such complete idiots that it will at least *work*. If enough stuff is kept server side then, while it will be cracked, it may take a good while longer. An uncrackable game for a few months.
That’s where the sales figures come in. Because if the suits see that it wasn’t pirated, but the sales figures didn’t go up (or even went down) then they won’t waste money on developing something like this again.
19/02/2010 at 17:21 Dean says:
Oh and this is almost tolerable for people with always-on net connections for AC2, which checkpoints on a fairly regular basis, so you won’t lose too much progress. If I really wanted to play it, I might put up with it. But how the hell will this work with The Settlers?
19/02/2010 at 17:50 Blather Blob says:
@Dean: There is no server-side processing, it’s just an authentication check. If anything, this might make it easier to crack, since any calls to the service will go across a bright line to a stand-alone DLL, showing exactly what needs to be cracked. Though presumably the response from the service won’t be a yes/no, but a value which is then calculated upon in the game itself, in the usual obfuscated manner like the results of a disc check’s DLL.
As to how the saving will work for Settlers 7, all saves are local and then synced to the server when you quit (just like Steam Cloud). In the original article, Tom Francis added an addendum that the syncing is optional and can be turned off in the options (which Steam Cloud doesn’t allow). So if you lose your connection, Settlers 7 saves like usual to your hard drive and quits, and the syncing just doesn’t occur (since you’ve lost your connection). But the save game is still there locally for next time your internet is working and you try to play.
AC2 can’t save at random, so it instead does the best it can and saves your nearest checkpoint, again, to your hard drive, before quitting. I find it humorous that because the system was designed “by guys who love PC games. They play PC games, they are your friends”, they forgot about checkpoint saves, because what kind of PC game would have those?
19/02/2010 at 18:01 Wisq says:
Steam Cloud allows you to not sync with it, it just has to have support for that option in-game.
I’m pretty sure both L4D2 and TF2 have options to not sync to Cloud. Torchlight doesn’t, as far as I’ve seen.
It’s also fault-tolerant, in that it only tries to do it at the end rather than while you’re playing, and (at least in the case of Torchlight) if it fails for some reason, you get a notice on next startup and it asks whether you want to continue with your local copy or use the Cloud copy (each one overwriting the other).
19/02/2010 at 18:31 Nalano says:
Refunds?
For a computer game?
Have you been in a store in the last decade?
19/02/2010 at 18:41 Blather Blob says:
@Wisq: Yeah, but Ubisoft’s method is the same, only trying to sync before launch and after you quit.
The only real difference is that there’s a system-wide on/off switch on ubi’s instead of per-game options, and they’ve gone and tied it into a DRM system with non-stop online authentication checks that kick you out of your game if you lose your connection. But the saving really has nothing to do with the requirement for non-stop connectivity, and isn’t what’s stopping them from implementing an offline mode (since it’s optional even when online).
19/02/2010 at 20:25 Dean says:
@Nalano if it don’t work you can get your money back.
And unless they are going to make you sign an EULA when you buy it, you can be sure that the EULA you have to click to agree to when installing the game (that gives them the ‘right’ to pull shit like this) will say “If you don’t agree, please take the game back to the store for a refund”).
19/02/2010 at 21:18 Nalano says:
Until Gamestop, EB, Fry’s and Best Buy collectively tell you that they don’t accept refunds of opened games because you had the opportunity to copy the DVD the game came on.
You can stomp and whine and say how much you think that’s illegal, and they’ll stare at you with the blank look they have for all customers, and you’ll walk out with no money. Like it’s been for the past decade.
20/02/2010 at 02:16 Papageno says:
What you do is you buy it but don’t open it. You’ve taken it out of commercial circulation for a few days, still get your money back, and give the reason you’re returning it to the retailer. I know it’s a pain, but I think it makes the point.
20/02/2010 at 21:25 tssk says:
It’s totally illegal not to refund you for a product that isn’t up to scratch but most game stores thumb their nose up at that because they know that
a) Most people won’t waste their time and money on an appearance at small claims court.
b) Those that might would probably find a very unimpressed judge annoyed that said gamer is wasting court time over ‘a toy’.
19/02/2010 at 17:18 SheffieldSteel says:
Pirates can no longer compete with Ubisoft. They are already way behind on revenue, and now they’re losing ground in terms of customer dissatisfaction too.
19/02/2010 at 17:18 Duck says:
And thanks, Alexander, that pleasant metaphor has made me completely disgusted.
Doesn’t anyone have any decency anymore? That was totally unnecessary. I am now more angry about your post than this entire DRM thing.
19/02/2010 at 17:19 Po0py says:
I worry that Ubisoft sees this as the last chance for their PC gaming efforts. If and when AS2 bombs they are gonna use that as an excuse to go console only. Which will be sad because I like Ubisoft games.
19/02/2010 at 17:28 John Peat says:
I don’t think the PC needs these multiplatform releases a much as you think. The total decline of PC retail means the PC can now focus on more specialist titles.
If you want a console game – a 360 is £99, buy one of those.
If you want a deeper, more complex game with a properly expansive online experience (not just head to head shootyshit) buy a PC and use services like Steam or dedicated MMOs to get your fix.
I wouldn’t mourn companies like Ubisoft, all they know how to do is milk franchises to death
19/02/2010 at 17:38 jonfitt says:
Yeah, I already have AC2 on 360. I buy games to play games, and the 360 pad IMHO was perfect in AC1 so should be in AC2. Plus I have the benefit of not having compatibility problems or he inevitable slowdown on my less than stellar PC.
And now, added bonus: I don’t have to deal with this DRM! My 360 version of AC2 is now even better!
19/02/2010 at 18:56 Po0py says:
I already have a 360. I just prefer to play my games on the PC. I haven’t touched my 360 in months, actually. I kind of like the the PC playing environment.
19/02/2010 at 19:03 FunkyBadger says:
nice theory, slighty undermined by thefact the two most innovative big-budget releases of recent times (Demon’s Souls and hard Rain) are console exclusives.
20/02/2010 at 06:07 bill says:
@FunkyBadger : I’ll give you hard rain, but what was innovative about Demon Soul’s? (other than the apostrophe usage?)
Innovative console titles will play to the console’s strength. Innovative PC titles will play to it’s strengths. I’d say that over the last few years the PC is pretty far ahead in terms of innovative titles. (excluding wii sports)
19/02/2010 at 17:19 Taillefer says:
I told my Mum.
19/02/2010 at 18:54 Bhazor says:
Yeah, I told your mum as well.
19/02/2010 at 18:57 Lilliput King says:
All night long.
19/02/2010 at 20:31 Taillefer says:
She was pretty indifferent about the whole thing, really.
19/02/2010 at 20:34 Starky says:
We’re going to Party, Karamu, Fiesta, forever. Come on and sing along!
19/02/2010 at 17:22 qrter says:
That bit made me laugh and creeped me out.
Reminds me of OMM in THX 1138 – “Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy. And be happy.”.. ;)
19/02/2010 at 23:40 Meatloaf says:
Aha! Someone else actually saw that movie!
Indeed, it’s a bit unsettling.
20/02/2010 at 06:30 redrain85 says:
The amount of weasel words and non-answers in that follow-up interview is staggering.
And that quote from the Ubi rep sounds like it came straight out of George Orwell’s 1984.
“Our new DRM telescreens are not doubleplusungood. Big Brother Ubisoft is your friend. Big Brother loves you, the PC gamer. Everything Big Brother does is for your benefit! Cease your crimethink when you say DRM is doubleplusungood.”
19/02/2010 at 17:31 Shodan says:
Maybe we need an RPS PC only game community project. Has absolutely no chance of success. Oh well.
They’re bastards for this. Make a console game, cant really be bothered with a PC port, so they use the most expensive and bloated way of killing it off.
19/02/2010 at 17:31 Dean says:
Theoretically if this did work, and it did reduce piracy, leading to a huge increase in sales…
Question:
Would you put up with this shit if it meant the RRP for a new PC game was £15 rather than £30?
19/02/2010 at 17:46 Demon Beaver says:
Assuming that would happen (it won’t… why, for example, are PS3 games still $60?)…
I personally will not put up with it either way, for three reasons:
1. I will not buy a game I cannot play while travelling, or simply out of Wifi-reach.
2. I will not buy a game which is unplayable in a few years from now (guaranteed, they will shut it down at some point). Or which is vulnerable to a remote server’s downtime or to the whims of my ISP.
3. I will not buy a game which sends its publisher data about my gaming habits. Even Steam I play in Offline mode on Single Player.
19/02/2010 at 17:34 Demon Beaver says:
First, I have to admit, I like the idea of a DDoS on those servers… it would cause an outcry like no other, if suddenly millions of gamers couldn’t play a game they legitimately bought (and the pirates keep playing, obviously).
But the only thing which will really change Ubisoft’s attitude would be a constant low review score of any game that includes this. Imagine both AC2 and Settlers 7 getting a Metascore of 35. I believe that is something they do care about, since it would seem to them a direct obstacle in the way of their profit.
Also, I do wonder, what will they blame if there are low sales of the games? Piracy again?
19/02/2010 at 17:39 Taillefer says:
“We feel too much intimacy and lack of couches probably affected the overall sales of the game.”
19/02/2010 at 17:36 unaco says:
So… What is Dave Tosser’s take on this situation? I’m certain his input would be measured, rational, insightful, and perhaps tapped out from beyond the grave… He is dead, isn’t he?
Also…
…OUTRAGE!!!
(I’ve been reading the Daily Mail too much).
19/02/2010 at 18:43 Brumisator says:
Yes! Bring back Dave Tosser!
Dave Tosser for president of the internet!
Hey, how about this:
You buy the game, then find pirate ways to play it offline?
People have speculated that it will take quite a while to crack, but once it’s done, what will stop us from playing any Ubisoft game the way we want?
That’s probably illegal too, but morally, I don’t see anything wrong with it. (Of course, morality is subjective)
19/02/2010 at 17:37 A-Scale says:
The people at Ubi will listen two only two voices- neither of them are ours. They will listen to review scores, and they will listen to sales numbers. If we don’t keep the vitriol we have for this scheme up and apparent, reviewers will probably not mention it in their review because they have to see a sea change to make them do anything but a straight, safe review.
Secondly, we need to not buy the game. It doesn’t matter if you pirate it- they will use that as an excuse anyway. But they need to make FAR less than their expected PC profits on this to shock them into realizing that it isn’t just normal blaseness or piracy, but rather a massive desire to behead them for their stupidity.
That will result in change. That, and talking to people not knowledgeable about it. Don’t let this issue die until the reviews come out. If we do, they will continue this madness.
19/02/2010 at 17:39 Radiant says:
The ‘overall plan’ is for this to become the norm.
They know Assassin’s Creed 2 is going to sell like crazy regardless and if they can get enough people to swallow this pill now then after the 3rd 4th and 10th game then people will stop caring.
Essentially it’s up to reviewers and editors to talk about this problem and mark the games down respectively.
They don’t care about 800 fellas on the internet but they do care about review scores and publicity.
Niche websites with a few thousand readers a month doesn’t matter it’s the reviews which pull in a few thousand readers a day that count.
Once the meta critic scores reflect the errors then they’ll get it.
19/02/2010 at 17:40 Radiant says:
Hah A Scale in the 2 minutes it took me to make a cup of tea and click send! *shakes fist*
19/02/2010 at 17:58 A-Scale says:
Great minds, mate!
19/02/2010 at 17:40 jsutcliffe says:
Oh my god. I just learned something that makes this DRM nonsense even better. AC2 will be retailing for the inflated price of $60, like MW2.
Sources: Amazon, Shacknews.
This might be widely known and I’m late to the party, but my mind is boggled and my jaw is on the floor.
19/02/2010 at 17:55 PixelCody says:
Oh wow. News indeed! It’s safe to say that I won’t be purchasing AC2, even though I really wanted to =(
19/02/2010 at 18:54 Blather Blob says:
@jsutcliffe: The best part is that the PS3 version, which you’ve been able to buy for 3 months already, and isn’t designed to be broken for non-pirates, is only $40 from amazon. So they make PC gamers wait a third of a year, make legal copies as unpalatable as possible, and jack the price up higher than both other PC games, and higher than console copies of AC2 are selling for. I really don’t understand what Ubisoft are doing.
19/02/2010 at 17:41 ZIGS says:
“The real idea is that if you offer a game that is better when you buy it, then people will actually buy it. We wouldn’t have built it if we thought that it was really going to piss off our customers.”
Are they delusional or just trolling?
19/02/2010 at 17:48 Demon Beaver says:
“If we say it often enough, maybe it will become the truth!”
19/02/2010 at 18:58 PHeMoX says:
They are clearly delusional. Most games have been shaped into casual orientated crap and offer barely anything substantially interesting. Not to mention most games are shamefully short and pathetically easy for more experienced gamers.
Yeah, so console owners tend to pay for games more often according to them, but 60$ for crap doesn’t change the fact that it’s still just that… crap.
19/02/2010 at 17:41 nerdometer says:
nearly 800 rps readers? or the same few (ok quite a few but not almost 800) repeating the same arguments ad nauseum.
I can barely muster the energy to be bothered about this, I am a consumer with a choice, I just won’t buy. Internet rage is such a waste of energy. Hey start a facebook group?! Just a thought, they’re all the ‘rage’ lately.
19/02/2010 at 18:31 Lambchops says:
I noted that 800 readers bit as well. The forum topic says 107 voices – but I think it might count anonymous posts as 1 poster; i’d say there’s certainly above the 400 mark in there at least though.
19/02/2010 at 18:31 Stupoider says:
There there, Nerdometer. We respect you for being so stolid in this dark and dismal days. However, there aren’t as many people raging about this, just people voicing their concerns and opinions. Which, hey, you just did!
19/02/2010 at 17:46 Ricc says:
The most interesting question in the interview was imo whether Ubi wants to actively harm PC gaming. Maybe not actively harm (kill), but at this point I am rather convinced that they want to drive gamers to the consoles, just like Microsoft.
They think that improving the PC wouldn’t increase their overall customer base, it would just diminish their more profitable console sales. Thus, milk the PC platform for whatever it’s worth, those negative side-effects might not even be that unwanted after all…
19/02/2010 at 17:55 TCM says:
To sum up, it’s like Steam, or even EA’s DRM system, but worse in every possible way.
19/02/2010 at 18:01 Heliosicle says:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SPLINTER CELL WHYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!?????
also, what I really want to know is how much bandwidth it uses.
19/02/2010 at 18:09 jsutcliffe says:
“A maximum of 50kbps.”
So, good luck playing their games for those unfortunate souls having to use dialup.
19/02/2010 at 19:35 jonfitt says:
Their suffering is constant anyway, I doubt this will make a difference.
19/02/2010 at 20:07 Flimgoblin says:
That’s only 250M for every 10 hours play.
(2Gbits)
19/02/2010 at 20:12 JonFitt says:
What’s that in PPM? (Peggles Per Minute)
19/02/2010 at 20:18 jsutcliffe says:
About 0.22 PPM (thirteen whole Peggles per hour).
19/02/2010 at 18:07 Evernight says:
Couple things:
“We aren’t trying to kill PC Gaming – we love PC gamers”
Just not as much as you love your console whores…. AC2 comes out six months later and with DRM hell all over it and you say you love us. Tiger did a better job of loving his wife.
Also, its a sad sad day when I want to pirate a game because of functionality rather than cost.
Oh and they stated that an advantage was “no install limits”….. um, we are still pissed that you had those in the first place. Why should I praise you for allowing me to do something I did before?
19/02/2010 at 18:14 Caleb367 says:
Anyone remembers when Spore got bombed on Amazon ratings due to users protesting its asinine 3 activations DRM? That sent EA home running and removing the activation limit faster than you can say “rated very bad”.
Maybe, MAYBE, unleashing hell again on ratings – and possibly adding comments on this moronic DRM too – will get Ubisoft the message.
19/02/2010 at 18:33 SheffieldSteel says:
The Amazon page for AssCreed2 PC doesn’t currently mention that it requires an always-on internet connection in orde to play the game. I’m thinking the Amazon people would benefit from some feedback on that issue.
19/02/2010 at 21:18 Blackberries says:
It’s mentioned discreetly on the Play.com page for the game, under “Special Features”. Ho-ho-ho. They seem to be allowing people to submit reviews already, so I’ve sent one in drawing attention to the constant need for an internet connection for the benefit of anyone who misses or doesn’t fully understand that single line. Wonder if it’ll show up..
19/02/2010 at 18:17 Jimbo says:
So long as it was made clear right from the start that they were obliged to de-activate the online requirement before they ever take the servers offline, I wouldn’t really have a problem with it, regardless of whether the price changes or not. That’s not to say that I think it will increase sales, because I don’t – I would think it is more likely to do the opposite if anything.
—-
I think they might actually be better served if they made it clear from the start that the online check would only be required for, say, the first month or two after launch. That’s perhaps short enough for it not to be worth the effort of spoofing the Ubisoft servers, but long enough for *some* of the millions of ‘passive pirates’ to just buy it legit rather than wait a month before they can pirate it.
You will never stop piracy entirely – eventually the crackers will beat your system – it’s just a question of how much time you can buy yourself during the launch window so that the only possible way to play it ‘right now’ is to buy it legit. Maybe a tacit compromise with the crackers would be more successful than repeatedly trying to stop them indefinitely, and repeatedly failing.
It also needs to become industry standard for every game to be available digitally on a publishers website at (or even before) retail launch and at (or below) shelf price. A lot of people are pirating games just because it’s often so much more convenient than being a legit customer – which is a ridiculous state of affairs and one that could easily be fixed by the industry. The cost itself doesn’t even come into it for some people.
19/02/2010 at 18:17 Bob says:
So people who have capped internet are going to be happy everytime they play their offline games lol
19/02/2010 at 18:23 hoff says:
2 things:
First, what is this argument about PC gaming sales declining? Does anyone have actual numbers? None of the statistics include digital downloads, which saw an increase in the mutliple-hundred-percent range on Steam (and still impressive numbers on similar services). Piracy exists since games exist. It was even easier to copy a floppy than a DVD (there’s an informative music video about this fact). The “dramatic” decline supposedly taking place in the past decade might only exist when compared to the frantically marketed console scene, with insane first-weekend-sales such as Halo 3′s and mediocre games like MW2 getting hyped into oblivion while PC gamers look at a trashy 4-hour singleplayer and laggy multiplayer with no mod support and scratch their heads in confusion… What about “The Sims”, “World of Warcraft”, every Valve title… heck, even Bioshock sold as well on the PC as it did on consoles (look up “sales” on the Wikipedia article).
All I see are publishers making up bogus piracy statistics as an excuse for their crappy games that do not run on any reasonable hardware not selling well. Then they just develop for console and do rushed ports of consolized games and wonder why PC gamer’s don’t get excited about them…
Secondly, let me repeat what I wrote in the comments of the past article:
Please, game journalists, support us angry internet me!
Don’t make fun of us all the time, ffs. We predicted this years ago. We complained about the first baby steps of ridiculous DRM and all you said was “derp herp whining internet people blerp”. It’s not your responsibility to defend game publisher’s decisions! It’s not helping the gaming scene. It’s not helping developers. We all know it. Why do you insist of making fun of us or get all defeatist about it until it’s finally come to this and it’s too late!?
We’re a few thousand people who actually cared, who saw it coming. The power of the gaming press would be to spread this observation to the mainstream. Without “interviewing Ubisoft to get their side of the story”. DO NOT INTERVIEW UBISOFT ONLY TO GET THE STANDARD MARKETING-SPIN BABBLE WE ALREADY KNOW! Do not publish their lame excuses that do not contain any actual information. Don’t give them the chance! Just look at the facts and maybe any actual changes. But we do not need to negotiate with the PR department of a publishing firm that has no f*** clue!
If you started to get more aggressive earlier, without the “let’s hear the other side of the story”, CNN-style tactic (“Oh great, a politician messed up, let’s give his PR guru a chance to spin his story around on the evening news until it sounds as if it’s actually a good thing!”). Just say it out loud: “This sucks.” Like now. I wish you started earlier, so it might have never come this far…
19/02/2010 at 18:26 hoff says:
Angry internet men. It’s angry internet men. Proud to be one, despite the typo.
19/02/2010 at 19:31 pkt-zer0 says:
From the PCGA report: “Among the key findings is that PC gaming software revenue was a $12.7 billion
industry in 2008, up $1.9 billion or nearly 18% from 2007.”
20/02/2010 at 07:11 Kakksakkamaddafakka says:
+1
19/02/2010 at 18:23 Iain says:
The one thing I’d like to say about this whole debacle is that if this is an attempt to halt ‘declining brick and mortar PC game sales’ (as Alec puts it), then the whole exercise is doomed to failure anyway.
PC retail sales on the High Street have been in freefall for a decade thanks to the consoles and websites like Amazon and Play, and with digital distribution methods like Steam and Impulse becoming ever more ubiquitous, I can foresee those few remaining PC games racks in my local GAME disappearing entirely in the next five years or so. The games retailers on the High Street hate PC games (because they can’t resell them at huge margins, like they can with console games), and to a point, I think a lot of PC gamers hate boxed PC games as well – I know I’d much rather buy a digital download version of a game and not be bothered pissing around with DVDs all the time I want to play something. I have even got to the point where I will buy titles I already own on Steam, just so that I don’t have to dig out discs to reinstall or play them.
If this means that the big publishers either abandon the PC entirely for their multiplatform ‘AAA’ titles, or go for digital distribution via something like Steam instead, I won’t be too displeased. After all, I’d much rather play something like Sins of a Solar Empire on my PC than Assassins Creed 2.
19/02/2010 at 18:26 bookwormat says:
I still think the biggest problem with DRM/service oriented games is transparency: It is not clear to most consumers what is really offered to them. That’s why I like the “always online” service more than the “three activation limit” service. For the general consumer it is probably even better than Steam-DRM. It is simply easier to understand what it means.
Also, I do not get the argument that “single player game must not require online access”. As a consumer I don’t care why the limitations are there. All I need to know is what I get for what price.
Of course I know that Ubisoft will probably sell their games for 50 Euros and couple them with other DRM systems like Steam or GfWL. I’m just saying that I would totally subscribe to this online Assassin’s Creed 2 service for 15 euro.
PS: I really like the last question in the PCG Interview “Will Ubi make a firm commitment to removing the DRM if the servers are to be taken offline? “. Every company is fast with promises, but these are meaningless until you find them in a license agreement.
19/02/2010 at 18:37 neolith says:
After taking a look at the interview I must say Ubisoft sounds like a guy who has just been beating up his girl and then telling her that it’s only because he loves her so much.
19/02/2010 at 18:40 Twigg says:
Thats pretty harsh, its only £26 on Amazon.co.uk ($40)
19/02/2010 at 18:41 Twigg says:
that was @ jsutcliffe
19/02/2010 at 18:41 Nalano says:
What gets me is that Ubisoft thinks that online backups of savegames is an important benefit to gamers.
I have never in all my time playing computer games thought, “Gee, I wish I could back up my saves to a server owned by the company!” Who the hell needs something like that? I find the whole “log in, get one set of savegames, log out, get another set of savegames” to be counterproductive!
19/02/2010 at 18:46 neolith says:
They don’t think that – they want us to think that it is a benefit.
19/02/2010 at 19:06 Carra says:
I would find it useful. If my pc fails one of the only things I have to try and save are my savegames. And those damn things are usually thrown all over your hard disk. Some in the games map, some in your documents, some in your save games… It’s hell to get these from a dozen of games.
19/02/2010 at 20:12 Nalano says:
You can’t do that yourself, Carra?
20/02/2010 at 00:01 Carra says:
Sure I can. But it would be way more convenient to store them online. Steamworks promised this years ago.
20/02/2010 at 00:52 Lilliput King says:
Cloud saving would be a great thing.
Ubisoft ruins it by providing only cloud saving.
19/02/2010 at 18:44 Shodan says:
The other reason this makes me angry is that I’m really looking forward to Splinter Cell conviction. I can see that having the same shite. Not good.
19/02/2010 at 18:44 Bluebreaker says:
They should also print in the retail box:
“Don’t bother buying this game, better pirate it. Its going to be easier to play and cheaper too.”
Then they will come to us crying on how bad piracy is on PC.
Yeah sure, and who’s fault is?
19/02/2010 at 20:11 Uhm says:
“Then they will come to us crying on how bad piracy is on PC.
Yeah sure, and who’s fault is?”
The pirate. It’s the pirate’s fault. Piracy is the fault of pirates. If you’re a pirate, it’s your fault. People who chose to pirate have caused piracy to be high. If you made that choice, it’s partially your fault. Christ.
19/02/2010 at 20:34 Bluebreaker says:
they can sell shit on a stick, and blame pirates for not selling it.
19/02/2010 at 20:51 Uhm says:
Quite. But it’s not the publisher’s fault piracy is high. That’s the fault of people choosing to pirate. Whether it sells or not is a different matter.
19/02/2010 at 21:49 Bluebreaker says:
The problem here, is that they are making the game more attractive for pirates than paying customers, punishing customers is not the way to fight piracy.
19/02/2010 at 18:46 Ricc says:
You know what would be a hundred times more useful than cloud-based savegames? If just everybody would agree to store the damned things in My Documents already…
19/02/2010 at 18:47 Doofmite says:
Replace “Ubisoft” and “we” with “pirates”.
Yarrrrrrr! Avast me ‘arties! Man the harpoons!
Oh yeah, and er, fuck Ubisoft. Fuck them in the ear.
19/02/2010 at 18:51 Skusey says:
I promise I will tell my only PC friend who doesn’t read RPS about this.
19/02/2010 at 18:52 PHeMoX says:
“Personally (i.e. my take is certainly not the RPS Group Consensus), I can at least understand why publishers are flailing for a response to what they blame for declining brick and mortar PC game sales.”
Regardless of feeling the need to protect anything… It’s clearly the wrong cure for the wrong disease though.
PC gaming isn’t dead or dying (unless developers and publishers continue this madness), nor is piracy even relevant in the whole DRM discussion, as customers now get games that are rigged with explosives. No internet connection? BoOoM!
You can bet people will avoid games because of such DRMs, even if they DID have the intention of legally purchasing a copy at first.
A lot of PC gamers are very devoted fans of certain developers, but many developers and publishers are stubbornly losing touch with reality.
19/02/2010 at 20:14 Nalano says:
Screw brick and mortars. Brick and mortars are not the gaming industry. PHeMoX has it right: They’re afraid of losing control.
19/02/2010 at 18:56 Carra says:
So what’s in it for gamers? The second: that you can install the game on as many PCs as you like, as many times as you like.
So euh, that’s an advantage these days? I haven’t bought one of those games except through steam.
Can we still play our games in five years? the hope is, the plan is that we’ll be on Assassin’s Creed, I dunno, 3, 4, 5, and the servers will still be there to serve those new games
Hope? Give us something real!
19/02/2010 at 20:08 Stromko says:
edit: Never-mind, when I read through the entire article it seemed that quote was out of context.
20/02/2010 at 00:49 Bonedwarf says:
The RPS article is off though. “Returned en-masse”… Since when can you return software? If it’s opened, barring those very rare retailers of which I’ve never actually found one, you can only exchange for another copy of the same broken ass title.
EVERY SINGLE SOFTWARE STORE I go into has this clearly marked. If it’s open, you can only exchange, not return for refund.
20/02/2010 at 01:21 Lilliput King says:
In the UK (where the RPS writers are situated) we’re are legally entitled to return a electronic product if it isn’t fit for purpose, as described vocally or in writing prior to purchase, or of “satisfactory quality”. Bit sketch, that. I did hear there’s EU laws that govern electronics in particular, and guarantee a 3 year warranty and increased consumer protection, but I don’t really know enough about them. However, we do have the right to send back CDs/DVDs ordered online until 7 days after receiving them, as long as they are unopened.
So you probably should be able to make your point. That said, I won’t be doing it. Just because you’re legally entitled to a refund doesn’t mean you’ll actually get your money back.
19/02/2010 at 19:01 ISJ says:
This is an interesting article and I agree with most of it… but in my opinion one massive thing is missing… the author states the onus is on us to make our displeasure felt in a productive and effective manner (rather than ranting on message boards) and he’s right.
However Mr Meer (and others like you) the bigger onus is on YOU and your colleagues. A FAR bigger effect would be had if journalists actually had the balls to stand up to the publishers and mark down massively any game that had punitive DRM – I can’t remember EVER reading a review where the score was adversely affected by the DRM. Bioshock had fantastic reviews (and was indeed a great game) yet it took me over 48 hours from first installing it to actually getting to play the damned thing… as the activation servers were down… this sort of DRM MUST, in my opinion, be mentioned in reviews (and should be legally required to be shown in large type on the boxes) .
Sure we will respond to your clarion call.. but do your bit first.. I don’t want to be reading 80%+ reviews for a game which is completely unplayable if your ISP is wonky, your wireless is down or you just want to play it somewhere on the move…
19/02/2010 at 19:38 Jerusahat says:
You make an excellent point.
I think it could be argued that reviewers shouldn’t mark a game down if they don’t actually experience problems for themselves. I think it would have been unfair to mark down Bioshock if the DRM problem didn’t actually exist when tested. Before release the whole thing was hypothetical.
The point of failure in this new DRM is very weak though, easily tested. I’m also interested to see if the cloud save system in Battle.net will have the same problem.
19/02/2010 at 21:01 Tom says:
amen
19/02/2010 at 21:03 suibhne says:
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
Part of the problem is that review copies typically have different DRM than the release version of a game. Even so, there are multiple approaches journos could take to this problem. Maybe a full review score could be withheld until the DRM was tested, for example. At the very least, every review should contain a description of the game’s DRM, not to mention a clear notice explaining whether or not the review score includes testing with the DRM.
The longtime insistence by games journos that DRM shouldn’t be reviewed as part of the product is bafflingly naive (or ignorant) and an abuse of the reader’s trust. It has to end.
19/02/2010 at 23:17 jonfitt says:
It might have an effect, but it is probably a bad idea.
Marking a game down for bad DRM would hit publishers who cherish metracritic scores, but it also hurts the developers who often have no say in how their game is packaged.
It turns a review into a buying guide more than a rating of a piece of work. Did the DRM change how good the actual game of Bioshock was? No. Did it affect it as a product? Yes.
How many points to subtract would also depend on how bad the DRM was to you. Is Starforce 3.5 times worse than Steam? Also, 99% of people will have no problem, and the reviewer could be one of these people.
Do we need to compare the DRM schemes of AMRA2 vs OPF2 to work out which is better?
If it really matters to you that much, read game reviews, then adjust them accordingly.
On the other hand, I think all review scores are meaningless, so if there’s a chance to stick it to the publishers then maybe the developers have to be caught in the crossfire for the good of the industry.
Back in the days when the magazines were the only place to read about games, perhaps they could have just said stuff it we’re not reviewing that?
20/02/2010 at 02:44 robolove says:
Metacritic is the only means of getting a publishers attention.
19/02/2010 at 19:27 Roberto says:
Ubi can polish their turd all they want, its still a piece of shit. I love Ubi’s games, but I’m finding it hard to rationalize buying any of their games from now on, it would be rewarding behavior that I think is COMPLETELY unacceptable. I will not have you watch my every move, and control when I can play my games, and I will DEFINITELY not pay you to do it.
19/02/2010 at 19:46 Shalrath says:
Instead of ‘downloading No-CD cracks anyway!” or “buying it and waiting for hackers to create a work-around” why don’t we all NOT BUY THE FUCKING GAMES.
Vote with your wallets, people, it’s the only way these morons will learn.
19/02/2010 at 20:07 Gutter says:
You do realize that they do not give a shit about how you vote, right?
They are using this DRM because people are already “voting” with their wallet… The reason they do it is because people are already not buying their games, why do you think that not buying them more will scare them?
Ubisoft isn’t trying to woo customers, they are trying to push console like DRM capabilities to PCs without having to wait for so called ‘trusted computing devices”.
19/02/2010 at 20:16 Nalano says:
Boycotts don’t work. They’ve spent years developing the console market so they can have a platform that’s been defanged so people can be model consumers. You won’t teach them anything except that their long term plan with the consoles was correct from the start.
So do what you want to do!
19/02/2010 at 20:19 Stromko says:
And what game has Ubisoft made for PC that deserved good sales? Prince of Persia? Console game, 3D platformers on PC require a gamepad and many of us already own a gamepad attached to a console, so that’s the place to get it. Far Cry 2? Impossible to mod, so better as a console game. Settlers 4? I tried the demo, I did not like it, same with Settlers 3.
We vote with our wallets by buying console games on consoles or not at all. It’s not about piracy, it’s about Ubisoft not understanding the platform. Personally, I only rent console games, I’m always sick of them within a week so aside from a few standouts there’s no reason to buy them.
The only Ubisoft games I’ve played on PC were purchased cheap on Steam or Direct2Drive on big sales. That’s the only way I’m taking a chance on them, it’s the only reason I ever got Far Cry 2 or Mirror’s Edge, Prototype, all sorts of console-ish games.
When I can get a 2-year old AAA game for 10$ on a reputable service like Steam, Direct2Drive, or GamersGate, I can’t imagine wasting my time with shady pirating sites. Not only that, I’ve got such a deluge of old AAA games from those awesome Christmas sales, I can’t imagine having the time on my hands to even play a pirated game.
If someone didn’t have 50 bucks last year to stock on about, oh, 30 AAA games, then they sure as hell don’t have 60$ for AC2 right now. Where the hell is Ubisoft losing sales? I’ll tell you, inability to compete in this market. The threat of shutting off the game we purchased at any time, means we can’t be certain if AC2 will ever be available for cheap, or how long we’d have access to it once it hits the bargain bin, and that may be the only effective strategy they have in this whole mess.
19/02/2010 at 22:43 Shalrath says:
“You won’t teach them anything except that their long term plan with the consoles was correct from the start.
So do what you want to do!”
Frankly? Good. Let them go to the console market. If they hate their paying customers this much, I sure as hell don’t want anything they’re making.
And you CAN show them with your wallet. They have DECREASED sales on PC, but morons keep buying up their shit and then having the GALL to complain about how they keep using awful DRM. If you hate it that much STOP BUYING THEIR STUFF.
19/02/2010 at 20:00 GetOutOfHereStalker says:
don’t buy their fucking game, don’t play their fucking game either (that’s part of boycotting a product moron), tell your fat fucking friends to do it too.
19/02/2010 at 20:01 clive dunn says:
Ubisofts statements read like a note, left by the side of the bed, from a grilfreind who ‘really likes you’ but just needs to take a break from the relationship (i.e fuck another guy).
Laters girl, plenty more fish in the sea!
19/02/2010 at 21:15 Heliocentric says:
But remember that time she/they gave you that amazing blow job/beyond good and evil?
Not so smug at being dumped/drmed now eh?
19/02/2010 at 20:11 Vinraith says:
Again, thanks RPS for keeping attention on this vitally important issue for the hobby. People need to know about it, and while I’ve tried to do my own bit for word of mouth at the end of the day you guys are the ones with the widely read platforms. The only way the industry is going to be given pause about this kind of nonsense is if journalists speak up, and if the ramifications of hosing their customers starts to show up in metacritic scores.
19/02/2010 at 21:22 SheffieldSteel says:
Hear, hear
19/02/2010 at 23:23 DJ Phantoon says:
Only sort of, Vinraith. While it is the job of RPS (and indeed, any games journalist with a conscience!) to state this until people get it, average people (read: non gamers) do not read their publications and thus will not know.
So they gotta be told by a friend. Make a big enough stink about it, get it on any major non-focused news site (like NBC or whatnot) to get average people’s attentions. It is true that people returning the product will hurt them, but only indirectly as the brick and mortar stores are hurt by returns, not the publisher.
Hurt them right in the pocketbook by denying them sales through a better informed consumer group.
19/02/2010 at 20:15 wererogue says:
“A developer is interested in making the best game they can; a publisher is not.”
Ubisoft is both, so I’d think that both forces are in play, but I guess they’re not harmonised :/
I’d be tempted to suggest that everyone buy the games and return them as defective. It’s a stronger statement than not buying or pirating – you’re saying that this one issue stops the products being valid. Or, if you don’t want to risk not being able to return it, go to a store, ask about the DRM, and tell them you’re not buying the game if you can’t play offline / the game’s going to crap out on you frequently.
20/02/2010 at 01:39 Chiller says:
Even if they belong to the same company, the developers and the people doing the marketing/publishing are likely completely different entities.
The publishing people want to make money. The devs just want to make games. They would only be caught getting involved in selling the game in a REALLY small company. Ubisoft is not a small company.
19/02/2010 at 20:16 bhlaab says:
PCG: What I think a lot of us would really like is a firm commitment that you understand our worries that the servers are going to go down and suddenly we’ve just got some trash data on our hard drives that we’ve paid for.
Ubisoft: The system is made by guys who love PC games. They play PC games, they are your friends.
Are you kidding me?
19/02/2010 at 20:23 Stromko says:
Flowery words instead of the firm commitment to do the right thing? Yeah, they’re not kidding.
19/02/2010 at 22:13 ET says:
…………….That is possibly one of the creepiest things I have ever heard a publisher say. Seriously, it wouldn’t be out of place in an horror flick. (‘Nevermind that these guys have bloody fangs! They love humans! They are your friends!) Has Ubisoft learned nothing at all from Hollywood scriptwriters?
19/02/2010 at 22:22 Diogo Ribeiro says:
“The system is made by guys who love PC games. They play PC games, they are your friends”
Kinda like a friendly alien message before the anal probing.
19/02/2010 at 20:16 terry says:
The arrogance and ignorance on display in those Ubisoft responses is truly breathtaking. I am in deep awe.
19/02/2010 at 20:18 Schalken says:
I was looking forward to SH5. Guess I won’t be getting it unless we can force Ubisoft to back away from this shit. I’m usually not a fan of this bourgeois “vote with your wallet” bullshit, but in this case it’s true. And why don’t we go one step further? Let’s email the relevant folks at Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc., and explain what Ubisoft is selling them.
19/02/2010 at 20:28 Nef says:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v468/Nefaroth/assassinscreedcoverszcopy.jpg
I made a true cover for the game, simply print and distribute into Assassins Creed 2 boxes/displays at your local brick & mortar.
19/02/2010 at 21:13 Nalano says:
People buy games at brick & mortars?
19/02/2010 at 20:38 Stromko says:
You know it’d be something else entirely if they promised to only require the internet connection for the first week, or 2 weeks, around the launch window.
If they agreed to, after a few weeks, put out a decryption code or patch that removed the need for the server connection, that would allay most of our worries. In fact, promising any support at all for their PC port of the game would allay a lot of our worries.
The only piracy that publishers actually need be concerned about is 0-day piracy. 99% of pirates aren’t going to wait a month to play a new game, in fact they usually won’t even wait for the game to come out.
If they had a copy protect system that worked for the first week, it would be exactly as effective– that’s how long it takes, at most, for a working crack to be developed for any system– and it would reduce frustration for their paying customers.
19/02/2010 at 20:54 Blather Blob says:
@Stromko: That would do nothing to stop people from buying used copies or loaning the game to friends, which is what this system will be mainly effective at preventing in the long term.
19/02/2010 at 22:24 invisiblejesus says:
@Blather Bob
I don’t know where you’re at or what the market’s like there, but in the US at least the used PC game market is nonexistent. Stores don’t sell them anymore.
20/02/2010 at 03:43 Stromko says:
GameStop / EBGames still does it, and they’re the biggest chain of brick & mortar game stores that I know of. There’s all manner of trade-in stores too, though the one that was in my town didn’t do well enough and shut down.
I would say it’s decreased a great deal, probably because of all these games requiring online activation. You could never return an MMO because the serial has already been tied to an account, more and more games have been going in that direction lately, even if they have little or no multiplayer.
20/02/2010 at 06:58 invisiblejesus says:
@Stromko
Gamestop/EBGames where? I have three Gamestop stores within easy driving distance of me, and none of them sell used PC games or take them for credit. Are you sure your information is current? They did sell them a few years ago, but they haven’t for a while. And for that matter, around here at least there’s no “Gamestop/EBGames”. It’s just Gamestop now. The EBGames brand has been completely done away with.
20/02/2010 at 07:04 Vinraith says:
@invisiblejesus
Hell, I’ve been buying PC games for more than 20 years in the US and don’t remember EVER seeing used PC games in stores. On the occasion that I got used PC titles it was always via eBay.
20/02/2010 at 07:32 invisiblejesus says:
@Vinraith
The EBGames that used to be near me carried a pretty good selection about 8-odd years back; I’ve still got the copy of VtM: Bloodlines I got used there. That all stopped when that location was officially converted to a Gamestop, though. Too bad, I liked EBGames a lot more than I like Gamestop.
19/02/2010 at 20:47 Wounder says:
The talk of boycotts is, alas, just that. No one could possibly justify changing a business plan because “a lot of folks online claim they’re not going to buy it.” What would be interesting is to set up a donation fund to a charitable organization where folks could prove how little they appreciate the evil shenanigans. Tally up the donations after a certain point and let Ubisoft (or whoever) know how much money they lost.
But of course, that assumes you’d get as much enjoyment out of a donation as a video game. And that you still had enough lunch money skimmings to replace that game with something else.
Also, they claim Steam games are quickly hacked. I’m not sure what they mean by hack exactly… TF2 might be hacked, but that doesn’t mean you’re playing online. And are there some metrics to how quickly games are hacked?
19/02/2010 at 20:48 blah says:
Well said! Completely agree with you there!
19/02/2010 at 20:49 blah says:
That was meant for ISJ above. Damn reply system… Always messing up my posts! ;_;
19/02/2010 at 20:49 undead dolphin hacker says:
What’s the point?
Gamers boycott the titles. Pirates find a way around the DRM as they always do.
So now Ubisoft’s PC games aren’t selling due to a boycott, but there’s a functioning crack on the internet. It’s gotta be piracy, lols am i rite?
19/02/2010 at 20:51 phuzz says:
First thing I did after venting my spleen in the other thread was wander downstairs and tell my (all pc gaming) flatmates that we might as well forget playing any ubisoft games. (our net connection is really crappy, thanks virgin)
19/02/2010 at 21:07 Chandrose says:
@ ISJ
The issue I find with your argument is that I don’t think the majority of purchasers actually read reviews. They read hype, or posters on the wall at your local Game Stop. I of course haven’t done any research to back this claim up, but I personally know many fringe gamers (admittedly mostly console gamers) who walk into a store and buy the game with the cover art they like. It also explains why some games review very poorly, but can sell very well.
19/02/2010 at 21:10 dragon_hunter21 says:
Wait, Splinter Cell: Conviction is gonna have this on it too?
Son of a BITCH.
That’s it, I’m swearing off Ubi forever- ‘least, until this absolutely asinine DRM system dissolves.
19/02/2010 at 21:17 Heliocentric says:
Seriously, i was going to get 2 copies near release day. Coop chaos theory was awesome.
19/02/2010 at 21:25 Steve says:
Boycot? I don’t think so!! Can’t afford to, sorry. The start of this year has been exceptionally good, but last year I couldn’t even spend my ‘budget’ on games. There simply werent enough good titles to keep me gaming all year. I KNOW almost everyone else feels the same way, just look at the MW2 boycot (LOL). So basically the companies can do whatever they like and still get away with it.
As it happens, I didn’t like a single UBI game since Vegas and I uninstalled MW2 before finishing it, so personally I couldn’t care less about what those companies are doing. Even if they leave the PC market that’s just fine with me. But that’s a coincidence; had UBI made a game I liked, i would have bought it. But they stopped making stuff that makes me tick. And a lot of people feel that way. Gaming is growing up: big companies merging and games feel shallow but pretty. (A bit like Boy-Zone in their days) Mass-market-oriented.
I repeat: last year I could NOT spend all the money I wanted to on games. How is the PC market not healthy? At least from the demand side? People are dying to play the next WoW and pay 12$ a month for it.
By all means boycot UBI, make it go bankrupt for all I care. If they leave the PC market, fine! Or start pirating to chase them away! I think the consumers are safe, there’s a lot of money to be made on us and some (preferably new) companies will jump at any percieved opportunity to get some of the pie.
Personally I have good hopes, just look at the amazing titles so far this year. I will never ever EVER get a console with crappy expensive peripherals and shit outdated hardware, and millions are like that. We don’t need a boycot, we need to stay loyal to the platform we love and resist jumping on the console wagon. Even if console games will beat pc games for a while, because a bunch of publishers will go console-only. (Has never happened, but it might)
20/02/2010 at 01:02 Bonedwarf says:
One less douchebag on Xbox Live with you not there then, so WIN!
Enjoy playing Madden on your PC… Enjoy playing Forza… Enjoy playing Trials HD, Castle Crashers, Shadow Complex etc…
You anti console people are so blinkered I’m amazed you can see out of your own pointlessly blinding cloud of vitriol long enough to see the screen and make a post.
20/02/2010 at 01:25 Shalrath says:
Only 65 million to go! :D
20/02/2010 at 01:42 DJ Phantoon says:
Both of you make no sense whatsoever.
PC is better than Xbox. This is a fact. This is because PC is better than Xbox. Duh.
And anyways, there will eventually be an Xbox 360 emulator, just like everything else.
Really, the point of a console is multiplayer (in the same room). Why not just get a Wii? It is better. And it does something the PC does not.
20/02/2010 at 03:54 Stromko says:
If you don’t think there were enough games last year, you should read more blogs like this one. There’s tons of brilliant stuff coming out, though not much of it is coming from established developers or publishers. As far as I’m concerned, all the stale, unimaginative sequels can go somewhere else, maybe a platform with a healthy rental market where we’re more comfortable getting bored of a game within 5 hours and returning it ..
Some games work better on consoles, some work better on PC. I don’t think that’s a decision that publishers should make, honestly, I’d rather make that decision based on my own preferences and judgement. Of course, publishers would rather not put out a game on a platform where it’s going to do badly, that’s why you don’t see a lot of RTSes and MMOs on consoles.
As for Ubisoft? They’ve clearly abandoned any hope of the PC market. This DRM is them flipping us the bird on the way out the door. I’ll be looking forward to them trying to ‘solve’ the rampant piracy that afflicts console games, too, and guiding themselves into bankruptcy.
19/02/2010 at 21:26 Kurt Lennon says:
What the cretins at UBISoft (and almost every other major game software developer) don’t consider is that being disrespectful, sleazy and deceptive makes gamers not care about doing exactly the same thing by pirating the everloving sh** out of their games.
19/02/2010 at 21:29 Goomich says:
Assasin’s Creed 2, Splinter Cell ConViction, Settlers 7, Silent Hunter 5, RUSE…
20/02/2010 at 01:43 DJ Phantoon says:
Y’know, unless someone mentions the games Ubisoft makes, I continually forget what they are.
Not joking or being snarky. I seriously forget because I just haven’t enjoyed any of their games in forever. Splinter Cell Traitor or whatever it was, was absolute garbage. It was like a sneaking game with the fun surgically removed and replaced with weapons grade tedium.
20/02/2010 at 02:40 Zerotime says:
DJ Phantoon: Well, more that the stealth was kept, but the methods by which it was accomplished (darkness, cover, alternate pathing, gadgets*) were left out.
* I played it on the PC, before the patch that fixed the “no mission rewards” bug, so I spent the entire game wondering why I was being told of this cool stuff that I couldn’t have.
19/02/2010 at 22:05 Spork says:
“Don’t run. We are your friends.” Anyone else remember how that turned out? I’m driving round to Ubi HQ with a speaker system.
19/02/2010 at 22:29 subversus says:
i think that if you want to use such draconian methods then you’re really desperate about your bottomline. It’s like last resort.
And if this is so hard to be profitable on PC market, then why not leave it for good? Seriously, leave it for companies like Valve and Blizzard. If PC users aren’t buying and prefer stealing that’s their fault, you’ll not get money from people until there are free options available for them.
19/02/2010 at 22:30 Frankie The Patrician[PF] says:
Ok, I am probably NOT the first one to point that out, but I cannot resist:
“Do we think that it’s the one system that God has sent onto earth that will never be cracked by anybody ever? We can’t guarantee that, but we believe in it.”
Sweetjesusonastick! I was half-expecting that they would go on and point a couple of verses in the Bible that predicts their DRM and that God Himself thinks it is a good thing…
19/02/2010 at 22:32 Aemony says:
Instead I need an always online internet connection? Thanks, but I’d pick the disc any time.
19/02/2010 at 22:38 SheffieldSteel says:
Hint:
If something is good,you do not need to make it mandatory.
If this cloud saves and always-on system were (1) optional (2) as good as Ubisoft PR would have us believe, all users would voluntarily keep it switched on.
19/02/2010 at 22:46 Sceptrum says:
Just waiting for 4chan to try something
19/02/2010 at 22:52 LewieP says:
You may have noticed in the previous post I mentioned that I was planning a form of protest better than a boycott.
Plan initiated:
http://savygamer.co.uk/2010/02/19/drm-assassination-lets-send-a-message-to-ubisoft/
19/02/2010 at 23:13 invisiblejesus says:
Brilliant. Sadly, I’m in the States and don’t even know what Tesco is. Still, here’s hoping enough people participate to make a difference. I may do it on my own when/if I have the spare cash and can confirm for sure that I’ll get my money back over here.
20/02/2010 at 00:08 Starky says:
Tesco = Walmart for the UK, and the worlds 3rd largest retailer, they go by the name of Fresh & Easy in the US.
ASDA (owned by Walmart) is the smaller company in the UK.
19/02/2010 at 22:56 ljalkfjklajsf says:
You do know Starcraft 2 is doing this too, right?
Also, this article is retarded. Feel sorry that you guys don’t have enough pennies to afford decent internet.
19/02/2010 at 23:01 Psychopomp says:
>You do know Starcraft 2 is doing this too, right?
[citation needed]
>Also, this article is retarded. Feel sorry that you guys don’t have enough pennies to afford decent internet.
Affording isn’t the issue. For many of us, we literally cannot get a stable ISP where we live.
19/02/2010 at 23:04 cjlr says:
@ljalkfjklajsf:
Obvious troll is obvious!
Hint: it’s in the name, guys ;
19/02/2010 at 23:17 Drug Crazed Dropkick says:
I have to post in what SavyGamer put on (http://savygamer.co.uk/2010/02/19/drm-assassination-lets-send-a-message-to-ubisoft/) which was preorder the game, and then as soon as it arrives, send it back saying the DRM was unacceptable. That shows that we aren’t happy, because the retailer gets tons of copies of second hand games.
19/02/2010 at 23:18 Kirrus says:
I hate piracy, but:
http://xkcd.com/488/
’nuff said.
20/02/2010 at 01:43 mootpoint says:
this.
Not that I think I will want to play AC2 in three years time, but games like Settlers or Silent Hunter have long lives. Imagine not being able to play Civ 4 (or X-Com, or whatever you think is good) just because some *** decided to shut down a server.
19/02/2010 at 23:21 Ravenger says:
Ubisoft say that if the connection loss is momentary the game will just pause until it reconnects.
Isn’t it amazing isn’t it that we’re now in a situation were we can expect internet lag in a single player game!
It’ll be great playing this on my connection when the students nearby are saturating the upstream with torrents. The packet loss will mean my game will perform like a muliplayer game over a 56k modem on a noisy line.
What’s the point of custom building a PC to get smooth framerates if the game is ‘lagged’ by the internet connection?
19/02/2010 at 23:24 Boldoran says:
The second: that you can install the game on as many PCs as you like, as many times as you like.
That they have the guts to list this point as a positive leaves me speechless.
19/02/2010 at 23:26 invisiblejesus says:
I bet it has PC-exclusive bonus features, too. Like keyboard and mouse controls and configurable graphics options.
19/02/2010 at 23:24 GameOverMan says:
About the piracy issue and how these draconian measures affect sales, I think that some people will never pay for a game, if they can get pirated copies they will, if a game can’t be pirated it’ll be ignored or they’ll find a way to play it, asking a friend to lend his/her copy, playing at that friend’s house or, in extreme cases, stealing it. At the opposite end of the spectrum there would be the rabid fans who will buy their favourite games the minute they are available, no matter how much they cost, what kind of DRM have and whether they are a lousy console port or not.
Then there are gamers that choose which titles to buy depending on a variety of factors: their price/value for money, extras like multiplayer on dedicated servers, modding capabilities, quality of the PC conversion (if it’s a console port), and details such as the one we are discussing about, DRM, limited installs, online checks, and so on.
This new kind of DRM, copy protection or whatever they want to call it wouldn’t affect sales one bit if every PC gamer belonged to one of the groups mentioned in the first paragraph, but I’m afraid that most of the potential buyers from the third group won’t pay for those games, I’m not saying that they’ll get a pirate copy but they will certainly not buy them, so IMHO this scheme will damage their sales and, if anything, it’ll increase piracy, not the other way round.
Please excuse my english.
19/02/2010 at 23:53 Pinkbeard says:
It will be cracked, oh yes it will.
This is like a red rag to a bull. Ubisoft will not escape the notice of the pirates for this. Their ‘Unbeatable’ DRM will be beaten and sent squaling back to its mother, bawling its eyes out about how it couldn’t stop the big nasty bully stealing its lunch money.
Are they going to do this to the console versions of their games? No they are not. Do you know why? Of course you do, its because the consoles are sealed markets, tightly controlled and hardwired to be as secure against piracy as possible. The thing is about the consoles is that one day they will die and everyone will embrace the open platform that is the PC.
The games publishers are falling into the same trap as the record companies and movie studios. The makers of the products that they publish simply don’t need them anymore. PC retail is dead, has been for years. We have Steam and GoG and Gamersgate, and Gametap, and D2D and many more to come. No more do we have to go anywhere near a spotty console jockey to get our gaming fix. The makers of the games can sell to us direclty, the publisher is obsolete. They can see their end coming and they are scared.
Ubisoft has just signed its own death warrant. (on the PC at any rate)
19/02/2010 at 23:59 Starky says:
@Steve: re state of the PC market/not enough games to buy in 2009.
I’m going to have to call BS on that…
Unless either your gaming budget is in the insane numbers (mid-high 4 figures), or you have really shitty taste 2009 was a fantastic year for gaming, PC and otherwise.
Hell the Indie scene alone was was spectacular, with a vast swath of cheapish £10-20) titles things like Torchlight, Aaa[...]aaA: blah blah Gravity, Solium Infernum, Zeno Clash, AI war, Plants Vs. Zombies the list goes on and on – 10 mins searching through old RPSposts will show you that.
In mainstream platform exclusives we had DoW 2, Empire:TW, Sims3. Dragon Age: Origins (which might as well be PC exclusive imo – given the PC version is VASTLY superior)…
As well as a vast number of “console ports” some of which were superior on the PC – Batman, RE5, Modern Warfare 2, Borderlands, Need for Speed: Shift, Left 4 Dead 2, Fear 2… and many many more.
Plus decent number of expansions, pre-order with beta access deals (such as with Natural selection, mount and blade and a dozen up and coming MMOs.
Added to that the massive advantage of the PC platform, ENDLESS free stuff… Indie games for free, browser games for free, micro-transaction “free”, but most of all… Mods…
Seriously, the mod community alone for 2009 was worth the purchase price of the base games + beefy gaming rig.
Amazing HL2 mods, Crysis mods (Including a mech warrior game that is by far better than ANY commercial Mech Warrior game to date) – massive upgrades, graphical and otherwise for “old” games.
Games that offer hundreds of hours playtime thanks to an amazing modding community (Dragon Age, Fallout, Mount and Blade, All the total war games except empire)…
Oh and then a crazy, crazy winter sales from all the major Digital distributors. The steam sale eclipsing them all in it’s insanity.
The PC as a gaming platform is getting better and better – just in a new direction.
So the platform might lose some AAA titles, that doesn’t for a second mean PC gaming is dying or in trouble… Given that those AAA multi-platform games are by far the least exciting things in the PC gaming space.
Does it really matter if Modern Warfare 3 doesn’t get a PC port? Even if every single one of the big publishers stopped releasing games on the PC – PC gaming would STILL thrive.
Unless you’re only interested in those AAA titles, in which case just get a damn console like the rest of us for them.
20/02/2010 at 04:05 Stromko says:
Fun little detail, when Ubisoft ported Far Cry 2 to the PC, they encrypted a lot of key files in order to make modding impossible. No modding on a Crysis-engine game. Imagine a zombie mod or a mechwarrior mod in the dense jungles and beautiful savannahs of Far Cry 2, or just a few tweaks to make a second playthrough interesting… Sorry, not happening.
For that alone, Ubisoft can f*ck right off.
19/02/2010 at 23:59 Heliocentric says:
I would love a developer to upon the cracking release a patch which removes the drm.
End effect, the pirates have nothing early on but buyers have a terribly restricted game. Then upon cracking everyone gets a perfect copy, including genuine customers. But genuine customers will have access to genuine extra features like automated patching and dlc options/freebies.
End effect? Customers only pissed off for a while by drm and genuine customers always have the best version.
20/02/2010 at 00:07 LewieP says:
Problem is, that is giving the hackers an even bigger incentive to hack games.
Crack a game, and not only are you the champion of the pirates, but you have made PUBLISHER MEGACORP your bitch.
20/02/2010 at 00:28 Heliocentric says:
It stops day one piracy and discourages piracy in general by making it the second rate product.
I would put my own money into such a development, were it not for the ultimate alternative they will never use. Just put the game out drm free and save the cash i would have been wasting on expensive drm which would only piss off paying customers. I would have a “key” which would only be used for getting updates and support, to avoid wasting bandwidth and tech support on pirates.
Everything beyond that is varying degrees of stupid.
20/02/2010 at 04:08 Stromko says:
Good after-launch support and community is the most effective anti-piracy measure. People don’t want to wait for a pirate to port over the latest patched .exe, or find a cracked server in order to play online.
I agree with the idea of removing the DRM soon after launch though. Eliminating zero-day piracy would eliminate the one thing that actually impacts sales at all.
20/02/2010 at 00:13 elyscape says:
Sounds like an abusive husband. He only hits me because he loves me! And us gamers, like the battered wife, keep coming back.
20/02/2010 at 00:16 Biz says:
i dont understand how people know they need to be online to play a game and then buy the game and then start crying because they have to be online
free market = people can sell whatever they want as long as they don’t lie to you about it
if you do not like a product, do not buy it. complaining afterwards about things that you knew were never there in the first place isn’t very productive
20/02/2010 at 00:20 Vinraith says:
@Biz
Right, because invasive DRM schemes are always clearly explained and labeled on the package/store page.
20/02/2010 at 00:33 LewieP says:
Publishers certainly aren’t taking responsibility for it, and are letting online retailers sell their games without explaining the DRM that they contain.
20/02/2010 at 00:33 Jossoy says:
I wasn’t at all excited about Assassin’s Creed 2 until i read someone say this the other week about their experience playing it on the Xbox: “I wasn’t paying enough attention during a conversation, and a button prompt popped up that would have made Ezio hug Leonardo and went away before I could get to it. Now I feel bad.”
During Tali’s loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2, I had to reload a save because I made a choice that I feel was ultimately the right decision, but made Tali upset with me. Ultimately in a couple years when Mass Effect 3 comes out that may have proven to be the wrong decision, much like going with Roman’s suggested mission at the end of GTA4 (I’ll just deal with the evil guys, I’d rather have my cousin be happy than spend all my energy on revenge) led to an ending I felt awful about, but I felt bad and couldn’t let it stand.
Basically, though it’s just a little thing in Assassin’s Creed 2 and not nearly as involved as those other two games, I still am excited to experience it (despite the fact that after seeing the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode “Quest of The Delta Knights” I am wary of anyone who sees fit to throw Leonardo da Vinci into a middle ages story).
All said, though, this nonsense has convinced me not to buy the game. My internet connection is usually sound and I wouldn’t have any worries that my game would be interrupted, there’s still a chance it would fail. I know Ubisoft seems confident that people won’t have this problem very often, but I’m having trouble imagining a system like this that doesn’t affect most people who buy it.
22/02/2010 at 03:18 Nick says:
Still, it did have David Warner which is always a plus.
20/02/2010 at 00:44 FUCK UBISOFT says:
When I first read the FAQ (http://forums.mariosworld.org/showthread.php?t=204) I could not believe it.
Guess I too will NOT buy any such game from Ubisoft or any other company that implements this kind of method.
And the pirates WILL have a hard time “cracking” this because of the time issue rather than it’s complexity.
B.
20/02/2010 at 01:17 jsdn says:
If gamers choose not to buy into this new DRM, Ubisoft will take it as a sign of piracy can’t be defeated and will retreat to consoles. Ubisoft wins. If gamers do buy into the new DRM, well… the outcome is obvious. It’s pretty damn stupid that game producers are driving a wedge between them and the gamers that pay their salary, but they’re not exactly making history in that respect.
20/02/2010 at 01:52 Chiller says:
Well, this is one of those times I wish I’d learned to hack when I was young and resourceful (or something like that).
Regardless, I’m pretty sure that a few people coordinating a sustained DDOS attack on their servers for a few days right after launch will get some kind of message across.
20/02/2010 at 02:02 Supertonic says:
So they want a whole bunch of people to have their Windows computers connected to the internet 24/7? Welcome to virus hell.
20/02/2010 at 02:23 MD says:
I’m pretty sure most people do that anyway. Not saying it’s a good idea (I wouldn’t know), but for me and others I know of, it’s standard practice.
20/02/2010 at 02:23 MD says:
(well not literally 24/7, but whenever the computer itself is switched on)
20/02/2010 at 02:24 bill says:
Personally I think this is a good thing. I don’t think it’s a good idea, and I won’t be buying any games that use it, but I’m interested to see how it plays out.
If they have finally managed to make a pirate proof system (if!) then it’ll be interesting to see how it affects their sales. there are a few possibilities:
(a) Their sales go up by up to 600% as all those pirates now buy a copy.
(b) Their sales don’t change as all those pirates would never have bought a copy.
(c) Their sales go down because of (b) and also people avoid the new system.
Either way, it’ll be good to know for sure. I personally think (a) is highly improbable… in which case this’ll finally show that worrying about all those pirates is a total waste of time, and they should concentrate on paying customers.
Of course, option (d) is that it’ll get cracked, and then we won’t learn anything much. But even that would be an interesting lesson.
So I say that we just let it happen, and see what the result is. But if we don’t like it, we don’t buy it.
20/02/2010 at 02:26 Monkeybreadman says:
TO ARMS!!!!!!!!
20/02/2010 at 02:31 Monkeybreadman says:
Addition – Piracy is an issue for them, which makes it an issue for us. You should make a post asking everyone’s opinion of what an exceptable DRM (that would actually work) would entail. Think of solutions rather than pointing out the obvious problem
No DRM is not an option i’m afraid. Someone will always take something for free.
20/02/2010 at 03:34 malkav11 says:
Someone will take something for free whether or not there is DRM on it. It’s a palliative for the company’s nerves, nothing more.
That said, I would be entirely comfortable with a simple disc check (enforced by very light DRM, not the Starforces or TAGES of the world that are little better than viruses) on retail copies and Steam/Impulse/whatever proprietary DRM system on games purchased from those distributors. So long as I continued to have the choice as to which way to buy it, rather than being forced to plug the retail copy into Steam/Impulse/whatever.
Alternatively, I’d be willing to input a basic serial code in retail copies, especially if I could plug same code into Impulse/Steam/whatever as an optional bonus. No disc check in that case, though.
I have of course put up with worse, but I won’t accept DRM like Starforce (because it’s actively problematic), nor is any sort of online activation for a retail product acceptable, and certainly no install limits, always on server correspondence, etc. (because these prevent game longevity).
20/02/2010 at 02:30 bill says:
Has anyone ever broken down PC piracy figures by region? I know 85% seems to be about the standard number quoted, but what i’m wondering is if that is western countries, or (as I suspect) mostly made up of Russia, China and other countries where piracy is basically the only option for people.
It’d be really stupid if publishers were getting this stressed about piracy, when it’s mostly from inaccessible customers anyway.
20/02/2010 at 03:27 malkav11 says:
You know, the hilarious thing is when this was first proposed I seem to recall that they were very adamant that this was not DRM, not an antipiracy measure, it was “value adding”. Now they’re like “oh, we have to do this to fight piracy, but here are some things that might help the medicine go down.”
Their list of positives is pretty amazing, though: the obviation of two things that weren’t and aren’t necessary to begin with but have been forced on us in antipiracy crusades just like this unnecessary and horrible plan, and cloud saves. Which are nice enough in their own way but clearly don’t necessitate anything that Ubi’s doing, as witness Steam’s implementation of same which doesn’t do any of what Ubi’s system does except, you know, the cloud saving. It’s (a bit) like someone walking up and punching you in the face, then Macing you, then offering to kick you in the balls with steel toed boots and claiming this is good for you because they’ll no longer have to punch or Mace you.
20/02/2010 at 03:36 Walsh says:
One game company has tried this already:
20/02/2010 at 03:37 Walsh says:
http://riseofflight.com/Blogs/post/2010/02/05/LOGIN-OFFLINE-ACCESS-GRANTED!!!.aspx
20/02/2010 at 03:47 pimorte says:
This had to come eventually. Ubisoft is blameless. The pirates drove them this far.
For a long time, I’ve thought about the future of the PC as a platform for games, and I’ve realised something.
It centres around the fact that the PC is an inherently hostile platform for game development.
The PC is the home of piracy. Piracy is far easier to achieve with a PC – it’s an open platform with easiily available specifications on which you can install tools developed by others or yourself. A platform which has wide-scale, almost entirely anonymous distribution channels for stolen goods (BitTorrent, Rapidshare, IRC). It’s an environment where there are groups entirely dedicated to the cracking and distribution of your product – including groups that don’t just do it because they want it for free, but because they are ideologically opposed to you making money off selling software. It’s a platform where the main consumers of anything other than casual games are technically proficient individuals with a mind to not paying money for your product.
The PC is not a stable platform to develop for. There is no standard configuration. You cannot expect a clean process space.
Resident programs will interfere with your game. Drivers won’t be up to date. Hardware won’t play nice with each other.
Plus, when things go wrong, the gamer will blame *you*.
PC gamers (and here I’m referring to the type that have a Steam account and read PC gaming news, not the Bejeweled set) have a massive entitlement complex. Game cost more than $10? Excuse to pirate. Game comes with DRM? Excuse to pirate. Game is single player? Excuse to pirate. Game doesn’t have a demo months before launch? Excuse to pirate. Game has an unskippable title screen? Excuse to pirate. Game doesn’t include a free blowjob coupon in the box? Excuse to pirate.
Piracy means that as it stands, most genres of PC games are completely unviable in the long term. If your game does not include a system to stop piracy, you will lose large amounts of sales. Your game archictecture must be designed around a piracy-retarding format.
Best to have a game that cannot work by design without an online component that regularly updates. So multiplayer shooters on Steam can at least survive the piracolypse. So can MMOs, if you figure out how to survive when Blizzard exists.
What Ubisoft have done here is extend that relatively safe ecosystem to single-player games. It’s the natural, final evolution of the PC ecosystem’s response to pirates.
If this system means that large-scale mainstream games are not removed from the PC platform entirely, I’m happy with it.
The alternative is to have the PC degrade into a specialist platform for two things: online-only multiplayer games and indies not appealing enough to get a deal with a major publisher.
-pim
PS – As for acceptance, millions of people pay monthly fees for single-player games. Look at World Of Warcraft. AION. Nearly all MMOs now focus a huge proportion of their development on what is in reality single-player content. Blizzard in particular for being the first to realise this is absolutely rolling in cash. A lot of people will still buy systems with online-only requirements.
20/02/2010 at 04:11 luminosity says:
Nice strawmen. It couldn’t be the case that there are a significant number of us who don’t pirate, buy games when they are reasonably priced (ie, the publisher not trying to stealth charge regions more, or put prices up) nd don’t come with insane DRM, and ignore them otherwise.
Oh no, we’re all dirty pirates just looking for any excuse to take a game for free.
Sigh.
Why do you love Ubisoft so? They don’t love you. Their system sucks. Their system is inherently hostile to people owning their media. This is all part of a bigger push by massive publishers to move people away from a media owning mind set to a media as a service mindset, where you just keep paying them more and more for the same things you would have had for free. Corporations are required by law to be evil, if they are public, and evil is profitable. They. Are. Not. Your. Friends.
20/02/2010 at 04:18 Metroid48 says:
You lost me here:
While I am opposed to pirating games, I have to point out that this system won’t actually prevent piracy. Once someone finds a way around it, which will probably be within a week of release, it’s done and the DRM remains only to annoy paying customers.
The only way to actually prevent piracy is to have the core content being streamed to the customer. This naturally happens with any multiplayer-only game (unless you’re going to play only with bots…) and with most MMOs. However, the reason the practice is acceptable is because those games have a focus on other players; they are not singleplayer, even if some may seem like it at times.
You have to keep in mind what the point of DRM is: peace of mind in that people have to pay to access your game. The problem is that any singleplayer games get cracked almost immediately, sometimes before release even. As a result, DRM only ends up deterring paying customers and a couple of people who might try to use one copy on multiple machines, which isn’t where the big loss is anyway.
I think publishers have lost sight a bit of what the net result of DRM is. It sometimes prevents piracy for a few days, after which it is no longer effective and only affects the paying customers’ experiences, always negatively (or not at all). I admit, it might be valuable purely to get those who must have the game at release to pay, but that’s all. I don’t want to see these big (singleplayer) titles removed from the pc either, but DRM – especially when this strict – is not the solution.
20/02/2010 at 04:20 bill says:
Maybe so. But the PC has always been this way. The Piracy figures seem to be a huge distraction from the sales figures. Many PC games nowadays sell well, many sell as well as they always have. PCs are much easier to develop for than they used to be, with DirectX and middleware that takes a lot of the hassle out of it.
If 95% of the people in russia or china pirate a game, that doesn’t have any affect on the number of people who buy it. PC games regularly outsell Wii games, despite the supposed massive piracy.
I’m assuming that if you feel this is an effective solution then you expect Assassin’s Creed 2 PC to sell 666% of Assasin’s Creed 1 PC? What if that doesn’t happen? What if it sells around the same amount? It shows that piracy and sales are unrelated.
PC gaming hasn’t changed – it’s console gaming that has been changed.
20/02/2010 at 04:22 sigma83 says:
Counterargument @primorte: Build a better product. Build a product that people will ant to pay for, at prices that will make people go ‘yeah I would pay that.’
See what happens when steam cuts prices 75%. See the World of Goo sale. See iTunes. Build a better distribution system. Make it easy for people to give you money.
Don’t insult your customers with DRM. See Sins of a Solar Empire. See Demigod. Both had no DRM other than the account required to patch and play online. (an argument you made) One could also argue that this can serve as a demo. Hey I quite like this game. I want to play it onilne with my friends.
If something is a fact of life, trying to eliminate it is not as efficient as incorporating it into your process and planning for it. Piracy is a fact of life. Not everyone has the means or the desire. It will always exist. The Industry At Large has yet to completely adapt to a system that incorporates and plans for it.
Gabe Newell put it best: A pirate is merely an unserved customer. Find a way to serve your customers.
20/02/2010 at 04:23 sigma83 says:
Curses, mega ninjaed!
20/02/2010 at 07:23 malkav11 says:
Quite aside from the several other ways you are wrong (many of which have been addressed by other people), Ubi’s scheme is not the natural extension of the MMO approach to singleplayer gaming. The reason MMOs aren’t pirated is not that they require an active internet connection, it’s that a substantial amount of the game execution happens on remote servers that the pirates do not have access to. This means that when pirates attempt to create unofficial servers (and they do), they have to employ an awkward combination of guesswork and reverse engineering from the data they do have, with the end result that a great many gameplay elements simply don’t work. They carry on anyway, because they are pirates, but people who want the real thing have to pay.
Ubi’s scheme doesn’t have this going for it. It’s just pinging a server now and then, as far as I can tell. Nothing essential to gameplay is executed offsite, so the pirates will simply patch out the ping. At most, they might have a little trouble doing something with the saves. Will crucial gameplay elements of singleplayer games be executed offsite at some point? Maybe, but this has some rather dramatic downsides and limits what one can do in the design of the game.
20/02/2010 at 08:48 ChaK_ says:
@sigma83
actually world of goo was one of the most pirated game ever. They reported like 95% of playing people didn’t buy it. Which is utterly sad considering it’s low price
20/02/2010 at 09:38 Riaktion says:
Personally I feel like Pimorte makes some good points, although they are obviously a bit sweeping and throws everyone into the same pot just like Luminosity says.
The truth is I am fed up with pirates ruining my past time, and then companies who make it worse with hardcore DRM, but the truth is I don’t know what the soloution is and thats the most frustrating thing of all.
For me… its the entire culture of most PC gamers these days and the fact that I don’t do anything about it. Do you guys do anything about it? I am talking about the friends I have that pirate games freely by downloading them. I try and tell them not to, but they don’t care, so do I report them? No, they are my friends, and they carry on.
How many of us are in this situation, I really don’t know what we are doing as a community to help fight the pirates ourselves, and it sounds like a lot of us don’t think this is even our fight because some of us feel the pirates are right in some of thier reasoning for doing it.
We seem to constantly throw it back at the companies to stop putting DRM on things and that way pirates will no longer have a leg to stand on, it will become plain old stealing.
Fair enough, but will that stop the pirates? I am going to say no.
The RPS community is one of the islands of PC gaming sanity in the nonsence that is the internet, and I would guess 99% of us buy our games, and I would love to say that its the minority (the pirates) ruining it for the majority, but honestly I have no idea if thats even the case when it comes to PC gaming. Certainly from the people I speak to at work etc… I am outnumbered as a legit gamer.
Alec makes a rallying call to stand up to Ubisofts DRM craziness and I agree with him. It punishes legit gamers and makes life harder for them and appears to be an over reaction which is a bit self defeating.
But should there be a rallying call to tell the pirates enough is enough as well? Should we be fighting this on two fronts? Should we be reporting our friends, reporting websites we all know about? Or is it that we don’t even believe anything will be done if we did? or that the pirates would find a way out of it anyway? Whats stopping us?
PC gaming is precious to me and although RPS and PC Gamer and the like have been shouting its praises from the rooftops, its starting to feel like the building they are stood on is starting to crumble and decay.
Is falling down under the weight of the very thing that makes it special and unique, the fact its open source.
And that just pisses me off.
20/02/2010 at 09:38 Brumisator says:
Yes, bear no mind to the fact that the piracy rate of Modern Warfare 2 was twice as high on 360 than on PC.
Blame the evil PC people, console gamers are all nice little saints.
20/02/2010 at 09:56 Dominic White says:
Twice the piracy RATE? That seems unlikely. Twice as many pirated copies, perhaps, but the 360 version sold about ten times as much as the PC version to compensate.
20/02/2010 at 10:04 Heliocentric says:
While we are all making up statistics 99% of all torrented modern warfare 2 was done by my mate steve who owns a server farm and was torrenting it between himself and his many pc’s.
20/02/2010 at 11:21 The7Seas says:
I’ve gone on about this before, but honestly, unless you’ve dipped a toe into the piratical seas you always sound ignorant when discussing it.
All the platforms have piracy. Releases on all the platforms are cracked, packaged, and distributed within days of the official game release.
This is also true of movies, books, music, software, and *any other digital medium that is in demand*.
Why? In great part, because they can, and because it’s challenging. Why do people pirate? Becaues it is human nature to optimize one’s time.
Steam and digital distribution in general has done more to convert piraters than any drm ever will. Why? Because they change the equation, they make it faster and more convenient to buy, than it is to pirate.
However, there are still a large number of people out there who don’t have much money, especially in eastern european, russian, and developing markets that on the one hand do not have the money required to sustain their gaming habit and on the other do not feel that they should restrain themselves to their economic situation. Honestly? Fair enough. It is very contrary to the american spirit, but for example you will probably never own a ferrari or a private jet or a luxury yacht in your life. If you could magically clone (not physically steal) one, would you not like to do so? Why should all the toys be reserved for the lucky few?
Most people that I know who pirate content of any sort, also consume paid content at a much higher rate than the average person. They might play 40 games a year, of which 30 are pirated and 5-10 are paid for. That’s much more than the average person.
It is simply not realistic to expect piracy to go away, especially as across the board the value, diversity, and attractiveness of content increases while the average earnings of a great number of people stay relatively stagnant.
Honestly I have no problem with that. It is the job of the publishers to make it less convenient to pirate than to buy, and the job of developers to figure out ways to add value in ways that encourage buying, and that’s their side of the war. They just have to make sure that they don’t go so far as to break the game, because then that flips the switch and people will simply pirate the game instead.
Looking at AssCreed2, I would say that it will be pirated more so than if it had not had this draconean restriction, as long as one of the release groups is able to crack the game, which I am fairly confident they will. Why? Because a cracked version of the game will be *markedly* superior to the uncracked.
One thing is for sure though, you can complain all you want about “how pirates are ruining it for you”, but it will change nothing. Piracy is here to stay as long as smart people with free time decide to turn to the challenge of cracking the safes made by content publishers. Which I imagine, will be always.
So in the meantime, hurt publishers that piss you off with YOUR dollars, and forget about griping about piracy, because it is like griping about the moon.
As for me? I buy games to the extent my budget will allow me (many more more games than the average person). I play games to the extent my time will allow me. Sometimes these factors are in alignment, sometimes they aren’t.
20/02/2010 at 11:27 Doctor Doc says:
Only it makes no difference because there will still be a crack days before release or hours after and then only paying customers are stuck with the terrible DRM once again.
20/02/2010 at 13:19 catmorbid says:
This shit has been going on for decades now. And it’s always been the pirates one step ahead of the developers. DRM really changes nothing. NOTHING! Oh – except that maaaybe… games could be cheaper without drm? mayybee…. It’d be nice to know you can enjoy your gaming experience without the hindrance of a DRM. How bad did Oblivion sell, with nothing more than a simple DVD-check as protection?
The point here is that people are fucking stupid – especially corporate people. When money gets involved, stupidity increases exponentially. Instead of adapting to the situation and trying to make the best of it, what do they do? The same fucking thing they’ve been doing for decades: making it more difficult for the paying customers to enjoy their purchase. How sane is that?
20/02/2010 at 13:43 bill says:
@ChaK_:
Re: world of Goo:
Wasn’t it’s 85% piracy rate about standard. It was about the same as games with DRM. Also, what no one asks is WHERE all those pirates come from. People seem to imagine it’s all rich american kids who can’t be bothered to pay, but it’s probably people in countries who have little other option.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-software-piracy-rate
20/02/2010 at 13:55 invisiblejesus says:
@bill
Yeah, I saw that link in the other thread, or maybe it was another post on this one. I forget. It’s interesting how the nations that get the best service from legitimate digital retailers seem to have the lowest piracy rates, even those nations that have a very piracy-friendly culture. Those that have high piracy rates tend to be nations where people just don’t have a lot of money to spend, and I would guess probably don’t have a lot of options as far as places to buy games. For that matter, it’s also interesting to note that a lot of the nations with high piracy rates are in eastern Europe, a region that’s producing a lot of really interesting and high quality PC-only games rather than retreating to the console-centric development model. I’ll leave it to better informed people to break down the facts and do a serious analysis, but I think it’s worth giving these figures some thought.
20/02/2010 at 14:32 yayayay says:
“Because they change the equation, they make it faster and more convenient to buy, than it is to pirate.”
that is the key thing, if only more companies would pay attention (and not just for games)
i’m a cold and callous pirate – i download tv, movies, music all the time. games too, but recently steam in particular has made it very very easy to purchase brand new games at an acceptable price point, reliably and instantly. so i pay for them.
i imagine that i’m a very typical pirate – i have money to spend, but i pirate because it’s easier and quicker. if the content providers can get it to me in a more user friendly way, i’m happy to pay for the privilege. ubisoft are going about this arse backwards.
22/02/2010 at 10:10 DSX says:
… “ideologically opposed to you making money off selling software.” …
This really isn’t true. Practically every single text document that comes with a pirated game or piece of software release invariably urges the user to buy it if they enjoy it.
22/02/2010 at 10:22 AndrewC says:
DSX: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE5pGeCUM-Y
22/02/2010 at 16:29 Axess Denyd says:
I would like to take a different tack:
The whole argument is BS because pirating is way easier on the Wii, and that has the best sales of anything.
20/02/2010 at 03:49 Urthman says:
One thing that could sink this plan pretty definitively is if the Ubisoft servers were hit with serious DoS attacks every time they release a game that uses this system.
I would never do or condone such a thing, but I might wonder aloud, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome DRM?”
20/02/2010 at 05:41 bill says:
I think that’d be counter-productive, as it’d allow them to claim that pirates were to blame for the system’s flaws. Much better to let it stand, or fall, on it’s own merits.
Given that almost every launch seems to have had “we were overwhelmed with unexpected demand” problems, I doubt it’ll even be necessary.
20/02/2010 at 16:18 Flimgoblin says:
New game release = lots of new players (assuming this doesn’t scare them off) = a DoS attack in and of itself ;)
See MW2 on Steam.
21/02/2010 at 07:04 JKjoker says:
i think it would work, if anything it would force ppl refuse to see whats wrong with this crap to feel the problem, in fact i think it would be the best thing that could happen, it just needs to hurt bad enough so that customers start asking “does this game need always on inet connection ?” when they buy new games
and btw, they will blame pirates for everything bad that happens with that service even if they have nothing to do with it
21/02/2010 at 10:12 iainl says:
Just about every big new release with an online component has a dodgy first day. If every Friday evening was flaky (to pick a random popular time for gaming) then nobody could ignore it.
20/02/2010 at 04:08 Walsh says:
Everyone should e-mail their local Ubi PR rep… keep it civil.
http://www.ubisoftgroup.com/index.php?p=69&art_id=
20/02/2010 at 04:43 Soobe says:
The same night I read the original story my Internet connection went out.
See, I work all day and for whatever reason, my ISP seems to find the time that I’m unwinding from a long days worth a work the best time to make the connection sketchy.
So my Internet went out and what did I do: fired up Mass Effect 2. Had I been wanting to play AC2 I would have been pissed, plain and simple.
My service is not cheap, in fact the best I can buy around here. But dropped connections and lousy service when you least want it are a reality–I shouldn’t be punished for that.
20/02/2010 at 04:54 Agnes says:
@jonfitt: Uh uh. No. You don’t get to have it both ways. Reviewers most certainly have a responsibility to their readers to inform them of the ENTIRETY of the product PRIOR to purchase. Failure to do right by their readers just makes reveiwers bought shills for publishers, for DRM is the first thing a paying customer experiences, NOT the game. The game means nothing when the DRM is an obstacle or hinderance. Devs have to live with that, unfortunately. I’m sure it is the height of insult for them to see a publisher smash the potential success of their work on the rocks of stupid or poorly implemented DRM, and we can feel for them, but for reviewers, who serve a readership and NOT (hopefully) any dev or pub, the full product, warts and all, DRM and all, must be outlined and yes, graded as that is what their readers will be paying for.
If reviewers truly want respect as journos, they must always side with their readers, not the producers of what they review.
20/02/2010 at 06:13 nine says:
The worst part is that when they shut down the master servers in a few years you’ll never be able to play again. They’ve made bague platitudes that ‘we wont do that’ but why the hell would they?!
21/02/2010 at 01:14 Wulf says:
Yup.
The difference between renting and a service is that a service has at least some need to uphold its reputation. This is why Steam has an offline mode (as I’ve pointed out before), and they’ve got a pretty good track record for making sure that the games people buy are available anywhere.
A rental is basically where you pay to play the game for a period of time. There’s no service tied into the Ubisoft rental system, and therefore there are going to be a lot of ANGRY PC gamers out there when Ubisoft do take their older DRM servers down. And they will, eventually. It might be 5 years down the line, but I’m still playing games from the early 90′s and on, so it’s not very reassuring. The game I’m playing a lot of currently, Myst Online, was originally released in ’03.
People do come back to games, and they’re going to come back to find that they didn’t buy a game, nor pay for a service, they just took out a VERY expensive rental.
20/02/2010 at 07:16 gryffinp says:
I’m taking the theory that Ubisoft’s PR department is in silent rebellion here, as evidenced by the linked interview and their FAQ, which absolutely fail to be even slightly positive about all this. Even the marketing department knows what a terrible terrible move this is, but someone Very Important is convinced this is the new way, and they are helpless but to make vaguely sarcastic FAQ questions.
At least, that’s the theory that amuses me the most.
21/02/2010 at 01:23 Wulf says:
This is very probably the case.
Any software engineer (or engineer in general) will tell you that if you do exactly what management (middle-management especially) wants then the company will fall apart, there are intelligent people even in an organisation run by complete imbeciles. Sometimes there’s not a lot they can do though if there’s no avenue for doing things right, so they just give up.
And that’s what we’re seeing here. Only a total buffoon would think that this DRM system even approaches upon a good idea, and only a moron (hello, Penny Arcade!) would think that this was meant to stop piracy, because an intelligent person would tell you that it can’t. The only thing you can do is:
1. Make your games easy to obtain and pay for.
2. Make sure that your content/price balance is fair, and provide free support post release.
All the DLC and DRM of late has only served to alienate people, and therefore sales will inevitably drop.
Look to your own house for your demon, Ubisoft, for even your servants tremble under its baleful gaze.
But… of course, idiot corporate people are idiots. Eventually they’ll drop the PC completely and then… then things will get interesting.
20/02/2010 at 07:30 Nonomu198 says:
757 comments isn’t 800 readers, far fom it.
20/02/2010 at 07:33 drewski says:
Yeah, that’s totally the most important thing about this story.
20/02/2010 at 07:46 Heliocentric says:
Given the concept of silent majority. There will be more than 800 rpsers who are upset.
20/02/2010 at 07:51 MD says:
And surely, Nonomu198, (if that even is your real name), we don’t need to remind you of The RPS Commenting Rulebook, which explicitly states that “all comments are to address the most important thing about the story in question”. NO EXCEPTIONS.
(Seriously though, assuming Nonomu198 was responding to Alec in the main article, rather than a comment I haven’t seen: Alec didn’t imply that the story only had 800 readers — that was the figure who “have said understandably upset things about” it.)
20/02/2010 at 07:55 MD says:
Looks like Heliocentric got in first, and based on his comment it seems that I may have misinterpreted Nonomu’s comment. If so, and the intent was actually to quibble about 757 being too few to constitute ‘nearly 800′, then I heartily endorse drewski’s mildly snarky response.
(Still reads to me like a ‘nearly 800 comments == lots more than 800 readers’ comment, but who knows.)
20/02/2010 at 08:28 Jim Rossignol says:
It’s in excess of 130k readers.
20/02/2010 at 08:59 Atalanta says:
I didn’t comment on the original post, but I read it and drunkenly ranted about it to all of my friends. I figure I’m accounted for somewhere in the repeat posts from some of the regulars.
Also, hey, way to completely miss the point.
20/02/2010 at 07:47 Snubz says:
It’s very fashion and cheap *where*?? Don’t just tease us! I need to know!
20/02/2010 at 08:12 DanPryce says:
Do I have to be online at all time to wear Ugg Boots? I don’t want to suddenly stop still in the street because I’ve lost connection to your server.
20/02/2010 at 08:36 Mr Lizard says:
A few thoughts:
1) There is no conspiracy to abandon the PC. Ubisoft are in the business of selling games, and they genuinely believe that this measure will help sales rather than hurt them. Keeping all those servers running will be expensive, especially at launch. If they didn’t want to make PC games any more, the only people to whom they would need to justify that decision would be the shareholders.
2) Assassin’s Creed 2 will probably sell more copies, but Settlers 7 (being a Windows exclusive rather than a months-old port) is going to be the real test for the system. If that game dies on its arse in its core market, they might just rethink. So tell all your German friends.
3) Every other major publisher will be watching this development closely, because if it does what Ubisoft think it will do, ie result in reduced piracy and/or increased sales, every big game will do something similar.
4) If they’re still using it around the time of Assassin’s Creed 3, why should they bother paying to keep those AC2 authentication servers running so people can play an obsolete game that isn’t making them any more money? Turning them off will increase demand for AC3. Simple economics.
5) One previous game that tried something similar was Rise Of Flight, which took six months to patch out the need for permanent internet connection. (Has anyone played it? Does anyone know if it kicked you out if you lost your connection?)
20/02/2010 at 10:49 Newblade says:
4) Same server can be used to authenticate several games. There’s no loss in letting one game keep working.
21/02/2010 at 04:42 Wulf says:
4 [NewBlade Rebuttal].) In order to fight the war against CYBAR-CRIME they’ll be updating their technology. In a client-server system this would require updates to the server and the client. Once Assassin’s Creed 3 is out it would not be economically savvy to continue updating the client patches for AC2. So the AC2 option is turned off server-side, and the client is left at client-DRM version win32.Ubi-A-023, whilst Assassin’s Creed 3 adopts the new, shiny client-DRM version win32.Ubi-A-025.
20/02/2010 at 08:56 Barry Shitpeas says:
@Pimorte: because, if we reduce your strawmen argument down to it, there is no such thing as piracy for the ocnsoles right? Right? Yeah, didn’t think so…
20/02/2010 at 23:59 FunkyBadger says:
Piracy is a far, far, far less prevalent problem on consoles than on PCs. To imply otherwise is disingenuous.
21/02/2010 at 04:31 Wulf says:
The Wii can be softmodded in under two minutes.
The 360 is a more difficult affair and yet there are five people in my neighbourhood (no, I’m not one of them, too much of a risk with an expensive console for me) who’ve done the firmware patch thingy with their drives, usually by sending it off or buying a 360 which has already been cracked.
I’d say that piracy levels on the Wii and 360 are probably almost about the same level as the PC, but the problem is is that it’s crackers versus publishers on the PC, rather than crackers versus a silly firmware hack. This makes it far more glamorous, as publishers come out with more and more draconic forms of DRM and crackers break them.
The important thing you’re forgetting is that on the consoles, it’s the responsibility of Nintendo and Microsoft to stop the piracy, not the publisher. This is why the piracy situation on consoles doesn’t get enough air time. But since some XBOX Live ban sweeps have numbered 1 million, I’d say it’s disingenious to think that the piracy situation isn’t almost as bad, if not as bad, as on the PC.
The only console that can’t be cracked with relative ease at the moment is the PS3, but that’s because the PS3 cannot be hacked, due to its encryption. When someone figures that out, it’ll become as bad as the rest, and then it’ll be Sony’s problem to fix.
21/02/2010 at 11:07 FunkyBadger says:
Wulf: but Microsoft can – and have – removed proven pirates from their service, the XBox live bans. Publishers can’t do that. Those pirates then have to pay Microsoft to regain access.
If all PC owners who had pirated games were “banned” I think the number would be a bit higer than 1m. Like, possible, all…
Also, the console hacks require hardware and software hacks – on PC you just download a file. Much easier to get into it on PC, if for nothing more than your (and my) fear about botching the mod and ruining your console.
20/02/2010 at 09:24 Atari says:
The fact that Ubisoft has said they will issue a patch if the servers are ever going to go offline means their system can and will be cracked. So within 6 months the pirates will be playing the games without the issues that paying customers have to deal with. Screwing with the paying customer is NOT the way to fight piracy.
20/02/2010 at 09:33 Tei says:
Thats probably a lie. If Ubisoft is bankrupt, do you think money will be invested to track down all the contracts to see if such patch is ok, then program the patch, and release it? Other systems that have closed his doors have never release such patch.
20/02/2010 at 13:37 invisiblejesus says:
Tei, I think what he means is that they’re acknowledging it’s possible to remove this DRM with a patch. And because it’s possible, crackers will figure out a way to do it. Whether or not Ubisoft would ever really issue that patch is besides the point, he’s saying because it can be done crackers will figure it out and do it.
22/02/2010 at 19:53 SheffieldSteel says:
Where is the lie?
If the software has been designed in such a way that the game is geniunely non-functional without the help of server-side resources (and for the sake of argument let’s include cryptologically interesting numbers in the “resources” category) then if the DRM can be removed by a patch, it would have to be quite a comprehensive patch – something that fundamentally alters how the game executes. That will be difficult to crack… and I’d guess that a leak from a disgruntled dev might happen sooner than a crack.
If on the other hand, the software is easy to patch to remove this DRM scheme, then we can expect a crack sooner rather than later. Packet sniffing alone might be enough.
20/02/2010 at 09:50 EBass says:
Lets stop talking about piracy, this is NOT about Piracy. Niether is it an attempt to abandon the PC.
What it is is a protracted attack on PC games to try to force the landscape to shift to the console model. We saw it with Modern Warfare 2′s dedicated servers as well.
Its to stop us modding games so they can charge us later for content we can create ourselves.
Its to keep them in control of when they ALLOW us to play the games. It won’t be long before we get yearly sports franchies turning off their servers at the instant the new one comes out “So the company can focus entirely on their new product to provide a better experience for the player.”.
Its to stop the PC showing the console types that a superior alternative to their system exists before the console market wises up and starts demanding the features that the PC offers, and their system COULD offer if the gatekeepers allowed it.
20/02/2010 at 10:09 Quercus says:
To quote Ubisoft “In the end it all comes back to one single truth: piracy is a big, huge, hairy problem. It’s a market that suffered a lot because of piracy..”
Really? Where is the data supporting the claim that the PC market has suffered a lot because of piracy?
This is the centre of the argument about piracy on the PC – the assumption that every pirated version of a game being played equates to a lost sale, which is frankly rubbish.
Hardcore pirates will never pay for their games and can’t be counted. And the more draconian the DRM becomes, the more that casual PC gamers will turn to download sites to get rid of intrusive and insulting DRM measures.
As Brad Wardell of Stardock has said; make the game for the paying customers and ignore the pirates.
The sad thing is that my wife has been really looking forward to this game and I’m not sure the stupid DRM will change her mind over it.
21/02/2010 at 00:01 FunkyBadger says:
You’re saying piracy on the PC hasn’t cost anything in lost sales?
Don’t be silly.
21/02/2010 at 04:23 Wulf says:
@FunkyBadger
Strawman alert! Strawman alert! Whoop, whoop, whoop! Man the anti-fallacy cannons!
Ahem.
He said: Where’s the data to show that piracy has caused the PC market to suffer a lot?
You say: Ahh, so you’re saying that piracy doesn’t hurt PC sales at all? That’s silly.
Spot the strawman!
He’s saying that he’s not convinced that it’s the ‘big, huge, hairy’ problem that they make it out to be, and in saying that he’s implying that piracy isn’t the sole cause of lost sales.
What you imply he’s saying is quite different.
And frankly, he has a point. Elsewhere in this thread there’s a bit of evidence which points out that, indeed, piracy isn’t as bad as Ubisoft makes it out to be. A large number of us here buy our games, myself included, of this I’m sure, and I’m also sure that we aren’t some sort of bizarre exception.
I honestly believe that when a person can pay for a game, they will. Hell, some even pirate games and then pay for them. I did this with Ace Attorney Investigations because there was three days between the releases, damn it, and my retailed box still hasn’t arrived in the mail!
I think that a lot of people are smart enough to realise that money talks, and if they want to see more games like the one they’ve enjoyed, then they have to put their money down for the developer to realise it’s appreciated.
But then, I have more faith in people in general than the average spod, I guess.
21/02/2010 at 11:11 FunkyBadger says:
Wulf: I actually noticed that “a lot” after I posted. Still thanks for your highly ammusing comedy stylings – is there a follow-up blog post detailing them?
As an experiment on the prevalence of piracy, I could go onto every DRM/Piracy thread and state something like “Piracy is wrong – all pirates are moral degenerates with no more right to live than a locust” – then we could count the angry rebuttals andexcuses posted for why piracy is okay.
I think we both already know the kind of response we’d get though.
21/02/2010 at 13:08 jalf says:
Still a strawman. His question was, and I quote, “Where is the data supporting the claim that the PC market has suffered a lot because of piracy?”
Angry rebuttals and excuses are not the same thing as “data showing that the PC market has suffered because of piracy”.
So once again, is there any data showing that PC games would have sold better and made more money for the developers, if piracy had not existed?
The number of pirates, or the number of times a game is downloaded illegaly is irrelevant. The number of people saying piracy is “okay” is irrelevant. The only relevant piece of data is: “would the elimination of piracy have caused more people to buy the game?”
21/02/2010 at 13:44 AndrewC says:
Jalf: such data is entirely impossible to gain, because you can never release the same game twice. You can’t release a game with uncracked DRM and without into the same market at the same time, so you can never have hard, concrete like-for-like statistics – making your demand for concrete proof disingenuous.
But then this whole corner of the argument is based upon one side saying ‘every pirate is a lost sale’ and the other saying ‘piracy doesn’t hurt sales’. Best to discount both sides for being grossly polarised in their views – such absolutist statements only distort the argument.
21/02/2010 at 20:12 FunkyBadger says:
As Andrew says – I don’t think every pirated game equals a lost sale, but some of them certainly did. So some harm was done.
21/02/2010 at 20:32 jalf says:
I’m aware of that. Note that I didn’t “demand concrete proof”. I simply said that FunkyBadger was making a strawman argument.
However, you can certainly produce statistics and estimates to guess at the impact of piracy on sales. And given the absolute panic that major publishers seem to be in, you’d think they’d have funded some research into this. Not “proving” that piracy hurts sales, but collecting statistics on how different games performed relative to expectations, and how heavily they were pirated. If Ubisoft seriously thinks this is such a big problem, it seems downright unprofessional not to base it on available data. Hell, they could even look at sales over time, not of single games, but revenue for the games industry or Ubisoft as a whole. Sure, the market was smaller 15 years ago, but they should be able to figure out to a decent degree of accuracy how much smaller it was. And that could give them an estimated ratio of “sales lost to piracy” over the last 15 years, say, from back when internet access was uncommon and slow, and so widespread piracy was harder to pull off, and up till today, when virtually everyone is able to download a pirated game in a matter of hours.
Of course it is impossible to produce hard proof of anything, but there are plenty of data sources that could be examined to produce some good estimates of how much piracy actually hurts sales. It could even generate some sympathy for them, perhaps allowing them to justify harsher DRM than they could otherwise get away with.
The fact that Ubisoft has produced no such data suggests to me that either:
- they haven’t bothered to look. Which is just incompetent and much more damaging to their business than any DRM or piracy could ever be. Perhaps they’re just scrambling to satisfy investors, or perhaps they’re really dumb enough to assume.
- they have the data, but choose not to publicize any of it. Which seems odd, since, as stated above, if it really shows that piracy does hurt them, it could be used to defend their DRM measures
The only data on the subject I’m aware of ( http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf ) suggests that the effect of file sharing on sales is “indistinguishable from zero”. If Ubisoft has data showing otherwise, why aren’t they showing it? And if they don’t, they frankly deserve to go bankrupt as they clearly don’t have a clue what they’re doing.
Agreed there.
Really?
Of course some of them represent lost sales, but there are also the additional sales generated by piracy: word of mouth causing the friends of a pirate to buy a game, or a pirate getting so hooked on a game that he goes out to buy it a week later, or people using a single copy of a game to play LAN games, and then decide they need this game for themselves.
As AndrewC said, it’s not so black and white. Some piracy equate lost sales, some part of it generates additional sales, and some has no effect as all, as the pirates in question would have never bought the game in any case. I don’t know what the ratio is between those three.
I agree that piracy probably causes some loss of sales overall, but it’s certainly not a sure thing, and it’s not clear that this loss is big enough to have “hurt the PC industry”.
21/02/2010 at 21:47 FunkyBadger says:
jalf: why do you assume Ubisoft have no such data? They know how many units they sell andthrough what streams. They might not tell us, but I’d be astonished if they didn’t know…
I remain unconvinced about the “sell on” effects of piracy – anecdotally, everyone I know who chips their console does it get free/cheap games. I’m happy to read that across
21/02/2010 at 21:53 FunkyBadger says:
THinking about this a bit more – I’m not the truth of piracy’s effects actually matters at this point, it seems the perception of piracy is pushing developers in certain directions (DRM, no mod tools etc.)…
Actually that’s wrong – falling profits are causing those shifts. They can be caused by lots of things – piracy for one, rising cots of production for another etc.
(As an aside its interesting to see the “no causation” argument putting in an appearance)
21/02/2010 at 22:33 jalf says:
(just for clarification, of course they have data on how many units their games sell, and they very likely have decent statistics on how heavily downloaded their games are as well. What I’m questioning is whether they’ve tried to correlate any of these information sources to tell them not just what the piracy rate is, but how many of those illegal downloads would have been converted into actual sales had piracy been eliminated)
Because if the did know, they’d have a killer argument for justifying their DRM systems: They could point to this data and show us that piracy is in fact crippling their business. Because if they publicized some of this data, they could come across as fair and sensible, rather than draconian and out of touch.
Because so far, the only public data I’m aware of suggests that piracy is fairly irrelevant: Record companies are not reporting diminishing sales despite removing almost all DRM from new releases and from several major online services over the last year or two. As far as I know, EA ditching their crazy DRM schemes hasn’t significantly affected their sales.
The study I linked to above concluded that the effect of file sharing was negligible.
If Ubisoft actually had meaningful data suggesting that piracy is in fact a crippling burden on the industry, it would be an obvious move to publicize it. Doing so would allow them to lobby lawmakers for harsher punishments for piracy, as well as justifying their own actions to consumers.
Anecdotally, many people I know have bought games after pirating them. Myself included. I know I’ve gotten 4 or 5 friends to buy BG&E just by letting them “borrow” my copy (which I bought only after pirating the game). I originally stumbled across the Total War series many years ago by pirating MTW. Since then I’ve bought every TW game. (and please don’t jump to conclusions now and accuse me of pirating every game and only ever buying those two. The truth is closer to being the other way around)
Of course, all of this is anecdotal. But that’s the point, isn’t it? There is some data supporting the “sell-on” effect, and some data supporting the “lost sales” one. As far as you and I are concerned, both are anecdotal.
(another anecdotal point is that I think you’re right about people chipping their consoles. The ones I know who do that are also solely interested in free games. But (anecdotally), my experience with PC gamers is very different)
Exactly. My question is how much those perceptions are informed by real-world data. I’ll gladly accept the 90% piracy rate figure since it seems to be commonly reported by many independent sources (which again is interesting. How come so many companies are willing to share this figure, but none are willing to share any data on how this correlates with sales or how piracy actually affects sales?), but we’re fooling ourselves if we pretend that this means customers would buy 10 times as many games if piracy was eliminated. Or even twice as many.
And how many sales will be lost due to DRM crippling their products and making them worth less to consumers?
They’re fighting a spectre, an imagined problem. Whatever the real effects of piracy, what they’re fighting is the phantom piracy which only exists in their heads. It doesn’t matter what the real figures are, because they dream that piracy is such a big problem that everything else is secondary, that every illegal download prevented is worth thousands of angry paying customers.
Which is why I doubt they’ve bothered to study the actual effects of piracy. They’re not interested. They’re clinging to their perception and blaming piracy for everything.
27/02/2010 at 21:14 Chris says:
Idiots–the market hasn’t suffered because of piracy, the market has suffered because of the draconian and idiotic methods to ‘prevent’ piracy that do nothing but punish the people who *did* pay for the game. (That, and the general economy downturn, of course).
20/02/2010 at 10:28 Lighthouse says:
While it may not do much posting on in this thread, I do know someone will read my comments and many will feel the same way I do. Hopefully someone from Ubisoft actually sees some of posts, but in the end it doesn’t matter to me anymore.
I have been an exclusive PC gamer since the early 1990′s – this is not an elitist stance, but merely for the fact that some of my favourite and former favourite genres have been PC centric games. Fast forward to today and many of the former developers and genres are gone, but PC gaming is still going on strong. If publishers want to kill PC gaming, then they just need to follow Ubisoft’s path.
I am one of the “apparently” few people that actually buy their PC games, as opposed to pirating them, but as others have mentioned, it has gotten to the stage now where I can’t be bothered to put up with crap anymore. I don’t have as much time as I used to for gaming, in fact my backlog seems to grow with each purchase. I have enough other games that if Ubisoft and a number of others went of out business, I would still have ample choice in games to play.
In the end, gaming is just another form of entertainment and I can get my entertainment from other sources such as movies. If I am going to be inconvenienced by entertainment, which is supposed to relieve stress not produce it, then I would rather not have it. Install limits, root kits, phoning home systems, multiple game logins and constant connections being required all put me off. It’s one thing for a multiplayer game to required a connection – it’s completely different for a single player game.
Sometimes crap happens, the net goes down – it just happened here in AUS yesterday where many international sites were inaccessible. Sometimes you may need to travel, who knows, but it is not acceptable for a single player game to have to required a constant connection. One time activations annoy the hell out of me and I can’t count all the games I have purchased on one hand, but at least you can still play without a connection.
This crap where the only method is to save games in the cloud and if your connection goes you are either unable to play the game or unable to continue from you save point is pathetic. It’s happend to me with Batman previously where I was unable to continue from my save game due to some GFWL issue or net I can’t remember, but the result was I was unable to play a single player game.
As I mentioned in the beginning, I don’t care for these issues anymore. If you are going to make it as hard as possible for me to not want you product, then fine I won’t buy it. Blame the pirates, blame whoever, but just leave PC gaming and go console exclusive, because you won’t be missed by me.
20/02/2010 at 10:34 DJ Phantoon says:
I think we can all agree on one thing:
Those damn Frenchie Ubisoftians hate the troops because they hate Freedum and ‘Murrica.
20/02/2010 at 13:35 invisiblejesus says:
That’s right. If you buy Assassin’s Creed 2, the terrorists will have already won.
20/02/2010 at 10:57 DaveyJones says:
“The alternative is to have the PC degrade into a specialist platform for two things: online-only multiplayer games and indies not appealing enough to get a deal with a major publisher.”
Is there something wrong with me if I would be completely satisfied if this happened?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no indie fanboy. (And I’m not a dev for anything. I just play the games, man.) I beat Crysis, COD4, Assassin’s Creed, and many other current games shipped out by major publishers. AND I enjoyed them immensely. But I’ve also played more Defcon than Civ, more Killing Floor than L4D, and more… well, Crayon Physics than anything. And don’t get me started on Solium Infernum.
Why is this? Several reasons. I feel better about buying these games from individuals, versus buying them from Faceless Corporation #21, because I know my money is going straight to those that brought me the experience. The developers are MUCH more responsive when it comes to debugging/listening to fans, the games themselves receive more patches and attention, and there’s much less of a rush to complete them, so the indie developers have more time to tweak every little aspect of their game. Granted, there are stellar companies (GSC/Ice-Pick Lodge) who actually have plenty of heart and soul, and DO pay attention to their (mostly rabid) fans, but even then, these are smaller companies (and strangely enough, happen to both be Russian) than giants like EA, which just seems to push out sequels when they feel one is due… *sigh*… or they don’t flesh out the first title in the series in order to wow folks with the sequel… Assassin’s Creed 2…
I guess my overall point is, that if the PC became indie and MMO only… hey, we still have consoles for all the big-budget, head-exploding back-flip-fests! And on the PC, we’ll still have Blizzard to keep the MMO ship afloat, plenty of wonderful budget/casual/indie games to choose from, and the occasional brilliant Russian first-person genre-bending interactive experience of awesomeness. No complaints here.
20/02/2010 at 12:37 Ysellian says:
@ pimorte. What’s wrong with large-scale mainstream games being removed from the PC entirely? Why don’t you just get a console?
20/02/2010 at 13:25 bill says:
Interesting figures on software piracy BY COUNTRY.
Can’t comment on the accuracy and how it applies to games in particular, but note that for example UK piracy is about 26% and US is the world’s lowest at 20%.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_sof_pir_rat-crime-software-piracy-rate
I hope all those iraquis and armenians who now can’t play AC2 make ubisoft a lot of money!
20/02/2010 at 13:33 invisiblejesus says:
That is interesting; those nations who are best served by legitimate digital retailers seem, generally speaking, to have the lowest rates of piracy. Shocking, isn’t it?
20/02/2010 at 14:31 cheezey says:
Indeed. Digital distribution allows for simultaneous world-wide releases, yet were still currently hamstrung by the archaic physical item model. Mass Effect 2 went gold just after Christmas, yet wasn’t released until nearly a month later. Not to mention that there was a 3 day delay between the US and EU release on top of this.
In an age where Digital Distribution exists such pointless delays scream of an industry unwilling to keep pace with the times.
Although I will admit I have a hard time seeing Johnny Foreigner, in the developing world, not buying food just so he can buy a legitimate copy of a game.
21/02/2010 at 06:06 DJ Phantoon says:
How DARE you insult Johny Foreigner, Cheezey! He is a hard worker and good man. He goes hungry so his two daughters can eat. I heard one of his daughters got someone to pay for her to go to school and he let her go even if he was afraid of what might happen like any parent. So don’t smack talk John. He deserves better.
20/02/2010 at 13:40 Initialised says:
Lets look at it from another angle.
New tech is often trialled on PC games, so assuming that whatever boycott/protest fails and the game sells well. How long is it until an always on connection is required for console games as they move from physical media to digital distribution?
20/02/2010 at 17:02 dragon_hunter21 says:
Wait, wait, wait. How is this an anti-piracy feature? This sounds more like trying to shove cloud computing down everybody’s throats with all the subtlety of a jackhammer.
20/02/2010 at 19:25 martin says:
i have not read all comments.
This new kind of DRM is over the top and it will only annoy paying customers.
Maybe the major publishers will abandon the pc for their AAA+ games but that should not worry us pc gamers. This void will be filled with content from other publishers and indies. We will maybe lose those Hollywood like Popcorn blockbusters but on the other side we will get some really clever and innovative games
20/02/2010 at 20:08 Iain says:
My internet occasionally cuts out for a second or two. Now, I can’t play this game.
Great work Ubisoft. =)
20/02/2010 at 21:05 Kurt Lennon says:
But is it balanced for lean??
20/02/2010 at 21:18 tssk says:
Entitlement complex? Moi?
Seriously I’ll tell you what stops me from priating.
Make it easier for me to buy the game than to pirate it.
I’ve gone from hating Steam to loving it because of how reliable I’ve found it so far in two years of use.
It’s even better than retail for me in that they at least seem to keep patching games so my purchases work.
I was really looking forward to playing Assasin’s Creed 2. I’ve become a PC gamer out of neccesity. PS3′s are too expensive, and 360′s are too unreliable. (I’ve seen the red ring of death at friend’s places three different times now. What are they making the motherboard out of…chocolate?)
I’m time poor. Sure I could pirate the game but quite frankly after screwing around with PC’s at work all day when I get home I want it just to work. That is my primary concern.
AC2 looks like it might not meet that need at least for the retail release. A pirate copy might do but if I have the choice of trying to find a yarred copy of AC2 vs buying a competitor’s product and playing it (or maybe doing another Mass Effect 2 run…), well…life’s too short.
I’d rather be playing than hunting for a yarred copy that may or may not work.
21/02/2010 at 00:04 FunkyBadger says:
I suspect a PC cabale of playing AssCreed2 will cost rather more than a PS3 and an XBox 360 combined.
21/02/2010 at 02:02 tssk says:
True. However I already had the PC. All I’ve needed to keep me up to date is a new video card. And that was way cheaper than a PS3.
The PC itself is three years old now but even now it can run Mass Effect 2 at full settings. Given it’s a console port I doubt I’d have trouble with running AC2.
21/02/2010 at 11:24 FunkyBadger says:
Fair point – although I thought AC1 was a notorious resources hog/unoptimised port.
20/02/2010 at 23:26 DethDonald says:
I’m the character who only has Internet connection on random occasions. I have it when visiting a friend, a family member, or at school. This DRM completely prevents me from purchasing this product although I originally planned to.
Thank you Ubisoft and thank you pirates for saving me $50.
22/02/2010 at 19:59 SheffieldSteel says:
Sorry, but you have not saved a penny… because you will spend that money on a different game by a different publisher.
Do us all a favour, and write to Ubisoft and let them know :-)
21/02/2010 at 00:04 noom says:
Decided to try one of them annoying facebook groups to spread the word. Briefly explains the situation and invites anybody to email support@ubisoft.com to say they are boycotting any product using said DRM.
Facebook group!
Join in! Invite some folks…
Or don’t…
21/02/2010 at 06:08 DJ Phantoon says:
See, piracy is bad, because piracy is bad. Obviously we are just whining for no reason.
CEOs gotta eat, too! They just happen to dine on gold plated bald eagles.
21/02/2010 at 06:11 Psychopomp says:
No one buys game—>Developer loses funding/Indie dev can’t support himself with just his games
But, please, continue on with your narrowminded viewpoint.
21/02/2010 at 06:18 DJ Phantoon says:
Uh, Ubisoft is producer and developer. Ubisoft Montreal was the developer, specifically.
How can the developer lose funding to… itself?
“Sorry, due to an error we can no longer afford to produce your games. You’ll need to look at other publishers.”
“What? We’re in house! That’d be like if EA went to Vivendi to produce a title!”
“Good idea. Start by asking EA. I’m sure they’ll want to produce Assassin’s Creed 3.”
21/02/2010 at 10:02 Psychopomp says:
In house developers are still developers.
22/02/2010 at 20:00 SheffieldSteel says:
That’s only American CEOs. British CEOs dine on gold plated beagles
21/02/2010 at 09:41 Ravenger says:
Consoles have less piracy than PC? Maybe for the 360, definitely for the PS3, but piracy on the handhelds is rife.
The DS in particualr suffers huge piracy due to the easy availablility of flash carts and the small download sizes of the rom files. I’ve known parents buy DS’s for their children and give them flash carts so they can get all their games for free. Yes I did have a go at the parents when I found out!
It’s interesting to note that the PS3 has no piracy, yet the games are still priced the same as the 360 and other consoles, so I don’t believe that if there were no piracy prices would drop.
Back on to the Ubisoft scheme, I think it’s a shame that my first action when hearing about a new game is to find out what DRM system it’ll be using. At least with Ubisoft’s scheme I can reliably skip everything they produce now without having to research it, since all their games will be using it. So there’s an upside at least. :-)
21/02/2010 at 11:13 FunkyBadger says:
The important things to look at are the percentages and the profit margins. I’d warrant the DS makes more money for Nintendo than any other system in question.
21/02/2010 at 20:17 malkav11 says:
Exactly. The DS is hugely profitable, as are many DS games. Despite it being trivial to pirate said games and them being heavily pirated.
But of course, piracy -must- be the scourge of PC gaming. There can be no other explanation.
21/02/2010 at 20:31 Uhm says:
It’s amusing how the least profitable console, PS3, has the least piracy.
21/02/2010 at 21:41 FunkyBadger says:
malkav: the point being that piracy is beyond the vast majority of DS users – the Nintendogs crowd, if you will. Whereas it’s easily within the compass of – ahem – most PC owners… sort of by definition, if you can update drivers and upgrade to Windows 7 then you can pirate games….
22/02/2010 at 02:37 malkav11 says:
The DS is if anything easier to pirate for than the PC. It’s trivial. Requires virtually nothing of the end-user. Sure, the casual crowd isn’t going to have the minimal knowhow necessary (or is very unlikely to), but there’s a massive casual market on the PC, for whom the same thing goes.
21/02/2010 at 11:51 nil says:
The fact that the game will be running on the user’s hardware means the system will be cracked. There is nothing you can do to prevent other people from using your data short of not giving it to them (as an interesting current example of this, and the tradeoffs involved, examine one of the open-source WoW servers, noting the amount and types of gameplay data the client actually possesses.)
21/02/2010 at 12:37 Mr. Rage says:
- Ubisoft launched Iron Wrath, a Rainbow Six 3 free expansion
- Game requires internet activation
- 3 years later ubisoft shut down the server
- I can’t activate my expansion
- Ubisoft don’t give a sh**.
Oh God, this again.
21/02/2010 at 18:40 Myros says:
pre-post caveat – I hate DRM. Im a gamer I have to, it’s the law.
Ok with that said one thing I think UBI have worked out is that the major ‘crack’ site does not allow cracks for games that do not require a DVD. They have in the past removed cracks and blocked discussion topics for any games who have no DVD in drive requirment.
Im sure the crack will still be found quickly elsewhere if someone is so inclined but for UBI I think it’s a percentage game, extend the time between retail release and when it hits wide pirate release and they win.
Of course from a gamer’s perspective they still lose anyway due to the rest of it.
22/02/2010 at 02:39 malkav11 says:
This isn’t really much of an obstacle. If one has obtained a pirate copy, one almost certainly has obtained the crack alongside it. The “crack sites” are mostly aimed at legitimate users who have no desire to have a disc in drive.
21/02/2010 at 23:53 FRIENDLYUNIT says:
Ok I get that I shouldn’t post here about it. But I must.
Someone must cry out for the poor huddled masses who simply want to play their singleplayer games and don’t have access to the internet.
You see, because they CANT. They are silent poor huddled masses, and they cant post here.
I take the point though. I will lurk outside the games shops and when I seem them I will tell them. Then I will give them a hug.
22/02/2010 at 07:15 Guy Jin says:
Personally, I would be curious to find out whether FunkyBadger’s IP address leads to a publisher or marketing company. His sophistry smacks of PR-fu.
22/02/2010 at 08:23 Ravenger says:
I think Ubisoft got the wrong end of the stick – when we said ‘PC games need dedicated servers’ we meant MULTIPLAYER games, not single player games…
Ironic isn’t it, just at a time when publishers are saying that you’d don’t need dedicated servers for multiplayer they’re forcing us to connect to their dedicated servers just to play single player.
22/02/2010 at 14:40 SheffieldSteel says:
Yeah, they just got a bit confused.
What they meant to say was, “you can’t have a dedicated server for your multiplayer game because all of our servers are busy authenticating the single player games.”
22/02/2010 at 08:29 Rob Lang says:
A pirated game does not mean a lost sale. An axiom most digitally based companies need to figure out.
22/02/2010 at 09:15 Ravenger says:
A pirated copy may not mean a lost sale, but zero day piracy does have an effect. When games are leaked days or even weeks before release you can lose sales as impatient gamers may well pirate your game just to get it early. Bragging rights are a big thing for some gamers.
Valve’s solution of not supplying the executable with the game and requiring you to download it on release is a good one, but one which can also lead to problems on launch day when the servers get hammered by thousands of customers trying to activate at once.
So even though I’m dead against Ubisoft’s system and limited activation DRM, I think something has to be done to stop zero day piracy.
22/02/2010 at 09:33 bill says:
@Ravenger:
It’d seem that valve has the best approach to zero-day piracy. And maybe it’s something other publishers should take note of.
Preloading, or Pre-selling would seem a good way to undermine the pirates. Plus companies need to be more flexible when it comes to street dates. If your game gets pirated 4 days before launch: go go go! Launch Launch Launch! Don’t make retailers and online sellers sit on their copy for days or weeks while pirates can get it already.
You don’t even really need DRM to stop most sero-day piracy. YOu just make a core part of the executable downloadable, and make sure you have enough bandwidth to let people download it on launch day.
Then you wouldn’t really even have to worry about street dates.. people could buy the DVD a week early, or pre-load it from online, and then on GLOBAL launch day (or before if it gets leaked) they could download the executable and play. Sure they might share around the executable, but then those people would have to wait for downloads, so they’d be behind.
22/02/2010 at 14:11 SheffieldSteel says:
Don’t you people realise that HOME TAPING IS KILLING MUSIC ????
Okay, okay, it might be taking a while…
24/02/2010 at 17:41 Spliter says:
People pirate because it’s easier. People pirate game they don’t trust. Demos don’t cut it because they only show you the best bits and so you can’t really judge the game based on it, especially if it’s at such an unaffordable price like 50$-60$.
What to do to combat piracy?
1-Make games cheaper. They are entertainment not something crucial for life, that’s why so many people pirate them, they want the entertainment but don’t want to pay far more than they think the game deserves.
2-Make it easier to buy the game than to pirate one. Valve has done a great job on this, buying on steam is a lot easier than looking through dozens of torrent sites, wasting entire day downloading a game only to discover the crack doesn’t work as expected.
3-Realize that pirates aren’t people who would buy your game, but people who wouldn’t.
4-Realize pirates are there to stay and spending more money on protection won’t make great difference (at least it won’t make positive difference).
5-Make pirates realize that if they bought the game they would get something a lot better than a pirated version they have to work their asses off not only to get working but to maintain.
6-Remember: the costumer is your friend, don’t use restrictive DRM. That only encourages them to pirate your games.
7-A pirate is a missed customer but one that’s interested in what you can offer, try to take advantage of that.
If game companies followed these rules I can assure them the piracy will get a lot smaller, and if not, it won’t get greater and you’ll spend a lot less money fighting them.
25/02/2010 at 06:09 Deci says:
@malkav11
“The reason MMOs aren’t pirated is not that they require an active internet connection, it’s that a substantial amount of the game execution happens on remote servers that the pirates do not have access to.”
Not to ruin your thunder about this but MMO’s are pirated but are hard to keep up to date due to content release, just look up private servers for your favourite MMO – Long ago with Ultima Online it was private shards and even now WoW is pirated with varied levels of content by someone hosting a private server that you modify one file to point the normal software to that server to connect to. Fact is, as has been said, piracy is a constant and should not affect people who genuinely want to play a game they paid for and this isn’t just a case of those one step too far situations but also attaching stones to your feet and throwing them in a lake – nobody who understands this drm will buy when they could go get a cheap preowned copy for a console for example.
25/02/2010 at 08:32 Igor says:
This is ridiculous! They are saying PC gaming is “dying” as in more mainstream games could be made for consoles only and not for the PC because of pirating. Thats like saying, okay so I’m going to give up a big percentage of my market share to smaller companies who cant afford to make games for all systems and switch over to the consoles!
Imagine that! EA, Blizzard, UBI, THQ, and so on… completely moving away from the PC. That would never happen, not because of piracy. There is to much greed involved. Its like bootlegging a movie, Avatar make 2 billion already… I don’t think Jack Cameron cares if someone steals even a couple hundred thousand copies. The point is, no matter how bad piracy is, GREEDY companies are worse!
PS: I agree with Dan, UGG boots shouldn’t require internet connection! but something like a cell phone should require service to call (if you get what I mean), as should multi-player based games. You can’t play a game on the internet without an internet connection, thats why its okay if the customer has to stay connected (Starcraft 2 for example.
I personally don’t believe that they cant come up with a better system like a small program that installs from the game (when you buy it or from the CD that makes sure you have a legit copy without being an annoyance)
Its wrong for them to punish anyone, even the pirates because its a lack of innovative security on their part. Big companies with big money that could easily invest into a much better system for protecting the game.
Next thing you know we need to make 6 accounts to play a freaking single player game!
04/03/2010 at 02:23 anotherman7 says:
http://www.infoaddict.com/ubisofts-new-drm-cracked-in-under-25-hours
Looks like the inconvenience for the consumer was worth it… because it’s stopped the… pirates? SHIT!
13/12/2010 at 21:17 windshield repair kit says:
This DRM is so draconian. Assuming that Ubisoft is not too simple minded, that it will at least work. If enough stuff is kept server side then, while it will be cracked, it may take a good while longer. An uncrackable game for a few months.
— windshield repair kit