Hacker Group Claims Real Ubisoft DRM Crack

[lucky_sharm]

I doubt there would be any obnoxious DRM at all if people just didn't pirate games.

 

[Plurralbles]

Ironically, I expect the PC sales for AC2 will have jumped now that people know that they can remove the obnoxious DRM.

in a perfect world that is exactly what would happen. But no, they'll instead just pirate the entire game and either sales will be the same, or sales will drop. Gamers use this argument all the time, "Pirates aren't consumers and not every pirate copy is a lost sale" but it works in the other way that people who weren't going to buy the game at launch aren't going to buy it now either.

wall of text and snip of epic proportions

As much as that had to be said, I meant that the guy was probably over estimating the effect of the neutralization of the DRM and we will not see the upward tick of sales.

edit: GREAT post by the way.

edit: I also meant that I was following the general idea that there is a population of people who will do this, as gamers consider that there is a population subset of the games industry who pirate and if they couldn't they wouldn't buy the game in the frst place. I'm not dealing in absolutes here.

 

[Andronicus]

The only Ubisoft game I'm interested in getting at the moment is Splinter Cell: Conviction, and I plan on getting that on console anyway. I do however hope they manage to crack Settlers 7 though, so those damn, horrible, lousy consumers in Australia are actually able to play the game they spent their hard-earned cash on. Seriously, if all the DRM does is insult the people actually paying for your game, then there's probably something wrong with your business model.

 

[Lazarus Long]

(Epic objection baleeted)
Hope this helps to clarify why your statement was incorrect in a slightly more objective manner than just disagreeing.

That was the most amazing thing...
I don't even...
Bravo, sir. (slow clap)
And it's doubly amazing that that post was delivered by Pedobear, Ace Attorney.

OT: I'm with Shamus Young on this one. If I buy a game, it is mine to do with as I please. Play it without a disc or an internet connection, give it to a friend, sell it on eBay, eat it, whatever.

 

[KingTiger]

as Mr.Burns would say "EXCELLENT"!!

Pirates always made my life easier...so many free games :3

Time to visit the Pirates of the Caribbean. its my way of saying "Screw you" to ubisoft...hehehe I feel evil >

 

[Nevyrmoore]

OT: I'm with Shamus Young on this one. If I buy a game, it is mine to do with as I please. Play it without a disc or an internet connection, give it to a friend, sell it on eBay, eat it, whatever.

The problem with him is he really likes to ignore facts and evidence that contradict his opinions.

In that particular case, the standard EULA thats been shipping with every game (console, PC, handheld) for a decade or two flatly states you never had those "rights."

Actually, as far as I'm aware, the EULA is not on legally stable ground. If you have certain consumer rights the EULA says you can't use, then unless your country's laws are as thick as pig shit, your consumer rights win every time.

For instance, let's take the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

(1) It is not an infringement of copyright for a lawful user of a copy of a computer program to make any back up copy of it which it is necessary for him to have for the purposes of his lawful use.

(2) For the purposes of this section and sections 50B and 50C a person is a lawful user of a computer program if (whether under a licence to do any acts restricted by the copyright in the program or otherwise), he has a right to use the program.

(3) Where an act is permitted under this section, it is irrelevant whether or not there exists any term or condition in an agreement which purports to prohibit or restrict the act (such terms being, by virtue of section 296A, void).

This says that I may legally make a backup copy of a computer program, as long as I only use it personally. Now, if a company tries to prevent me from doing that, I will kindly point them towards the part in bold. That says that their attempts to stop me from backing up my software are null and void.

 

[Lazarus Long]

OT: I'm with Shamus Young on this one. If I buy a game, it is mine to do with as I please. Play it without a disc or an internet connection, give it to a friend, sell it on eBay, eat it, whatever.

The problem with him is he really likes to ignore facts and evidence that contradict his opinions.

In that particular case, the standard EULA thats been shipping with every game (console, PC, handheld) for a decade or two flatly states you never had those "rights."

Sometimes the law and justice aren't exactly on speaking terms. I wasn't trying to quote law, just what I feel is right.

 

[Treblaine]

Simple question, in the past 6 weeks... has Assassin's Creed 2 been hugely successful on PC?

Has it sold many many times better than any other PC game thanks to how Ubisoft apparently eliminated the Piracy factor?

No, sales are ambiguous due to digital distribution but all signs point to it being almost a complete flop on PC, precisely BECAUSE of the DRM. Look, I know Ubisoft don't really care about gamers and just want to make money, but surely they should realise that:
Bad DRM-> less sales -> less money

 

[BGH122]

Ironically, I expect the PC sales for AC2 will have jumped now that people know that they can remove the obnoxious DRM.

in a perfect world that is exactly what would happen. But no, they'll instead just pirate the entire game and either sales will be the same, or sales will drop. Gamers use this argument all the time, "Pirates aren't consumers and not every pirate copy is a lost sale" but it works in the other way that people who weren't going to buy the game at launch aren't going to buy it now either.

This is a formal logical fallacy. The following is a valid argument:


A1) All things that are Pirates are NOT Consumers

A2) All things that Buy Games are Consumers

Conclusion) Pirates do not Buy Games

This argument works because the middle term, Consumers, creates a necessary disjunction between the entities Pirates and Game Buyers since we know Pirates are not Consumers and to Buy Games one must be a Consumer. It's essentially the transitive property in algebra.

Your arguement here is invalid because its based on false facts. A person can be both a pirate and a consumer and often is. If im a big fan of the series or the game looks really good i will buy it. If im unsure of the game or think it only looks half decent then i will download the game. I bought both Fallout 3 and red alert 3 but also downloaded oblivion and c&c4. Sure i have probably downloaded more pc games and burt more ps1/2 games then i purchased but i do still buy plenty of games. Especially since you cant burn 360/ps3 games but thats a completely different matter entirely since 95% of console games i buy are used it doesnt hurt really effect the gaming market.

I hear what you're saying, but syllogistic arguments deal in absolutes even though the world doesn't really work like that (at least not at the level of meaningful high level propositions (by which I mean any proposition which itself consists of bundles of many, many other propositions e.g. "Today is nice", a simple attribution of 'niceness' to 'today' consists of an arse-tonne of axioms defining 'nice', 'today', 'attribution' etc)). My argument was syllogistically correct i.e. it did not incur any formal, informal or syllogistic fallacies, whether or not it's correct in real life is another matter. For instance,

p -> q

q a

∴

p a

is a valid syllogistic argument, but it's not only invalid in the real world, it's totally frickin' meaningless. However, one might claim that I begged the question [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question] on my initial axiom, All things that are Pirates are Non-Consumers and thus invalidated my conclusion. That may be a valid criticism, for syllogisms apply very poorly to complex real world situations because even fairly simple high level propositions in the real world are made up of tons of infinitesimally small syllogistic arguments on which they rest. Were we to really analyse here what is meant by our terms ('Pirate', 'Consumer', 'Game' etc) then my post would have stretched off into oblivion (and its length was comparatively already pretty damn close to the end of the universe).

Ironically, I expect the PC sales for AC2 will have jumped now that people know that they can remove the obnoxious DRM.

in a perfect world that is exactly what would happen. But no, they'll instead just pirate the entire game and either sales will be the same, or sales will drop. Gamers use this argument all the time, "Pirates aren't consumers and not every pirate copy is a lost sale" but it works in the other way that people who weren't going to buy the game at launch aren't going to buy it now either.

wall of text and snip of epic proportions

As much as that had to be said, I meant that the guy was probably over estimating the effect of the neutralization of the DRM and we will not see the upward tick of sales.

edit: GREAT post by the way.

edit: I also meant that I was following the general idea that there is a population of people who will do this, as gamers consider that there is a population subset of the games industry who pirate and if they couldn't they wouldn't buy the game in the frst place. I'm not dealing in absolutes here.

Fair enough, I'm glad you weren't offended by my post. Most times people seem to think I'm being pretentious or condescending when I employ syllogistic logic.

I agree that the cracking of DRM is very unlikely to bring in more sales than the month of unpirated sales the DRM accrued. However, as many have pointed out, this profit analysis is foolish for three reasons:

1) Stunts like this seriously damage Ubisoft's brand image (I certainly won't be buying from them again, which saddens me because I really wanted to buy Splinter Cell: Conviction, I suppose I could always get a second hand copy so no money goes back to Ubisoft)

2) The DRM isn't free, it wasn't coded (expertly coded, heck, even Skidrow gave kudos to the coders in the NFO file) and distributed out of the kindness of some computer scientist's heart, it cost a lot of money and now it's cracked. That's it. Skidrow have utterly cracked it and added those skills to their repertoire, making the next DRM that much less likely to succeed. Skidrow were given a month of free fun and Ubisoft squandered huge amounts of cash and untold lost future sales due to PR damage.

3) Stunts like this seriously damage the reputation of the entire games industry. It may be unfair, but humans have a limited working memory and, as Bartlett, and Anderson after him, noted, humans tend to rely on Schema (packed Long Term Memory nodes) to heighten the highest integrated chunk of memory and effectively allow for pseudo-complex fast decision making. In short: the entire industry will be tarnished by Ubisoft and EA's brush. If they don't act soon they'll be just as reviled as the once beloved music industry and that will further compound a sense of justice in piracy.

I have not made my mind up about the ethics of piracy. I am damn sure it is not stealing, regardless of the propaganda, for the owner of the data is not deprived of anything but a potential, yet non-existent, reward for said data and nor, in most cases, is (s)he even aware it occurred. I do not see how a non-loss we are not even aware of can be construed as the same as physically taking something from somebody else which will consciously impact them. That does not mean I consider it case closed, I'm still ruminating, attempting to disprove myself.

Thanks for the compliment on my post.

(Epic objection baleeted)
Hope this helps to clarify why your statement was incorrect in a slightly more objective manner than just disagreeing.

That was the most amazing thing...
I don't even...
Bravo, sir. (slow clap)
And it's doubly amazing that that post was delivered by Pedobear, Ace Attorney.

OT: I'm with Shamus Young on this one. If I buy a game, it is mine to do with as I please. Play it without a disc or an internet connection, give it to a friend, sell it on eBay, eat it, whatever.

Well, PedoBear in his best suit. He's always very serious and presentable when in his best suit. He's really a misunderstood genius you see, following in the footsteps of Socrates (who too had a thing for the little children if we're to inventively analyse the charge against him of 'corrupting the youth of Athens').

Thanks for the compliment on my post.

 

[Treblaine]

OT: I'm with Shamus Young on this one. If I buy a game, it is mine to do with as I please. Play it without a disc or an internet connection, give it to a friend, sell it on eBay, eat it, whatever.

The problem with him is he really likes to ignore facts and evidence that contradict his opinions.

In that particular case, the standard EULA thats been shipping with every game (console, PC, handheld) for a decade or two flatly states you never had those "rights."

Actually, as far as I'm aware, the EULA is not on legally stable ground. If you have certain consumer rights the EULA says you can't use, then unless your country's laws are as thick as pig shit, your consumer rights win every time.

For instance, let's take the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

(1) It is not an infringement of copyright for a lawful user of a copy of a computer program to make any back up copy of it which it is necessary for him to have for the purposes of his lawful use.

(2) For the purposes of this section and sections 50B and 50C a person is a lawful user of a computer program if (whether under a licence to do any acts restricted by the copyright in the program or otherwise), he has a right to use the program.

(3) Where an act is permitted under this section, it is irrelevant whether or not there exists any term or condition in an agreement which purports to prohibit or restrict the act (such terms being, by virtue of section 296A, void).

This says that I may legally make a backup copy of a computer program, as long as I only use it personally. Now, if a company tries to prevent me from doing that, I will kindly point them towards the part in bold. That says that their attempts to stop me from backing up my software are null and void.

Both you and them will have to pay a LOT of money to lawyers before that law will ever even begin to be accepted.

 

[omega_peaches]

20 bucks says that this will be patched

 

[BGH122]

20 bucks says that this will be patched

It can't be patched.

Skidrow released a Scene 'proper' release i.e. the .exe has been 'fixed'. It will no longer phone home to Ubisoft to check for patches so Ubisoft can make as many patches reinforcing the DRM as they please because the patches will never be downloaded by anyone using the 'fixed' .exe. Once cracked, a game's DRM can't be restored unless the user is stupid enough to manually patch the game (and even then, all the patches for worthwhile games are always cracked on the day they're released because the reverse engineers have already sussed the underlying mechanism by which the DRM works and can easily detect any tweaks to it in the patch by simply comparing the two decompiled .exe's (pre and post patch) to see what the new one is calling and then just disable that string).

Which is why continuous patches for the sole reason of attempting to prevent DRM circumnavigation really annoys me because, as per usual, only the non-pirate is affected.

 

[Playbahnosh]

I would've guessed Razor would do the proper crack, but whatever. SkidRow is as is good as any, since CORE, Fairlight and Hybrid went down the drain, they are the two most prominent teams out there. My EIC pays for most the games I play and review, so I don't have to use cracks for many years now, but of this Ubi kind of DRM gets popular, I might even have to go back to that.

To be honest, I don't really care about Asscreed or any Ubisoft games since they pulled that DRM fiasco, I'll never buy any of their games ever again, but I feel a strange warmth inside knowing, that justice had been done.

 

[Nevyrmoore]

SkidRow is as is good as any, since CORE, Fairlight and Hybrid went down the drain, they are the two most prominent teams out there.

By down the drain, you mean they're no longer up to scratch, or not releasing? Because I know Fairlight's ISO side are still releasing.

Still, damn, Fairlight. That takes me back to my Amiga years. I remember seeing a lot of Fairlight cracktros back when I was too young to buy my own software. Also back before I realised all those Amiga games my dad had were actually illegal.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

I would've guessed Razor would do the proper crack, but whatever. SkidRow is as is good as any, since CORE, Fairlight and Hybrid went down the drain, they are the two most prominent teams out there.

There is a Fairlight kicking around at the moment but it's not the same Fairlight.

 

[antipunt]

You know the funniest part?

Now that it's been cracked once they know how and the cracking will get faster every time this system is used.

Right here. I'm pretty sure that other games featuring that DRM will be cracked much faster than AC2.

Interesting, the corners of my lips involuntarily curled upwards. Honestly.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

2) The DRM isn't free, it wasn't coded (expertly coded, heck, even Skidrow gave kudos to the coders in the NFO file) and distributed out of the kindness of some computer scientist's heart, it cost a lot of money and now it's cracked. That's it. Skidrow have utterly cracked it and added those skills to their repertoire, making the next DRM that much less likely to succeed. Skidrow were given a month of free fun and Ubisoft squandered huge amounts of cash and untold lost future sales due to PR damage.

Hell, this new DRM scheme is the most fun the entire cracking scene has had in ages. Nothing gets that mob excited like a brand spanking new 'uncrackable' DRM system.

It's not just the Skid Row crew who'll be better prepared to tackle this scheme in the future, all the cracking groups will be. There's no way they'd be able to restrain themselves from showing the other crews just how they did it even if they wanted to, which is highly unlikely in the first place.