Indie RPG Developer Details Why Ubisoft's DRM Will Be Effective

[Syntax Error]

The guy's underestimating Crackers (or was it Crack Teams?). The most successful anti-piracy method I've seen was on Spyro the Dragon: Year of the Dragon. Improperly cracked copies slowly deplete the amount of gems you can collect (you need a set amount of gems in order to unlock later levels). Took pirates two months to crack that.

Lesson: If you want piracy to have a lesser effect on your sales, make sure that your copy protection/DRM is not so goddamn blatant.

 

[Olrod]

Vogel relates the new DRM to something like World of Warcraft or playing Modern Warfare 2 online. If you disconnect, you're done, and all saved info is handled by the servers rather than being kept on each user's machine.

I thought the game didn't automatically save your progress, you had to save your game manually? if you get unexpectedly disconnected after an hour of playing and you didn't save recently, then say goodbye to all that hard work.

Or was it another game I'm thinking of?

 

[theultimateend]

I'm sure all the people will do is make the server 127.0.0.1 and then have your game constantly saving to your system.

Won't even screw with your internet connection.

I find myself in an interesting position.

On the one hand, I'd like to believe Ubisoft's programmers are smarter than making it that simple to get around.

On the other hand, it's stupid DRM to begin with, and thus I hope it is that simple.

Considering Adobe did something similar to this and the workaround is a crack and that I'm not going to be surprised.

DRM only hurts legitimate gamers. It accuses the legitimate purchasers of being thieves, it punishes them for not being thieves, and it costs them more (again for not being thieves).

Just like those FBI warnings on DVD's, they just accuse the legitimate people of being thieves.

In the end, according to another article on this very website, the amount of pirates who would ever buy the product is negligable. Which means, since no physical product is actually stolen, the stock of the product does not change and the sales do not change.

What it really is a question of is how much people hate others enjoying their stuff without them seeing a return from it.

Do I suppose piracy? Not at all, do I see any evidence that it is hurting sales, apparently not if the statistics are correct.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/7225-Experienced-Points-Piracy-Numbers

Quote "If the 1 in 1,000 number was at all indicative of the rest of the industry, then it would be almost worthless to fight pirates at all. "Perfect DRM" would only result in an additional 0.9% increase in sales. Less than a single percent." - Shamus Young

In other words, piracy doesn't appear to be hurting the developers, it is actually hurting the people buying the games. Because they are getting punished for people who aren't even part of the targeted demographic (IE Buyers).

What we appear to have is a battle of principles and not a fight for survival. At least from what I've read.

Also again, to clarify, I do not pirate nor do I support it. But I DO buy games and movies and I DO get accused of being a thief each time I do. Which is why I'm less likely to continue doing either. Lately I've instead started reading and writing more. So I guess it was a positive to be wrongly accused of a crime.

 

[Syntax Error]

Pff. Back in the old days, publishers could never own your saved games, simply because they weren't there. Every time you played a game you start at level one, and when you're halfway through and had to turn off the machine, you could start all over again.

(You can never overuse italics)

I kid. Well, it seems that preventing piracy and screwing over legit customers are directly proportional. It's a shame, really.

Wait a minute, aren't we overlooking a blatantly obvious backdoor here? Correct me if I'm wrong, but this DRM prevents you from saving your game on your computer, right? So, if you treat is like Super Mario Bros for the NES, couldn't you simply not save and just leave the game running so you can continue playing later? I expect it would be easy enough to have the game actually running without having to connect to the servers, so you can just leave ACII running on the menu screen until you feel like playing again. It's impractical, but probably easier than the other options. And it's ideal for shorter games that you can finish if you put your back into it for a day. Or am I terribly wrong somewhere in this reasoning?

The games require you to be connected to the internet all the freaking time. If your ISP chokes for even a second, say bye bye to all your progress so far from the last check point.

 

[EnzoHonda]

The guy's underestimating Crackers (or was it Crack Teams?). The most successful anti-piracy method I've seen was on Spyro the Dragon: Year of the Dragon. Improperly cracked copies slowly deplete the amount of gems you can collect (you need a set amount of gems in order to unlock later levels). Took pirates two months to crack that.

Lesson: If you want piracy to have a lesser effect on your sales, make sure that your copy protection/DRM is not so goddamn blatant.

That's a cool way of protecting against cracking. "I cracked it! The game works fine!" Even if every game tried that sort of thing, it'd be difficult to crack. How long would it take for someone to figure out that a key dialogue tree from 1/3 the way into an RPG doesn't exist in badly cracked games? Its uniqueness reminds me of Leisure Suit Larry's way of age verification. You had to answer questions that only an adult would know if you wanted to play the game. (It had problems, but was still innovative, and thus, neat.) If I remember correctly, The Bare Naked Ladies put tons of "fake" versions of their songs on the Internet just to clog the system.

 

[John Funk]

If only there was a third option besides buying the game or pirating it. You know, a way to show we're not willing to bend over and take it up the pooper.
Oh wait.

... pirate it through usenet?

Don't be a pirating dickhead and just not buy the game? Is what I think he meant.

Ubisoft has done something tyrannical here, sure, but they've still got the moral high ground above pirates and thieves.

 

[Scrythe]

Don't EVER say something's impossible for pirates. Remember the last few models of the PSP? They were all hacked withing a week. Each one boasted some kind of "magical anti-pirate hardware/software".

 

[Shadeovblack]

Resistance is futile.

 

[Turtleboy1017]

Effective at stopping piracy, sure. But it's equally effective at stopping sales. I'm not buying Ubisoft anymore, are you?

Splinter Cell Conviction, and as long as they don't release anything else that completely mesmerizes me, yeah I'm done with them.

 

[samsonguy920]

Effective at stopping piracy, sure. But it's equally effective at stopping sales. I'm not buying Ubisoft anymore, are you?

I'm not buying any of their products with this DRM. Too many things can go wrong, some of them even criminal. What's to stop some bored IT to dig into the accounts and use those for their own game? Or even a hacker?
What's really stupid about this, is they are using servers basically in the same way as for an MMO, without collecting monthly payments to maintain them or pay the people keeping them running. So this money they expect to make with deterred piracy is going to be eaten up by server maintenance. And it isn't going to be as long as Mr. Independent Developer thinks.
What's going to suck is when Ubisoft sees small returns for AC2 for pc, is they are going to let go of the wrong people. The dimwits who came up with this idea are going to stay, coming up with more dumb ideas.
Granted Blizzard's approach with Battle.net is along the same lines, but there is a certain amount of trust going on here, and Blizzard does have a constant instream of money to keep the servers dependable. Plus last time I checked Starcraft will just be a one time internet registration, with the online only necessary for multiplayer games. May have changed though, but I will trust Blizzard over Ubisoft any day.

 

[aaron552]

Option 3 is the most likely one, IMO. Given that the FAQ on Ubisoft's site says that they will release a patch when they retire their servers, I wouldn't be surprised if the local savegame code was already present in the exe, but disabled. Therefore the patch would only have to be a few kB, or less, saving Ubisoft bandwidth when they do release said patch...

 

[Therumancer]

Holy fucking shit.

Or they just edit any drm entries out of the primary exe file. LIKE THEY'VE BEEN DOING FOR DECADES.

Actually I think the point is that parts of the game are not stored on your computer or on the disc, so this means you never have access to an intact product to crack. Even if you did so, you'd be missing information present on their servers. For example with the save games being stored on their servers you'd have to pretty much create a save game system.

If the game is playable, it has to be on your computer. Period. Whether they have to dump the ram and dig the game code out of it or what.

This isn't some flying car bullshit like that onlive scam, where games can be streamed over the internet through the power of magic and investments.

No magic involved. It's just like an MMORPG where your character and item data and such are not stored on your system, which also means you can't cheat by editing the files. Also if you look at games like Ultima Online, it took a long time for the private shards to catch up with the game because half the code wasn't stored offline so when they "hacked it" a good portion of the game was unworkable or disabled and it took them a long time to effectively construct the stuff that they were missing.

SOME of the data is on your system, and some of what it needs is on theirs.

Now granted, with enough persistance eventually someone will be able to get it running, but looking at hacks of MMOs (which is what this is turning the game into, a single player game using the same principles of an MMO for security purposes) it can take a very long time.

No comparison to "Onlive" and what they may or may not have promised. If you look, you've already seen where this is going.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like it. But I do agree that this has the potential to be fairly effective. Of course that effectiveness comes at the cost of massively inconveinencing me, and that means I am not going to support these games.

The problem though is that I anticipate most people who are going to complain about this are still going to buy the games and continue to complain. Much like how people complained about the lack of servers for Modern Warfare 2, but then in the end bought the game anyway in such numbers that it shatttered all previous records.... and pretty much demonstrated why internet complaints, and even displays of organization, are totally ignored by an industry that treats us in a similar fashion to how pushers treat known junkies.

 

[Sneaklemming]

Vogel relates the new DRM to something like World of Warcraft or playing Modern Warfare 2 online.

It's ironic that he uses those examples, since World of Warcraft has pirate servers that are run and maintained, and MW2 multiplayer was cracked by pirates so that they can play amongst each other.

Maybe he should have likened it to steam? Except that was hacked too... doh.

 

[TwelveBaud]

In the documentation (not the press release) for the technology, Ubi said that save games would be saved locally and then synced to the servers in the background, on a separate channel than the DRM connection, and that for ACII and three other proposed games all content for the main game is on the disc.

So for all the people debating "how do we do savegames?" ... uh, already done. All pirates have to do is remove the constant-connection requirement, and disable the savegame uploader, the second half of which is already documented by Ubi themselves (as a tech support measure).

 

[incal11]

Maybe this will deter piracy for the developers to see it has no effect on sales ?
one can dream; they'll probably refuse to see.

 

[Wakefield]

if the new drm scheme hurts sales, like many think it will, ubisoft will just blame piracy for it

You my good sir are exactly right.

 

[MorsePacific]

After seeing the amount of time it took pirates to actually crack the DRM on Batman: Arkham Asylum, I'd bet money on a fully-playable version of the game being out about two days after the PC version is finally released.

Less if the game gets leaked early.

 

[Robert0288]

The more ubisoft braggs about their unbeatable DRM the faster its going to be cracked. A few more articles and I think its going the way of MW2 that was cracked and availible to torrent within hours of official release.

Harder it is, the faster it will be done.