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

[AceDiamond]

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.

Given the nature of this whole kerfuffle I bet the game will be leaked early and cracked before it even hits shelves.

 

[matrix3509]

This guy really shows his ignorance of piracy techniques. He treats each of those things like they are some impossible wall to pirates, when in reality all three of those things have been done on previous titles and failed spectacularly.

Also, you might not what to say that pirates will have a hard time cracking something. Remember Spore? Yeah...they take it as a challenge. I fully expect that those games with this DRM on it will start appearing on the torrents a least a day before their official releases.

 

[MisterColeman]

Whoever wrote that has no idea how good hackers think. They are going to trick the game into thinking a random folder on the hard drive is the server. They can reverse engineer to see what kind of signals the game believes it should get from the server and provide code in the folder to do that.

1 is easily the most likely choice, or a combination of 1 and 3.

I am fortunate in believing most games are garbage, so when I hear something has DRM I don't buy it or pirate it, I just don't play it at all ever, and I don't feel like I am missing out on anything.

 

[Nova5]

Or...

4.) Create an emulated lightweight 'server' on your local machine (VM, maybe?), redirect application there via hosts file.

I'm not a pirate. This just isn't rocket science.

Let's not forget the good ol' fashioned "playthough in one solid sitting" gambit.

And, on a final note, I honestly believe this is going to kill Ubisoft's PC gaming market. Few people want to put up with this kind of crap. For any effect this may have 'undermining piracy', it's just as likely to undermine their own sales. In other words: Crap shoot.

 

[Alexander_Q]

I remember reading an earlier Escapist article wherein it was estimated that "perfect DRM" could only increase sales by 0.9%.

I would like to see estimates of sales lost to:

-People who don't have constant internet connections, or internet connections at all
-People who will not buy in protest

I'm just guessing, but I'd imagine those numbers may add up to more than 0.9%. Add the cost of implementing this DRM, and you have a pretty ignorant marketing move.

 

[VinnyKings]

Pfft I give it a week.

A month at the most before pirates crack it.

Edit: DRM is just another way to shoot yourself in the foot.

 

[Asehujiko]

1. Make your own, free saved game server and alter the application code to use it.

This means a lot of work and expense, both to duplicate Ubisoft's game saving code and to set up and maintain the servers. Won't happen.

Except that the game saves progress offline be default and the steamcloud ripoff is optional. The only thing they need to change is for the game to not ask for permission to be played. Or reroute the request to the pc itself which gets a tiny ubiserver.bat file that just says "yes" to all incoming requests regardless of the serial key used. Which is standard practice for cracking games with securom. If they are truly lazy, they can change the time the game is allowed to run offline before crashing from 2 seconds to 2 years, which takes about 5 minutes, a hex editor and only rudimentary knowledge of code.

Good job Ubishit, bribing people for your scare campaign, i almost thought the guy was genuinely underestimating hackers instead of just letting out a vital piece of information that everybody knows already.

 

[Abedeus]

How long did it take to pirate AC1? Oh, right. Minus one month. You could play a semi-playable version a month before the official date.

 

[Doug]

Executive: "Yay, no pirate copies have been made!"
Accountant: "Ok, so, how many copies of our game have we sold?"
Executive: "Well... only 6. But they've not been pirated!"
Accountant: "...? This system cost 6 million to implement..."
Executive: "And its worked! No pirates at all."
Accountant: "Excuse me, I feel the urge to prepare bankrupcy paperwork."

 

[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.

Considering other development houses are seeing fine returns by not treating their customers like criminals, they don't have the moral high ground at all.

They most certainly do, because they aren't thieves. They're being jerks and horribly shortsighted, but they're still better than pirates.

 

[Kollega]

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

Agreed. Even if those pirates won't pirate it, they still won't buy it. And many people who wanted to buy it will also be turned away by this pointless DRM.

4. Trick the game into thinking your own PC is Ubisoft's server.
It's basically option one without the need to constantly keep a public server up. Something similar has been done for other games that require online identification. While the emulating of Ubisoft's model would undoubtedly take some effort, this option is easier to pull off than the three options offered in the article.

Yeaaaah. That's the easiest one. How hard it is to write a program that will re-route the save games on your own hard drive? Answer: not very.

 

[Jandau]

What many developers don't seem to realize is that crackers aren't random morons who poke around and occasionally manage to break some DRM. They are skilled and well organized people who are essentially a dev studio of a sorts. A dev studio dedicated to breaking DRM. The best Ubisoft can hope for is a few days, maybe a week before the game is cracked.

However, that's exactly what they should be hoping for since according to some other numbers I've seen a while back, if you can keep your game from getting pirated in a week, it will improve your sales (impatient ones will buy it instead of waiting for a crack). But then again, couldn't they have spent their time making a hard-to-crack DRM that DOESN'T screw over every paying customer?

 

[Spongebobdickpants]

this is the one case of two cases (the other being IWnet) where i say hackers have fun i might be one of those pirates just too prove a point XD.but also these corps are being very greedy blizzard makes £7 a month from millions of subcribers so why do they need more?!also most pirates will only do so if they have NO intention of buying the game.So DRM will only screw over the fans.Look at sins of a solar empire that game was a sell out and had NO protection.

 

[NLS]

I'm thinking something around the lines of Number 1, but instead of having external servers, the server is run in the background on the users machine when playing the game.

 

[lijenstina]

"If you disconnect, you're done" - unless you have a pirated version.

 

[Eruanno]

Executive: "Yay, no pirate copies have been made!"
Accountant: "Ok, so, how many copies of our game have we sold?"
Executive: "Well... only 6. But they've not been pirated!"
Accountant: "...? This system cost 6 million to implement..."
Executive: "And its worked! No pirates at all."
Accountant: "Excuse me, I feel the urge to prepare bankrupcy paperwork."

Haha, exactly my thought. I imagined it more like a public announcement for the success of DRM in general though. Something like:

April 23rd: Ubisoft reports most successful DRM ever! No copies of Assassin's Creed 2 for PC have so far been pirated!
April 24th: It appears that we have in fact not sold any copies either.
April 25th: Ubisoft files for bankrupcy.

OR

Ubisoft blames complete lack of sales of Assassin's Creed 2 for PC on pirates, whereas in fact no sales have been made due to everyone just buying the console version instead. Ubisoft files MASSIVE loss due to wasting money on developing the game for PC.

 

[Woodsey]

I'll give it a week maximum.

The point is that it will be hacked, and people are likely to wait for that instead of being prepared to be kicked out of a singleplayer game through no fault of their own.

They seem to be under the impression that pirates are working from a disadvantage; in reality, the guys that crack these things are as skilled (if not more so) as the guys who create the DRM.

If you've got a PC that's half the battle, there's no special unobtainable element locked away in Ubi-towers that no one else has access to.

A PC and knowledge, and you're pretty much there.