Ubisoft Says Always-On DRM, "A Success"
- Thread starter The Wooster
- Start date
There's a couple of primary reasons why people hate DRM. The first is because it negatively impacts the performance of the game, or worse your computer. It runs on your machine and takes up resources. Even if it was perfectly designed (which most assuredly are not), it would consume resources and on mid-low end machines, that directly impacts the performance.Twilight_guy said:
The second reason, and I would argue the bigger, is that the concept of DRM is that you, yes you in particular, are a thief and must therefore be treated as such. The root concept of DRM is that the paying customer will be treated worse because they are a potential thief. It's basically like a brick and mortar store saying "No, you cannot come into my store unless personally escorted by a police officer."
The reason it's become a "crusade", to use your term, is simply because people are sick of paying for a good and then being treated as a criminal for it.
Actually, buggrit. I support the DRM measures. Steam does exactly the same thing for TF2 and counterstrike. No steam logon? NO GAME FOR YOU, MY FRIEND. It's unintrusive, and it protects their sales figures. Sure, I may be speaking as someone from a first world country with a reliable net connection, but honestly. They are a business. They have to answer to shareholders. Not you people.
wasn't this covered before? it's allready been pointed out by EC ages ago that this kind of DRM only hurts legitimate users.
They have to pay for those servers somehow. They are basically running a F2PMMO system with zero separate income to pay for server maintenance. The money to pay for that comes from everything else, including game sales.The_root_of_all_evil said:
How they manage to keep this going as long as they have I have no idea, but I would have to think it is going to hit a wall soon.
This latest comment alone is stupid as it is, but I have to wonder when they come up with the next stupid idea of charging subscriptions to pay for their online DRM. Outright suicide, there.
Reducing piracy by eliminating sales. Sounds like a pyrrhic victory to me. I know I haven't bought a single game from Ubisoft as of late precisely because of the obscene DRM, and I don't plan on ever buying an Ubisoft game as long as they continue to use such DRM(but I don't pirate it, either!).Grey Carter said:
BTW, Escapist admins/moderators/etc., are the kanji characters in the captcha really necessary? Had to try twice to post this comment.
Maybe people don't like the possibility that one day they won't be able to access their games. My command and conquer games from years ago? I can still play those. I will NEVER lose those unless i destroy the disk.Twilight_guy said:
This DRM? I lose my game when the servers go down. I don't get a say in it. I'm renting the game until they tell me that they're shutting the game down. I'm not buying it.
Fuck that.
a "sucess" at keeping me from playing Settlers 7 to pass the boredom while on holiday... with no internet... ah well, just build in MINECRAFT(using Yahtzee's voice in his review)
sure, it protects against piracy, but the game is £5!!! it's not even worth pirating if you can get it for washing a bloody car!!!
sure, it protects against piracy, but the game is £5!!! it's not even worth pirating if you can get it for washing a bloody car!!!
You just named two games that are multiplayer only, and therefore require an online connection to play. Bad argument there.TypeSD said:
And yes, they have to answer to shareholders, but shareholders only stay such as long as there is money being made. Where is the profit when Ubisoft has to divert money from sales to pay for their server maintenance which gives nothing in return?
With more internet providers putting caps on and reducing their service, more people are going to be wanting to reduce their online time wherever possible. Buying the latest Ubisoft game is not going to be one of their choices.
It is quite possible sales have already taken a dip, and this is damage control in the denial fashion. Ubisoft is already releasing a game soon without their DRM, and they have been showing a trend of not keeping it on their games for very long. If anything this is becoming more a measure to "prevent piracy" during the first few months, but then they move along to give the server time to the next game.
By all logic this is a system that is self-defeating and only becomes more expensive than what it is supposed to prevent. I doubt it will last much longer.
but then again that's just what EA does, and they make you spend in the £30's for ones like the sport games... i'd rather lose my £5 S7 than a £35 EA Golfdogstile said:
samsonguy920 said:
Ok, so Batman: AA, hugely popular single player game. Where's all the moral outrage that it requires a live account to be able to save the game? People will buy games that are good, and accept the conditions attached. A bad game with bad DRM will get canned, and the developers will be rightly tossed into the gutter.
Again, Steam itself is a form of DRM, no one seems to care about that either. Why? Because it works well and is unobtrusive. The accounts for Dragon age 1 and 2 are a form of DRM, no one cares about those either. No login? Ha! no DLC for you. ME2 had that as well.
an idea from reading part of your post: after entering the product key to verify the game, allow offline(SP+MP against computer) without internet connection, provided the game disk is in the drive(i'm sounding like a PC gamer - go golden fingers!), but require an internet connection, with sighned in account, with verified copy, to play online with others, this way, multiplayer is for buyers, and singleplayer is for people with the disk but no code, or the dishonest people who pirated itsamsonguy920 said:
Meaningless. They have no reasonable way to measure pirating. This is nothing more than a PR move - telling everyone it worked because otherwise all of the people complaining would have been justified.
That Ubisoft representatives are willing to make up data to justify their poor decisions doesn't change the fact that this is still probably the worst of all of the absolutely terrible DRM schemes currently in use. But they'll continue to insist that it's working because most people will complain, but at the end of the day they still want to play the games.
Ubisoft has fallen prey to the increasingly popular "producers vs. customers" attitude of many of the big publishers.
That Ubisoft representatives are willing to make up data to justify their poor decisions doesn't change the fact that this is still probably the worst of all of the absolutely terrible DRM schemes currently in use. But they'll continue to insist that it's working because most people will complain, but at the end of the day they still want to play the games.
Ubisoft has fallen prey to the increasingly popular "producers vs. customers" attitude of many of the big publishers.