DRM from hell. | Hacker News Reader

DRM from hell.

arstechnica.com

If you're flying, you'll have to pay for onflight Internet or not play. If your Internet goes out in your house, you can't play, and if you were playing while it happened, you could lose progress.

Wrong. I'll just play the pirated version, which won't have these restrictions.

Personally I don't see anything morally wrong with buying the game then playing the pirated version.

Personally, if I'm going to go to the hassle of pirating the game then I don't need a legit copy.

Sure, I'd like to support the creators but not if they're only offering to sell me an inferior version of the product.

I tend to agree with you, but the truth is, the creators probably hate it as much as you do. The main perpetrators of draconian DRM systems are the greedy publishers.

You're probably right there. But if I'm going to buy a legit copy I'm basically rewarding the publishers for their perfidy.

Convenient? Yes. Morally defensible? Not at all.

Moral defensibility is irrelevant from my perspective.

See, I'd like to give game creators my money. Games represent great value and I generally enjoy the prospect of well made sequels. I'm happy to pay, as long as they're not asking me to do extra work.

All the game creators have to do to get my money is make it easy for me to give it to them. This means:

a) Not selling me a broken (and that's what this DRM is) copy of the game forcing me to waste an hour or more of my time procuring a working copy from pirate sites.

b) Not requiring me to sign up for some lousy custom online content network when I've already got Steam and it just works.

That's it. If they're willing to make it easy for me to support them, then great, here's some cash. If they aren't, well, frankly, I don't care enough about the morality of the situation to jump through hoops for them.

If you will not buy the game because of the DRM, don't play it. Otherwise the DRM is only an excuse for piracy. I tend to agree with houseabsolute here.

I did this with X-Plane. I bought the DVDs, and while waiting for them in the mail, I just installed the "NoDVD crack" so I could play without the DVD.

I don't think I did anything wrong. The author of the software got his money, I got a DVD drive to use while I use the program. Everyone wins.

I played Assassins Creed 2 on the PS3, and it does not have this copy protection scheme. I bought Bioshock 2 for the PC. It has what I think is a similar protection scheme. It required me to sign up for a Windows Live account, and stay signed in to save.

I am never buying a game like this again. Treating paying customers like thieves is just wrong. All this is going to do is finish off PC game sales (which are already suffering). Unless this spreads to the consoles as well. In that case, indie games will be there.

edit: Looks like Bioshock 2 (and other "Games for Windows Live") have offline support, it is just well-hidden. Still, this is a huge annoyance, and just means the pirates will have a better experience, since the game is capable of saving locally.

I was once a PC gamer. I continued to be one even after switching to a Mac for everything else. Increasingly, though, I found I didn't have time or patience for the hoops I had to jump through to get things to work. So I bought my first console and never looked back.

To be honest I'll never be a console gamer like I used to be a PC gamer. As it was I was an FPS gamer all the way and a controller can never match keyboard and mouse combo for any of those games. Another thing that consoles can't beat is playing age of empires 2 or starcraft on LAN with a bunch of friends

Though I did buy a PS3 for mgs4, street fighter 4, and hopefully God of War 3 and FF13 and mainly used for Blu Ray

I found the same to be true. BioShock 2 was the first PC game I have bought in quite a while. I did not even know about Windows Live games until last week, and was really surprised my ageing video card held up well :)

The experience will probably have me go back to consoles for good. Too bad: the controls for shooters are so much better on the PC.

I played fallout 3 a Games for Windows Live game and you could create an offline account (basically just a nickname) and play with that I never bought dlc so I don't know if that required an online account

In reply to your edit, I don't notice the same behavior. When I'm not signed in, I can't save. But maybe if I'm signed in and then lose it, it will work. Who knows.

I am finally confident in saying will not buy another one of these games that require the Windows Live or full online support. I was really excited about Bioshock 2, but then I played for a bit and couldn't save. That fucking pissed me off. I had a bad attitude about the game from then on.

It's interesting. Before, DRM was kind of noticeable only to technical people (I mean, I didn't encounter any functional issues with Fallout 3), but the concept of being connected to the internet and not being connected are pretty well understood enough to the average player that I hope more regular players realize this is just absurd.

I agree. I played Red Faction Guerrilla for a bit before realizing I needed a Windows Live account to save, so I had to restart. Never mind that it took me forever to even sign up to windows live because of some issue with it updating (and a good fifteen minutes of googling why it wouldn't update in the first place) - I felt really frustrated and cheated and would have scrapped playing the game because of it, except I'd already paid for it. I will never ever buy a windows live game again, though.

What annoys me is that DRM does NOT (and never will) stop piracy, yet the paying customers get screwed over while the pirates get a nice DRM and hassle free game to play for free.

More amazing is that requiring Live to save doesn't in anyway enhance the gameplay. It's not like you can play this game wherever you want and have a shared pool of saves.

At least Valve has the decency to keep your game purchases on file so you can install from scratch again with any hassle. The DRM needs to be a tradeoff, bother me a bit, but give me a useful feature.

Playing the game at all is not a feature.

This was posted on Reddit, and I thought it was actually pretty clever:

"The man represents pirates. The car represents paying customers. The bus represents Ubisoft DRM. http://i.imgur.com/zPyuI.gif

"Our online services platform will require a maximum of 50kbps of available bandwidth, so even with the slowest connection, gameplay won’t be affected."

What on earth are they transferring to/from the server that requires up to 50Kbps of bandwidth? The only legitimate thing I can think of would be if the were logging user's movements through the game, and even that is kind of sketchy...

Honestly I'm surprised to see so little sympathy for the publishers on a site like this. Aren't most of us making a living (or trying) by selling bits? What would you do if you were creating software for a market where piracy was easy and rampant? I dislike DRM as much as anybody. I'm not trying to say DRM is good. I'm a casual PC gamer, and I avoid titles with DRM schemes I can't live with. I'm annoyed when that means I'll miss out on a good title. But I can certainly understand the plight of the publishers in an age when piracy has gotten ridiculously easy. I don't want to see PC gaming disappear completely. But when even fellow software creators can't put themselves in the shoes of PC game developers, I fear it's inevitable. Building a profitable PC game business was difficult even when most people paid for them.

"Aren't most of us making a living (or trying) by selling bits?"

The same could be said about the creators of fake (malware) 'tune up utilities', fake AV and spyware tools. Do you defend them too? What Ubisoft are doing is unethical, and I will not defend their doing it simply because its profitable (and even that is questionable).

I guess I don't understand the comparison you're making.

The purveyor of fake tune-up utilities fools unsophisticated consumers into buying something useless, which is obviously unethical.

The PC game developer tries to make money on a product that's so desirable, more people steal it than buy it.

I for one believe that this is far better than the virus-like StarForce et al. This allows unlimited installs, doesn't require disc in drive, and shouldn't cause BSoD. And if implemented well, it should be quite secure. Last part doesn't apply to AC2, where the implementation is still bit lacking iirc. But if the saves would be created directly to/on server, then crackers would need to either create their own save/load system to replace online functionality, or create their own server and redirect the traffic there. Most importantly, the executable can't just be "cracked" as it doesn't have the functionality needed for game play (=conventional save/load mechanism)

This is like saying that while the neighborhood bully likes to punch you, he has stopped kicking you when you fall so it's all right. :-)

50kbps about 6Kb per second, 22Mb per hour

On a TWC 5Gb cap line for $30 per month thats 232 Hours playing time per month (8 hours per day) if you do no other downloading.

What if you had 3 people in your house all wanting to play games DRMd like this ? You'd have to upgrade your connection just to play games you already paid for.

The biggest annoyance I have with all this stuff is that taking a stance and not buying this game doesn't work out anyways. The publisher will just look at the poor sales, quote some piracy numbers and claim any poor sales are a result of piracy and that more significant steps will need to be taken.

If this completely keeps out all piracy then it's a good move on their part. I think though if the game does manage to get cracked their should be some kind of update that removes it, it's unfair for pirates to get a better game play experience than paying customers.

What is the likelihood that this will not be cracked? Every game is. Unless what you're really selling is a subscription a la WoW, you can't prevent piracy by making your game have a super annoying DRM scheme. Ubisoft is probably pretty desperate to try such a sad move.

Client-side this kind of scheme could be implemented much alike a MMORPG, with the distinction that you are playing alone in your instance of game world. But still, all in-game progress could be tracked only server-side. If so, what could the crackers do when the game itself doesn't have the ability to make save files?

Take a snapshot of the memory used by the game, then reload that. Or, sniff the traffic to the server and try and reverse engineer the database schema or serialization format.

The server communication will probably be encrypted. But yea, it will be cracked and the cracked version will offer a better user experience than paying customers get.

With a key and encryption method which you have, you just have to find it.

This is a good point. Many people misunderstand the idea of encryption. Essentially, if the data is to be used by the client, the client needs a way to decrypt it, thus the client can copy and do with the content what they wish (no matter how hard you try to prevent this).

Not really, because the server isn't serving anything that's integral to the game experience. All of the content is on the machine or loaded into memory at some point in time.

The only way this really works is if you're continually releasing new content on the server side.

The MMO model works because there is a significant amount of value in the product that never exists on the client. To use WoW as an example, all of the enemy spawns, loot generation, AI, spell scripting, etc all exists on the server. In the case of a single-player game like AC2, the only way to replicate that model would be to put AI, text dialog, persistence, etc on the remote server. This requires a tremendous infrastructure investment that just doesn't pay for itself in a non-subscription model.

If the server just saves and restores game saves, I can mock that with enough input data. You have to have actual value on those remote servers that people will need access to.

It absolutely will be cracked (I can't think of a single big game that hasn't been), and pirates and paying customers alike will enjoy the DRM-free version as if this debacle never happened. Of course the simpler honest crowd that just want to buy the game and play it still get screwed.

it's unfair for pirates to get a better game play experience than paying customers

I agree, but is the problem that those the cheating swine pirates circumvent all the hideous crap imposed on paying customers by the gaming company?

Or... Maybe the problem is the hideous crap imposed on paying customers by the gaming company and they should make the customer experience at least as good as the pirate experience.

For example, allow the game to work just fine offline and give you an option you can turn off to phone home when you have an internet connection. But if you turn it on, every once in a while you are randomly selected to receive a bonus of some kind in the game.

If this completely keeps out all piracy then it's a good move on their part.

Sure. And if this gives every member of the development team a magical unicorn they can ride to work it's a good move on their part as well.

One can only hope that the Steam version doesn't have this monstrosity. A large number of Ubisoft's games on Steam have had TAGES on them, though, so I'm not holding my breath.

This is the kind of epic dumb you don't usually see in companies outside of the record industry. Apparently they are sharing execs now.

I will not buy this game... solely based on this review.

50kbps - good luck if you're on GPRS. What about dial-up, some people still use that don't they ?

Maybe they'll be using a 56.6kbps modem?

hehe you think you get >= 50kbps without ever going under for more than a few seconds ? I guess you've never been on dial up

56kbps was download only, upload was 33.6kbps.

It'll just be a short burst of handshaking data that will happen every so often. The syncing of save games will require the most upload bandwidth, but that's optional and separate from the authentication checking.

redundant?

I'm so glad I don't play videogames. Too many things in life to do than to waste time with that mess.

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