Ubisoft DRM Will Eat Your Children
February 22nd, 2010 by Macguffin in UncategorizedExaggeration? Perhaps.
Actually, their new DRM scheme will only stop you from playing your game when you don’t have a constant internet connection to their servers. If it gets interrupted, you essentially get booted. Details here on Ars Technica.
I’ll be up front – I loathe software piracy. Even though it is unrealistic for me to do so, I want everyone to play by the rules. If I spend a chunk of my life making a game, and I say it costs $30 to buy it, then please do me the service of either paying for it or not playing it.
On the other hand, like awesome indie master Cliffski, I believe that DRM is less than useless. It actively penalizes the people who buy your game, and does nothing to inconvenience the people who are BitTorrenting ripped versions of it. This is why, no matter how much I hate the idea of people taking my game without paying for it, we won’t have any DRM on All Heroes Die.
Ubisoft folks, other publishers – here’s the mental calculation you make me do every time I see a game that does something ridiculous like this:
- I think about how hard I want the game.
- I contemplate having that DRM on my system.
- I then think about, if I really need that game on my PC, that I’ll probably purchase it from you, then look into BitTorrenting a cracked version. (I pay for all my games these days. I’m also have no qualms about circumventing their DRM if I’ve done so.)
- Then I decide this is all too much work, and I go buy or play a different game. Bye, bye lost sale.
C’mon guys. Think this one out a little more, won’t you?
February 22nd, 2010 at 3:18 pm
In fairness, most of us have “constant internet connections” (assuming that you mean something reasonable by that), and have had them since sometime around 1995. Dial-in worked just fine for playing Everquest through through a multi-hour raid, for example, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be sufficient for the needs of this sort of scheme.
The real question is, have they put some sort of unreasonable ping time or bandwidth requirement on the connection? I mean, has this thing been coded in such a way that it really causes more than once-per-20-hours-of-play-time crashes? If so, then shame on them – that’s completely not necessary to achieve their purpose.
In comparison, I loved Dragon’s Age. Played it the whole way through several times. It crashed at least half a dozen times on me. If I’m willing to accept that, I don’t see why I should accept non-obtrusive DRM as well.
February 22nd, 2010 at 3:30 pm
It’s not onerous to you and me, sure. But there are lots of edge cases – taking transatlantic flights with your laptop, not wanting to pay $15 bucks for internet at a hotel, or just having a flaky internet connection. Balance that against the fact that I can Torrent the thing and play just fine with no issues at all.
In the end, I do agree that it’s not a huge deal for most people day to day. But the cavalier way that big publishers keep doing this sort of stuff, combined with the fact that it barely slows down the warez crowd – feh.
February 23rd, 2010 at 4:35 am
I think one of the major overlooked things is it isn’t your internet connection necessarily (although this is huge, considering how it is dodgy in many areas around the world), but the fact you are relying on the magical Ubisoft cloud.
Now the issue is, while Ubisoft might be considered too big to fail…you have the save games, and literal game functionality, on and related to their servers. If their servers go poof (reasons: their own downtime (even MS has tons of Live! downtime and people pay for that!), or they decide to take the servers offline, or it just goes down by accident…), so does the game entirely.
That’s a massive point of failure, that shoves everyone off and makes them unable to play it in the future (and also one you can’t control!). As a partial game historian (and having some lists of all the game servers that have gone offline so people have to rely on direct IP or Gamespy connections…) it’s worrying.
And people are arguing MMO’s do it, yet this is a singleplayer game, not a server driven one, and there is no real benefit to “cloud save games” (actually for most it’s an issue that they have no direct control over it! so it is lost on Ubisoft’s hardline business whim!).
Urg, what a situation. I’m avoiding it entirely, for shame Ubisoft, for shame
February 23rd, 2010 at 2:38 pm
I suppose with the two batteries I carry I could get about 2 hours of gameplay on my transatlantic flight. If I was lucky. I’ve never really tried. Playing with the touchpad mouse is generally FTL, and there’s not exactly a lot of elbow room to spread out. As for not paying the $15 at the hotel – I can’t imagine *not* paying for internet. If nothing else, I need to be able to check e-mail, facebook, and the Macguffin Games blog on a daily basis.
Occasional downtime when I can’t play might be annoying – but honestly, I’m not so lost for things to do that I absolutely have to play a particular game without interruption. Ubisoft going out of business or deciding to drop support is a larger worry, I’ll admit. In that case, I guess we just have to hope that they either remove the DRM before doing so, or that somebody writes an open source clone.
It’s not that I love DRM. But I don’t buy that it doesn’t help at all. Sure, many people bit torrent. Some don’t. I don’t even know how, for one.
More to the point, central authentication is pretty much the only hope for successful DRM. If it’s purely client side, it can be cracked. If the data lives on the server, as with an MMO, then there’s a reasonable hope that you can actually implement a successful solution. Since I think piracy sucks (hell, just the used/rental games market makes me grumpy), I’m willing to tolerate their missteps as they figure out a reasonable way to address the issue.
March 15th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
While I fully agree with your post, I was surprised to find the reference “like awesome indie master Cliffski” here. You are aware he actually started uploading torrents with virus infested patches? The guy is childish and a nutjob.
Anyway, waiting for your March release, this game has potential and I like your 5 dollar beta scheme.
March 15th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Hey R – Hrm – I don’t know anything either way to his posting up viruses (although the potential legal liability it would cause makes me think he’s unlikely to do that), but I feel pretty confident in saying he’s a really good businessman – he’s supporting himself from his games alone, and that’s crazy hard to do. And he makes excellent games.
Thanks for the support!
March 15th, 2010 at 1:08 pm
The virus part refers to some torrents on TPB, he deluted the available torrents (which obviously pirated his games) with some illegitimate versions containing damaging software. The comments were then filled with anti-piracy rants by a user using his nick. (Then again, it might be slander against him, let’s not go further into this).
OT: Paradox Interactive has a great scheme, IMHO, where they provide serials with the games which serve only to get posting access to some parts of the forum (user modifications and tech support). I find small devs or indies manage to design effective jet subtle anti-piracy measures.