This is for Silent Hunter 5 rather than AC2, but it’s the same system.
http://www.infoaddict.com/ubisofts-new-drm-cracked-in-under-25-hours
Incidentally, I’ve been waiting for Silent Hunter 5 for a while and I was pretty much a guaranteed customer, but this new bullshit has me waiting and reconsideri
Waiting and reconsidering. Well played Ubisoft. Not sure why that got cut off.
That’s the thing about all the new DRM schemes. It doesn’t matter. You could make it so that your program only runs when a legitimate user sticks a probe up their rectum with their specific body temperature profile - there are technically skilled crackers out there that just take out whatever part of the program checks. Adding new methods to check is like adding 8 more locks to your door when the guy breaking into your house knows how to climb in the upstairs window anyway.
That’s quite gratifying to me to see it’s already been cracked.
Maybe games should cost $500 and include an Ubi employee that comes to your house and installs the game then stands over your shoulder with his finger on the “Let this guy play” button while you play. Then uninstalls the game and wipes your hard drive.
No one should be happy about DRM getting cracked. It just means they’re going to make something more intrusive or stop making games on the PC.
Or they’ll just learn to accept that there will be a certain level of piracy, and encourage users to actually buy products by making high quality products that don’t punish the user. Plenty of games now have gone back to a simple CD check, to prevent casual piracy. That’s about the best you can do. It sucks, but any potential solutions just hurt you more than they help. They are never going to win the war with pirates, so they should just chalk them up as a lost cause and not piss off the people who do want to support them.
From that article :
Holy. Fucking. Hell.
And on Silent Hunter, too, a franchise that practically depends on user mods and game files & savegame modifications to become any good. Insert long rant about myopic corporate pinheads who don’t know jack shit here. I mean, seriously.
I think what really gets me frothing is that those sheep shaggers could ask any coder on their payroll, any game designer AT ALL, and they’d tell them this is a Bad Idea. Or just go :smack: repeatedly until the suits get the hint - I wouldn’t recommend that course of action however, as it would lead to brain fucking haemorrhage before achieving its goal.
Agreed. I believe you can stamp out 90% of casual piracy with simple CD checks, which are a minimal hassle for the user. The rest penalizes legit users more than pirates.
Silent Hunter 5 and AC2 will sell, but I guarantee they’d sell more with the DRM. I never bothered with Spore because of DRM. Same with GTA IV.
Is “simple CD check” a codeword for console games?
I have no idea what it is you’re trying to ask or imply. I just mean the standard disc check that’s on most of the games made in the last 10 years, where it tries to find the proper DVD in your drive when you fire it up. Obviously that doesn’t apply to digital distribution, but they have their own authentication systems.
That’s simple and defeatable, but it does prevent the very low hanging fruit easy piracy of passing a dvd around to all your friends. But here’s the thing: Yes, you can defeat a cd check with a crack, but if you have the savvy to be able to find that crack, then you can FIND THE CRACK TO ANY OTHER TYPE of copy protection I’ve ever seen.
CD Check? Crack it. Online authentication? Crack it. Continuous online authentication that boots you if your internet connection fails and no offline mode? Crack it. Rectal probe that performs a biometric scan of your colon? Crack it. Each step takes the same amount of effort to pirate it, but each step progressively becomes more burdensome to customers and discourages sales. There’s no benefit to what activision does compared to just doing a cd check does - if it’s an uncracked executable, the user needs the DVD. If it’s a cracked executable, it doesn’t matter what particular code you use to check legitimacy, because it was removed by a crack. All this does is piss off the people who aren’t cracking their games.
As a consumer i fail to see why i shouldn’t be happy that a system that does absolutely nothing but deny my rights got defeated.
One day one side will probably give up, and there are more software crackers than there are game companies.
Because they’re going to make something more intrusive or stop making games for the PC.
That they’re going to stop making games for the PC.
Or they’ll switch to the extremely effective and user friendly steam model. I spent about 80 dollars on Steams holliday sales, i have yet to play a single one of those games, and the most important thing is i feel incredibly positive about my purchases. I think its ridiculous to think that they will stop making PC games when there is a profitable and workable alternative.
How is this helping them? It has failed and caused backlash every time they’ve tried it. By making legitimate copies inferior to pirated copies, they are incentivizing piracy further.
Piracy has been rampant for years. They’re not going to stop. They’re just going to make half-assed ports like they’re doing anyway. Yes, it’s a shitty time for gaming in general and PC gaming, but it’s not really getting any worse than it’s been over the last 5 years. But since the coding is all done in directX anyway with various shared libraries, it’s too easy to turn out a (mediocre) PC port to stop making them.
I’m thinking actually that Steam and similar services making game buying painless and cheap will actually be the thing that reduces piracy, and the DRM these services use is almost invisible to the user.
They’ve been saying that for years, and frankly, it’s no closer to happening today than it was 10 years ago. PC gaming has just evolved and changed it’s model. MMOs have huge income sources, but the total unit sales are low in comparison to console numbers. I imagine blizzard and SOE are happy enough the way things are.
Likewise, the retail sales market has been reduced dramatically. But the digital distribution market has taken off. $50+ dollar sales are a tough price point to make. But PC games have adapted by having a large number of cheaper games created. Or alternatively, following the Sims model and having a huge number of cheap expansion packs to allow a game to have a long game life.
PC gaming isn’t going away. Neither are consoles. What you are seeing is that consoles are beginning to evolve along similar lines, with each consoles online marketplaces.
DRM is an contentious issue. but it’s not going to cause the imminent death of PC gaming.
I think there will be less big-name titles for the PC. It seems obvious to me that the bean-counters and execs at companies like Codemasters, Activision, and Ubisoft are ignorant and because of their tactics their sales of PC titles will drop low enough that they will drop them entirely.
The thing is, I kept hoping that, thanks to digital distribution, small independent studios would rise again and take advantage of the possibility of doing away with publishing shills almost entirely, which seemed possible for a moment… but big nasty annoying Steam seems to be swallowing everything there, too 
What are you talking about? There are lots of independent games that flourish on steam, and steam provides some of the best deals in the industry to developers.
Not only that, but you know how companies (most notably EA) shut down old game multiplayer matchmaking servers after 2-3 years in order to cut costs and force you to buy the new game in the series? What if they do something similar here? Then you can’t even play the single player version of the game anymore. There’s a huge, legitimate beef to have with this sort of stupidity.