Latest Ubisoft DRM measure - all SP saves stored on a cloud server - by EvaUnit02
june gloom on 28/1/2010 at 23:37
And even then that only applies to what engine the game you cheated on was. Cheat in CS 1.6, no more DoD 1.3, Natural Selection, etc. for you. But you can still play CSS.
Solution: Don't cheat. You cheat, you deserve what you get. And that includes losing your game.
heywood on 29/1/2010 at 22:06
Quote Posted by dethtoll
That doesn't work either, because instead of coming to the conclusion that nobody wants to deal with their DRM, they just assume PC gaming is a waste of money.
If other companies with reasonable anti-piracy measures have good PC sales numbers and Ubi has shitty PC sales numbers, then maybe they would get the point.
I don't think that will happen though because when it comes to piracy & DRM, people talk the talk but don't walk the walk. If the game is good, people who buy games will buy it and people who pirate games will pirate it and that tends to be true regardless of the DRM.
Quote:
Publishers live in a failed environment. The piracy arms race has gotten to be so severe that it's done damage to PC gaming that I fear may be irreparable. It's stopped being about curtailing piracy (the old "please don't steal this game" era) and has become about controlling the consumer. A lot of this can be blamed on the rise of the internet- it's easier than ever to control from afar what the consumer is able to do with the product they spent money on. This will only get worse before it gets better. Thanks to the escalating war between publishers who only care about money, and pirates who only care about "sticking it to the man," the DRM/piracy debate is a ship that is rapidly hurtling towards the sun, meanwhile everyone aboard is burning alive and looking for a way out.
Yeah, it does feel like being caught in the middle of a war. Part of it can be blamed on the internet, which both pirates and publishers try to exploit. But I also think it can be blamed on the increasing cost of game development.
Back in the mid-1990s, PC game devleopers were small, independent businesses. Now they're megabuck Hollywood-esque studio giants led by teams of biz guys fretting about whether they're going to make their numbers every quarter. Just look at the game credits these days. Doom took one company of ~10 people to make. Quake 1 took one company and less than 20 people, and that includes the biz guys. For Quake 2, they had Activision do the QA and publishing, and now ~40 people were involved total. Fast forward 10 years and go count the people listed in the credits for Bioshock. The list is so long I can't even be bothered to go through it all, but it's probably a couple hundred people. The stakes in game publishing have gone up!
lost_soul on 29/1/2010 at 22:17
but... they can still sell *more* copies of the game at that lower price and make more money. They're slowly trying to bring the price up to see how much a consumer will pay for a game. I would never pay $60 for a game only to be insulted and risk losing access to it at some point.
heywood on 30/1/2010 at 00:16
Personally, I'm not so price conscious when it comes to games. I can afford the money for games more than the time to play them. Also, I remember paying $40 for C64 games when I was like 14 or 15 years old. That was a lot of money to me then and I was picky. A $60 game now is a relative bargain, considering inflation and the amount of content. And even if I only play it once, I'll probably spend 20 hours on it, which works out to about $3/hour entertainment cost. That's less than all the rest of my hobbies except maybe playing tennis.
Anyway, pricing aside, there's no way I'm going to play a game that stores my saves online. I want control of my saves so 5 years from now when I get the random urge to play again I can pull my old saves from a backup and check things out, or share them with others if I like. Also, I want the option of playing offline when I'm traveling.
twisty on 31/1/2010 at 07:13
On my current ADSL connection I am forced to reboot my modem anywhere up to several times a day to rectify intermittent throughput or dropout issues. I can only imagine how annoying this would be if I was in the middle of a game and had to reboot my modem just to perform a quicksave.
belboz on 31/1/2010 at 12:32
With ubisoft doing this I can play ubisoft games again, that starforce protection system can turn your working computer into a pile of useless parts, it seems to rewrite your hardware permissions at a software level and if your computer crashes or there's a power cut, then there's the chance that after the crash or powercut all you have is the pile.
And I already have a ubisoft account, and EA, and Microsoft Live, and steam, and blizzard.
And you hackers aint going to be sending me more fake scammy emails cos I've removed my email from this site so go and stick your arse up your bum hole and smell the wong poo pong put.
Brian The Dog on 31/1/2010 at 14:16
I get the feeling that companies are watching digital distribution services that are DRM free as the extended-life format for their titles. By this I mean, the Publishers release the game with lots of DRM (although this is being scaled back in some cases due to large negative reviews on places like Amazon which can affect game sales), and when they feel they can move it to a back-catalogue then they can place it on sites like GOG. Activision have just signed up for GOG to put some of their older titles on there, for instance.
As to when a company thinks that a game should be moved to the back-catalogue, then I guess it depends on how big the title is. It's highly unlikely that EA would put "The Sims", or Activision putting "Diablo" on there since they still make money from standard CD sales.
The big question is whether the digital distribution format will have DRM on it or not. GOG constantly have to convince the publishers that piracy of older titles will not hit sales in a significant way, but some are still unconvinced.
So I'm not too fussed if games come with hideous DRM on them - I'll just not buy them. The more people do this, the more chance it will be moved to the back-catalogue and we can get it digitally, hopefully with no DRM.
Jason Moyer on 31/1/2010 at 14:44
Quote Posted by belboz
With ubisoft doing this I can play ubisoft games again
Ubisoft hasn't used Starforce for years. They just released a string of games that didn't use any copy protection whatsoever (Prince of Persia, HAWX, etc).
TTK12G3 on 31/1/2010 at 15:43
Quote Posted by dethtoll
I hope it requires Steam and breaks all Thiefgen's diseased little hearts.
Oh they're not all rabid about it. I'm not. I've grown to have a cautious liking for it.
Quote Posted by heywood
Personally, I'm not so price conscious when it comes to games. I can afford the money for games more than the time to play them. Also, I remember paying $40 for C64 games when I was like 14 or 15 years old..
Yeah? Remember the insane triple digit mission pack offers that popped up at the end of shareware versions of games like Rise of the Triad? Remember Quake costing 60USD? That was crazy. :D
gunsmoke on 31/1/2010 at 17:41
I paid $70 for several Super Nintendo carts.
