StarDestroyer.Net BBS

A pirate group known as Skidrow released a working version of Silent Hunter V less then a day after it was released. I feel really bad for anyone who purchased a retail copy, but if you did you can restore full functionality by downloading this.

A simple, loud laugh is all I have to say on this.

Wonder how they did it though, modding the files to point toward a new file on the HDD instead of the Ubi servers... or simply excising the malignant code...

Even better, Assassin's Creed II was apparently cracked yesterday and it doesn't even come out for six days. Yep, way to piss off customers with DRM that doesn't even manage the minimal 'delay piracy for launch sales' goal.

White Haven wrote:Even better, Assassin's Creed II was apparently cracked yesterday and it doesn't even come out for six days. Yep, way to piss off customers with DRM that doesn't even manage the minimal 'delay piracy for launch sales' goal.

To be honest, I'm not sure how this could be done unless either:
#1: Someone leaked a copy of AC2 from inside Ubisoft... in which case there's nothing to do for Ubisoft except to go after the insider, or
#2: Someone leaked a copy of AC2 from inside Ubisoft, only for the hackers to find out that Ubisoft didn't bother changing the code enough.

Only positive I've heard out of this is that Ubisoft's since changed its DRM scheme to pick up game progress from "the exact moment" where an Internet connection was lost.

They send out review copies to all sorts of media outlets long before release, and sometimes the people working in the factories to produce the game discs after it goes gold "accidentally lose track of" a copy or two. Leaks from inside Ubisoft are of course possible too.

Edward Yee wrote:To be honest, I'm not sure how this could be done unless...

That's often how it's done. Someone working in a factory where the things are being made or someone on one of the trucks will nab one, or if that fails, someone working at a best buy. I'm not sure if there's financial gain for those who do it, or just the thrill of being part of a sekret underground pirate group, but you need to take pretty stiff measures to insure people don't palm a copy to the pirates.

I'd like if there was a way to do widespread copy protection that didn't involve ass-rape as a viable way of identifying a legitimate user. As a person who has a financial stake in small software development, piracy is actually a threat to my pocketbook, since it's very easy to demolish a sizable portion of my income if it gets pirated and becomes easier to get that way than legitimately.

That said, I'm not sad that Ubisoft's DRM got crushed, this is an idiotic way to do it, and it doesn't benefit anyone downstream like me who would actually love a simpler, lighter, economical form of copy protection. I'm still stuck hoping our products do well enough that I get paid, but not so well someone goes to the trouble of cracking the ID codes. They could make more money as well as not piss off us (consumers and smaller distributors) if their stupid DRM technologies weren't so insane.

White Haven wrote:Even better, Assassin's Creed II was apparently cracked yesterday and it doesn't even come out for six days. Yep, way to piss off customers with DRM that doesn't even manage the minimal 'delay piracy for launch sales' goal.

According to my Steam Assassin's Creed II is available now... and I know a guy at my office has bought and starting playing it already...

Hmm. Then Evilavatar told me wrong. I hadn't noticed, because honestly, with that crazy DRM, who's actually buying it?

Crazy people? Those who pirate it were never going to buy it anyway, so the DRM was a moot issue in their decision. Those who really want the game will either feel irate, but swallow their pride eventually (as is the case with PC gamers accepting stupid measures to stop a threat that has ALWAYS existed in trade) and buy it, or decide to switch platforms and appease the mass migration to consoles crowd.

I do find this whole situation humorous. I wish I could be a fly on the wall at the next Ubisoft board meeting, but I'd be afraid the CEO would eat me.

DRM never hurts anyone but the legitimate consumer, but that doesn't make piracy a proper response.

atg wrote:According to my Steam Assassin's Creed II is available now... and I know a guy at my office has bought and starting playing it already...

Logged in at Steam's Web site, looking at the Assassin's Creed 2 page there, it's saying "approximately 4 days and 10 hours." Are you looking through the client? I've had a pre-purchased game show up in the My Games list even before it was supposed to be available, albeit as a "not installed."

Incidentally, the bit about insider-caused leaks (i.e. someone in retail at Best Buy) reminds me of this pirating fail...

Edward Yee wrote:

atg wrote:According to my Steam Assassin's Creed II is available now... and I know a guy at my office has bought and starting playing it already...

Logged in at Steam's Web site, looking at the Assassin's Creed 2 page there, it's saying "approximately 4 days and 10 hours." Are you looking through the client? I've had a pre-purchased game show up in the My Games list even before it was supposed to be available, albeit as a "not installed."

Incidentally, the bit about insider-caused leaks (i.e. someone in retail at Best Buy) reminds me of this pirating fail...

Yeah I'm looking at it through the client: "Available Now". Released 5 March 2010. As I said one of the guys at work has been playing it.

Maybe Australia got a game early for once...

Admiral Valdemar wrote:Crazy people? Those who pirate it were never going to buy it anyway, so the DRM was a moot issue in their decision. Those who really want the game will either feel irate, but swallow their pride eventually (as is the case with PC gamers accepting stupid measures to stop a threat that has ALWAYS existed in trade) and buy it, or decide to switch platforms and appease the mass migration to consoles crowd.

I do find this whole situation humorous. I wish I could be a fly on the wall at the next Ubisoft board meeting, but I'd be afraid the CEO would eat me.

I'll take option 3: Buy it and crack it after it's installed, so I don't have to deal with what some stupid suits think paying customers should have to put up with in order to protect their bottom line from people who had no intention of buying it in the first place.

Oh for the days of feelies & creative piracy protection where you had to enter the 5th word on the 71st page of the user manual, or spin the code wheel and match the face of the pirate and tell the computer when and where he was hanged.

At least DRM was semi-entertaining then.

eion wrote:Oh for the days of feelies & creative piracy protection where you had to enter the 5th word on the 71st page of the user manual, or spin the code wheel and match the face of the pirate and tell the computer when and where he was hanged.

At least DRM was semi-entertaining then.

Well, the problem with piracy of software is that no matter how we make it so our game is programmed to be locked, removing the lock is simple enough. Adding more and more locks, like how Ubisoft did it, makes it harder but certainly no less possible. The best you can shoot for, on the non-crack front, is to create the software with a unique copy protection code setup that has no available canned response and delay people long enough that the main buying surge is intact without pirated copies available.

I'm also in favor of feelies. But that doesn't help smaller developers, sadly. Bigger developers have a lot more tools at their disposal, and I hope they do return to feelies as one of the ways to make people feel like their purchase was worth it. Cloth maps, decoder wheels, and all this stuff had a bit of copy protection benefit but also made you feel more like your game was product instead of just a program. Nintendo occasionally does stuff like this. Hell, even gold-painting the game cartridge was enough to get people to pre-order stuff in the past.

They should take a nod from restaurants and other businesses. If EA offered me a "Buy Five and the Next One's Free!" deal, or some other kind of punch-card style deals, I think your increase in business would offset the stuff you give away.

Well, movies and music have it worse than software does. It doesn't matter how good or how intrusive your copy protection is, at some stage you are converting it to output to the monitor, and if there is no other way of evading it, they can always just record the monitor/speaker output and then reconvert it into a readable file format. Easiest way is the oldschool cam-in-a-cinema, but if one were really dedicated I suppose you could create custom software to nab it as it goes through the graphics card to the monitor, although I imagine that would be a pain in the ass to do.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Totally not surprising. I mean, if you announce a new definitive DRM scheme, you can bet the crackers will start working on breaking it. Of course, if you don't announce it, the PR backlash will eat you alive. Heh. I really don't get why do they bother. At best they are preventing regular consumers from making backup copies directly from the disc (and they can still dowload a pirated version).

Still, I don't think I'll buy any of these games. I want my purchases to function without the need for cracks. Using a No-CD crack for convenience and to avoid disc and drive damage is one thing, having to use cracked executables because the game will be a pain in the ass to run otherwise is unnacceptable. Particularly if that pain in the ass requires connection to a server that, once brought down (as all servers will someday) will turn my game disc into a shiny coaster (technically, at least).

Raise your hand if this comes as a surprise.

No one? Well, that's how things are. DRM is worthless, a fact that has been proven again and again. As long as all the code is on consumer side, you are merely wasting money for a false sense of security that will guaranteed end in disappointment.

As Starglider mentioned in the previous Ubisoft DRM thread, this is likely just a stepping stone for future DRM where part of the processing will run on a remote server. If this were to happen, then there's no cracking the game. I would guess that Ubisoft is aware that the present DRM will be cracked very quickly; what they're more interested in is breaking consumer resistance to this type of DRM so the more aggressive form can be implemented in the future. Even if they're forced to scale back in the short-term, or they suffer losses on games implementing this DRM, they're more interested in the long-term and slowly eroding resistance since it yields one major advantage in a new business model which I've seen no one bring up: subscription single-player.

Yeah, but publishers are moving to consoles. Even the developers have begun to favor them above PC (hopefully for more than just pirate-related reasons). Alan Wake, that started out as a PC game, has became a console-only game for example.

Somehow that strategy does not seem to chine with what you said. For one thing, this step shows that the whole thing is just impractical: it does not work. Why would even more serious DRM measure work instead?

Because it will require crackers to emulate functionality that exists only server side and is never executed on the clients computer? Most cracks sidestep the copy protection, redirect file access (in Starforce), unpack game code and such things. They don't rewrite the game.

The inevitable trend is towards the majority of PC games running on an MMORPG engine, even if they're primarily single player games. The minority who still don't have a decent Internet connection will be written off. The main casualty of this transition will be modding, which will be replaced by locked-down carefully controlled 'user created content' schemes as seen in Little Big Planet and Halo 3's 'level editor'.

Starglider wrote:The inevitable trend is towards the majority of PC games running on an MMORPG engine, even if they're primarily single player games. The minority who still don't have a decent Internet connection will be written off. The main casualty of this transition will be modding, which will be replaced by locked-down carefully controlled 'user created content' schemes as seen in Little Big Planet and Halo 3's 'level editor'.

If that is to become reality, I think I'll pass on PC gaming. It's not like I've had any decent purchases in, what, three years? Defcon, The Orange Box and just this week, the SupCom pack from D2D.co.uk because it was a fiver. I miss RTS and sims on the PC, but now I've gotten used to using a controller for FPS games, over a mouse, and all other genres work on consoles, there's little to warrant a gaming PC anymore.

Tis rather depressing, though.

If that is to become reality, I think I'll pass on PC gaming. It's not like I've had any decent purchases in, what, three years? Defcon, The Orange Box and just this week, the SupCom pack from D2D.co.uk because it was a fiver. I miss RTS and sims on the PC, but now I've gotten used to using a controller for FPS games, over a mouse, and all other genres work on consoles, there's little to warrant a gaming PC anymore.

Tis rather depressing, though.

Hasn't that been obvious for years, I mean the daily NPD sales charts are all dominated by endless versions of the sims and World of warcraft for the mainstream gamer/general public, the people not likely to bother pirating a game or having a gaming pc either, Seems most developers and publishers are of the opinion of that someone with the technical knowledge to have a good gaming pc is simply more likely to pirate then the dumb mainstream/general public who just wants to pop in the disk and play and fiddle with the settings and drivers etc.

starfury wrote:Seems most developers and publishers are of the opinion of that someone with the technical knowledge to have a good gaming pc is simply more likely to pirate then the dumb mainstream/general public who just wants to pop in the disk and play and fiddle with the settings and drivers etc.

Funny thing, that was what I thought too. Or rather, "if the person is technically knowledgeable enough to, say, get the parts for their own computer instead of just buying wholesale based on whatever they read or are told, they're more likely to want more out of their games than we're willing to give them -- or rather, more than we're willing to pay our guys to do."

For some reason this reminds me of the religion vs. science questions from Armageddon...