It’s been a while now since Ubisoft started releasing games with their most sinful of DRM systems, and since they have done, we/I have refused to talk about them. It’s probably about time that changed, but before we start posting about their games, I wanted to explain the reasons why we’re having a turn around.
First, lets go back over the history very briefly, just to provide some context. On the 17th February Tom Francis penned his experience with Assassins Creed 2, documenting that it needed a constant internet connection. On the connection breaking the player is effectively kicked out of the game. Uproar. And rightly so, DRM has never been this intrusive, draconian, or damaging to the paying customers user experience before.
In early March rumours started to circulate that Ubis DRM had been cracked. These rumours were soon squashed by Ubisoft, but wether it was true or not I honestly don’t know. What was obvious though was that Ubisofts DRM had actually worked to an extent, there was no solid evidence of a crack, and zero-day piracy had been circumvented. Well done Ubisoft. Everyone without exception is still pissed though.
Later in March customers get extremely pissed. Ubisoft were asked numerous times ‘what if your servers go down’ and they brushed off the question. Of course, with bitter irony, their servers went down. They offered out some free games as compensation, but the damage was done. Uproar.
In late April the system is actually, finally, cracked properly. What does this mean? Nothing as far as Ubisoft is concerned. In business terms it took two long months for their system to be broken, and while there are no sales figures, I can only imagine that the ratio of people not buying because of the DRM is outweighed by the people who have bought it because they couldn’t pirate it. Us gamers are impatient, after all.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m outright speculating, and am more than happy and ready to be proven wrong, but I would say you can call this horribe, horrible DRM a financial success. They stopped piracy at the time that it’s most rife and damaging. That’s not something I particularly care about though. Financial success shouldn’t be the ‘be all and end all’. Games are entertainment, fun things, they shouldn’t be dragged through the dirt by fusty business types.
This DRM system isn’t going away. It worked. It pissed people off, but it worked. The really, really crap thing is that Ubisoft actually make some quite nice games, too. Splinter Cell, Assassins creed, Silent Hunter. These are franchises people like. They are fun games, dragged down by the publisher with ill-informed decisions on the actual effects of game piracy. It’s hard to ignore that.
Now, our position on it. Boycotting in the early days seemed a wise thing to do. Surely there would be a mass uprising from PC Gaming bodies such as ourselves turning their back on Ubi as a statement. Treat PC Gamers like crap and we will no longer count you as a publisher of PC Games. It never happened. Ubis stuff was reported on, comments pages flooded. Fair enough. And on reflection, it’s the professional thing to do. I made a consumer decision in the heat of the moment, not a journalistic one, much less an Editors one.
Everyone that writes on here is effectively a games journalist. Sure, some of us do more than others, some are semi-professional, some just do it for the fun of it. But it still stands. It’s impossible for us to just ‘never talk about ubisoft games again’. They are, like it or not, part of gaming culture. You can’t discuss stealth games without talking about Splinter Cell for example.
These games exist, it’s unfortunate that the system exists with them. The best thing, I think, we can do is focus on the games themselves. We won’t ignore the DRM, that’s for sure (especially in reviews), but we will celebrate what those Game Designers achieved before their publisher got their grubby fucking mitts on it. I salute anyone still standing up to Ubisoft and not consuming their games, I honestly respect that; for us though, it’s not the right decision.
I expect Ubi banked on the very fact that the journalistic thing to do (which helpfully masks the cynical “we wrote about it first” mentality of so many gaming news outlets) would still ensure their games were talked about despite the heavy-handed DRM.
Perhaps the only thing that could have had them sit up and take note would’ve been a complete press black-out but this was hardly going to happen (see above parentheses).
It may not have been a journalistic decision, Craig, but I have no doubt that it was the right one, futile though it turned out to be without similar action across the board.
Yeah, makes sense. While I wish there was a way to show the publisher how stupid this is, it also hurts the developer, who is probably more affected by this than the consumers (cause, y’know, it’s their jobs on the line).
I suppose I’ll reconsider (they really do have some seriously nice games…now if only they would combine them all into one mega game!), but certainly not at the ridiculous price point, DRM or not.
And it’s sort of sad, it seems that most mainstream game journalists (journalists, I’m talking about here, not the games) still bend to the publisher’s whim.
However, I don’t entirely know if your assertion about their success is correct. I’ve heard that a server emulator was up by zero day, and a full on crack (removing the online requirement) was up in a couple days of the first game with it (AC2? I don’t remember, but I know it was the first game). Feel free to correct me, but I distinctly remember how freakin’ quickly it got cracked relative to the DRM strength.
Not to mention the numerous loads of people (see even the sad RPS thread on any Ubisoft article) purposely pirating it to piss off Ubisoft. The sales on Steam were not quite particularly strong, as far as I can tell, as they peaked for about one or two days and then just dropped off to the bottom of the Top 10 and even off the chart.
Still, I hate them for harming some of gaming’s most prized franchises.
I’ve been nosing about on the ‘front lines’, so to speak, so perhaps I can offer some more information on exactly what’s been going on, for those with better things to do than trawl through piracy websites?
From what I understood about the rumoured Day 0 Screed 2 crack, it seems that someone made an “attempt” and uploaded to the usual release sites; these got nuked, but rumours persisted.
If you go read the comments on places like The Pirate Bay you’ll see a lot of people downloaded the game under the assumption that it had been cracked. However, since it hadn’t in their disappointment and frustration a lot of people seemed to have decided “what the hell, I’ll just buy the game”. In this respect, the DRM did a brilliant job.
About a week into April I believe someone built a server emulator which fooled the authoriser into thinking the copy was legit. However, because it relied on the game receiving specific information from this emulator (that it would normally have received from the server), players could only complete as much of the story as authorisation data was available. As I understand it, by the time SKIDROW released their crack (~22 April iirc) about 90% of the game was playable.
SKIDROW’s crack was much less fiddly to use, requiring a single file to be dropped into the Ubisoft Game Launcher folder. Apparently this approach was similar to the server emulator method; so similar in fact that many sites nuked their release after the other groups complained, only unnuking when SKIDROW published a rebuttal. (Delicious, delicious internet drama)
Incidentally, they appear to be taking the same approach to subsequent Ubisoft games, so we’ve had fast releases for Settlers and Splinter Cell.
However, those important few weeks when Screed 2 was uncracked probably paid for all the DRM development, and maintaining it now is cheap, so it really doesn’t matter to Ubisoft that it’s been cracked.
P.S. It might be worth going through the EULA to see what its stance on cracks is. Technically, traditional cracks which modify game files are in breach of the EULA but the SKIDROW crack modifies launcher files instead. Unless they’ve modified the agreement in some way I don’t see why a legitimate user couldn’t use the crack as well.
My copy of AC2 I sold to Mr Lager, since I forgot about the boycott (The SavyGamer one, which would’ve been a brilliant idea. If it worked).
I’m still not playing them. I can’t be certain that I can hold the connection at the moment, since it’s being rather flaky (again). I’m not paying for an unplayable game.
The figures are the issue, and I’m not seeing any.
I’d like to see how many copies it sold in the release date, how many when people saw it wasn’t cracked, if the sales rates changed when it was finally cracked…
Also, Craig you are a git for not linking this
That’s an empty link?
Oh I hate html tags. Damn things. http://drugcrazed.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/another-post-on-piracy-madness/
What happened with this? Were no sales figures released from Ubisoft still?
Not that I’ve ever seen. Not sure what the state of play is with their DRM now either – suppose AssBro will show what they’ve settled on in the new year.
Or you could ask Pete. I’m sure he’d tell you :P
So this happened then http://tinyurl.com/346jdzx [reddit]
Will keep a lookout then in the NY, thanks for the quick reply Craig :)
And so it continues http://tinyurl.com/38xrgnz [eurogamer]