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Future Ubisoft Games To Require Constant Internet Access
Posted by
Soulskill
on Wed Jan 27, 2010 07:46 AM
from the this-will-go-over-well dept.
from the this-will-go-over-well dept.
Following up on our discussion yesterday of annoying game distribution platforms, Ubisoft has announced the details of their Online Services Platform, which they will use to distribute and administer future PC game releases. The platform will require internet access in order to play installed games, saved games will be stored remotely, and the game you're playing will even pause and try to reconnect if your connection is lost during play. Quoting Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
"This seems like such a bizarre, bewildering backward step. Of course we haven't experienced it yet, but based on Ubi’s own description of the system so many concerns arise. Yes, certainly, most people have the internet all the time on their PCs. But not all people. So already a percentage of the audience is lost. Then comes those who own gaming laptops, who now will not be able to play games on trains, buses, in the park, or anywhere they may not be able to find a WiFi connection (something that’s rarely free in the UK, of course – fancy paying the £10/hour in the airport to play your Ubisoft game?). Then there's the day your internet is down, and the engineers can’t come out to fix it until tomorrow. No game for you. Or any of the dozens of other situations when the internet is not available to a player. But further, there are people who do not wish to let a publisher know their private gaming habits. People who do not wish to report in to a company they’ve no affiliation with, nor accountability to, whenever they play a game they’ve legally bought. People who don’t want their save data stored remotely. This new system renders all customers beholden to Ubisoft in perpetuity whenever they buy their games."
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Game Distribution Platforms Becoming Annoyingly Common 349 comments
The Escapist's Shamus Young recently posted an article complaining about the proliferation of distribution platforms and social networks for video games. None of the companies who make these are "quite sure how games will be sold and played ten years from now," he writes, "but they all know they want to be the ones running the community or selling the titles." Young continues,
"Remember how these systems usually work: The program sets itself up to run when Windows starts, and it must be running if you want to play the game. If you follow this scheme to its logical conclusion, you'll see that the system tray of every gaming PC would eventually end up clogged with loaders, patchers, helpers, and monitors. Every publisher would have a program for serving up content, connecting players, managing digital licenses, performing patches, and (most importantly) selling stuff. Some people don't mind having 'just one more' program running in the background. But what happens when you have programs from Valve, Stardock, Activision, 2k Games, Take-Two, Codemasters, Microsoft, Eidos, and Ubisoft? Sure, you could disable them. But then when you fire the thing up to play a game, it will want to spend fifteen minutes patching itself and the game before it will let you in. And imagine how fun it would be juggling accounts for all of them."
[+]
Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed 631 comments
A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting:
"If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."
[+]
Ubisoft DRM Problems Remain Unsolved 430 comments
ocean_soul writes "More than three weeks after the release of The Settlers 7, with the controversial 'always on-line' DRM, a lot of people still can't connect to Ubisoft's DRM servers. The forum threads where people can post if they are unable to connect keep growing daily. One reason for the lack of fixes or responses from support seems to be that the people responsible were on vacation during the Easter holiday, despite the promise of 24/7 monitoring of the servers. The moral of this story seems to be that it is a bad idea to buy a game just before a major holiday."
Or perhaps that it's wise to avoid games with such DRM altogether. So far, Ubisoft hasn't shown any sign that they're reconsidering the requirement of a constant connection. They've recently said it's "vital" to the success of their games and promised that their DRM would "evolve and improve" over time.
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But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can this even remotely be considered a good idea? I do understand the burning desire for customer dependency, demographic information and all that, but seriously...I'd be very irritated if I were in a tricky spot, my network dropped briefly, and the game responded in such a fashion. Probably irritated enough to return it, if I hadn't been aware of the issue beforehand.
Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess someone thought it would be an effective way to prevent piracy
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Funny)
And someone's botnet runs a Denial of Service attack in 3, 2, 1, 0, 65536, 65535... damnit... now I gotta recompile...
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Funny)
You do indeed, you've got a really screwed up system if 0 rolls back to 65536.
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also a nontrivial expense to run that server.
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Funny)
Yep - nothing like going out of business to be safe from pirates.
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess someone thought it would be an effective way to prevent piracy
Once you've started a legitimate copy of a game, what process do they figure will turn the copy into an illegitimate one during gameplay?
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:But why? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Interesting)
If only the mods went to +6. I think we've already seen evidence with Spore, which picked up a reputation for annoying DRM, and subsequently became the most pirated game.
Surely it wouldn't be long before it would be cracked anyway - the crack would just have to modify the PCs hosts file to set pointlessdrm.ubisoft.com 127.0.0.1, and run a mini activation server that tells the game your copy's legit.
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Funny)
"the crack would just have to modify the PCs hosts file to set pointlessdrm.ubisoft.com 127.0.0.1, and run a mini activation server that tells the game your copy's legit"
(Ubisoft exec): "Is anyone writing this down? Someone google 127.0.0.1 and see if we can buy the domain..."
Parent
Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)
But this is a trend even in Xbox360 games. The new Mass Effect 2 does this. in order to even play the game you have to register with easports.com (in game they link to your xbox live account info) and it sends a lot of info there as you play. Plus the game has turned from a great cinematic experience to a "you have to buy all this crap" in order to have the good gear fest.
It's down loadable content whore out to the extreme. $60.00 for the game and another $240.00 to actually have the whole game after you buy all the crap that the game should have came with.
and It's only going to get worse.
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)
Mass Effect 2 is a great example. I purchased it on Steam ahead of the release and preloaded it. Yet the day of release, EA's authentication servers couldn't be reached. Worse, you end up having to make accounts in different places to prove you own the game, even though Steam already knows you do. It reminds me of GTA-IV. Set up an account here, now set one up over there. Now figure out how to link them. For what? All I want is to be able to play the game I purchased! Using a game for the first time is getting to be as bad as doing taxes.
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Informative)
Check out a torrent site for confirmation on this, s'all true.
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Re:But why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, soon we will ALL be pirates, simply because the pirated version will be the only one where you don't have to jump through flaming hoops while tapdancing and juggling bowling balls just to play the *&^&%&^% game!
To see how this kind of BS DRM hurts customers just watch this [metacafe.com] (warning: Language NSFW but who can blame him) and pay close attention to the huge piles of game boxes behind him. Here is a guy who has spent thousands on games, simply to get shafted. But of course if he would have pirated he would not have had all the BS, because the pirate version "just works" unlike the defective by design retail version. How about giving us a good deal for our money, instead of taking our $60 and then bitch-slapping us for daring to pay you? How about that game companies?
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Re:But why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for the pirates, who've not only had the game available for days, but have the DLC packs too.
Sometimes I think that game publishers are trying to self-destruct.
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Re:But why? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure where you get your information from, but it's wrong. There's no requirement for a network connection to play ME2 on 360, or for any kind of registration - you can just put the disc in and play. However, there is some (to be honest, absurd) registration hoops you have to go through to get access to the free/collectors edition DLC. As for stuff you have to buy, well there's nothing for sale yet so I have no idea what you're talking about or where you get $240 as a figure from. The only paid DLC currently available AFAIK is for people who don't have the Cerberus Network access code which comes bundled with new copies of the game (i.e. it's a used game tax).
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Re:But why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they hate their customers, or their management are a bunch of incompetent idiots.
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As I said in the last thread. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pirated games are simply superior.
Pirated games treat me like admin of my own computer.
Legitimate game do not.
I really do not need any other reason to refuse to use anything but pirated games.
It is MY hardware, not ubisoft / Ea / etc
Re:As I said in the last thread. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay to be treated like a criminal
OR
Become a criminal to be treated like a human being.
What a fucking world we live in.
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Re:As I said in the last thread. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you do not want it to become my software, do not sell it to me. You may maintain copyrights over it, but the bits are mine. Let me use them.
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Re:As I said in the last thread. (Score:5, Insightful)
_____EXACTLY_____
Praise the spaghetti monster that someone actually gets it.
I have purchased the odd game, ***AFTER*** a good crack game out for it, that allowed me to install it and play it and still be admin of my own computersputnik.
There are no games out there for an "admin" of my mind set to buy, there is only stuff that I cannot differentiate from malware / trojan infested crap.
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Re:As I said in the last thread. (Score:4, Informative)
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Wow... (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the high system requirements and per-machine installation(and probably a dozen background processes and some kernel-mode driver that breaks your DVD drive) of a local application, combined with all the vendor lock-in, violation of First Sale, and high connectivity requirements and costs of a cloud app. Good work, guys.
I suggest a slogan. "Ubisoft: We make single-player games that require more internet access than Gmail, for fuck's sake."
Not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
This is either stupidity or an intentionally over the top "announcement" designed to soften people up so that when they release the actual platform people are relieved that it only phones home every hour instead of continuously.
Very few people are going to accept requiring 24/7 connectivity to play their games; given the number of times a day that I lose connection to Steam for a couple of minutes for whatever reason, if it had a system like this I'd never be able to play any of my games without interruption. And God help you if you're playing a multiplayer game and you lose connection to Ubisoft but not to the server you're playing on; forget blaming lag, you can just blame the fact that your game was paused for 30 seconds while it re-established a connection to Ubi.
Oh and we're sorry we deleted all your save games, but these things happen and the agreement you signed means we don't have any responsibility to protect your data while it's sitting on our servers. Again, Steam has it right here with their cloud settings, you *sync* the information with the local machine, you don't store it all remotely.
Re:Not going to happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Steam does not have it right. I cannot restore a backup and play it without an internet connection. If steam goes away, and either I have not already downloaded the patches they promise to make available, or those patches are never made available, I cannot play my games. I will have to warez them. So why not just do that in the first place, and avoid the whole potential for a problem?
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This is why people crack games they own (Score:5, Insightful)
Future Ubisoft Games (Score:5, Informative)
To Not Appear In My Home. :(
Which is better, cracked or bought? (Score:4, Insightful)
Legally bought: can only play it at home or wherever I manage to find a free and reliable internet connection that does not suck (which is a minority of them)
Cracked: can play it at home, in the backseat of a car, on the bus, on the train, on the plane, in the park, at the airport, ANYWHERE.
And the best part is that the cracked version is free! Why waste money on an inferior product, then?
The only downside is that the cracked version is only released about a week after the official version.
Cloud Gaming? (Score:5, Insightful)
A while ago I decided that I'll switch to PC only gaming.
This was for one reason: I will always be able to play the games I own.
Consoles break, hardware can become irreplaceable, chips can burn out, backup batteries die, ROMs have questionable copyright.
But PC's will be forever.
I can even play some older games on QEMU right now. In 50 years I will be able to play today's games on an emulated system with an emulated GPU & CPU.
Many (if not most) of today's games have the multi-player component as a critical part of game-play. Playing them on a non-networked computer would be virtually pointless. The benefit of this setup is that I could go to an internet cafe, a friends house or work and start up a game, while being in exactly the same place in the game as at home. But haven't some games had that ability for many years?
Either way, without stand-alone gameplay - I'm not interested. I want to make sure that someday (in the far future) I will be able to play the games I play today with my great-grand-kids, instead of receiving a message like "Sorry, Can't connect to server", "ipv9 not supported", or "Gameplay not available, server offline since 2011".
Bullshit and Ubisoft now belong together. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ubisoft? Pfft (Score:4, Insightful)
So Ubisoft is going mandate ridiculous DRM measures. Ubisoft. This is the company/publisher who, as far as I can tell, has barely produced one game that didn't suck in a long time. And that's just because compared to Assassin's Creed 1, it'd be hard for 2 not to look good. Yeah. So long Ubisoft, I can't say it was fun.
Maybe this is a good thing, though. Someone like Blizzard doing this would have people grumbling and moaning and everyone would still put up with it because they need their WoW or Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2 or whatever. If someone like Ubisoft does it, and it's just one more reason for people not to buy their crap, and they go under, maybe it will make other companies think twice before trying similar stupidity. Maybe.
REVIEWERS, please take a stand (Score:4, Interesting)
Game review websites and magazines ought to unite on this issue and give games failing scores if they do not allow for offline play when in self-contained single player mode.
Innocent Bystanders (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand major media companies consider piracy to be a major problem. I understand we're not likely to ever change that opinion. But. It would be nice if they got everything in perspective and realized that they should not hinder legitimate customers in their war against pirates. All that will do is either drive those legitimate customers away or, worse, turn them in to pirates.
Looking at Ubisoft on Wikipedia... (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubisoft#Controversies [wikipedia.org]
- use of the StarForce copy protection
- ceased to provide his games to a magazine that had negative reviews of their games
- admit to release low quality games that need additional promotion to be sold
SecuROM (Score:4, Insightful)
They're the ones using it.
They did create some very good games, but I'm not buying anything with SecuROM in it, no matter how good the game. Now they want to add 'needs permanent net access'? If I wasn't already blocking them on my shopping list, I'd be doing it now...l
I've pirated exactly one game in my life (Score:4, Interesting)
I was an early adopter of Steam. If you are like me, and have not been a habitual pirate, Steam is awesome. I don't have to have boxes of games and manuals lying around, no more swapping CDs, my computers install all of their games on their own...Steam has made games so cheap I find myself buying some and never playing them. I'm collecting them like baseball cards, or candy.
The point of all of this is I am the customer the gaming industry wants. I'm the one buying their games, and buying games for my wife and kids. They cannot afford to piss people like me off. Here is the part that everyone who works in the gaming industry should read:
IF I HAVE ONE MORE EXPERIENCE LIKE I HAD YESTERDAY WITH MASS EFFECT 2, I'LL TURN PIRATE, AND NEVER LOOK BACK. I paid full price for a game, so I can listen to my buddies who pirated it talk about it for days before I get to play it, and when I finally go to unlock the game already installed on my HD, I can't play it because EA's auth servers can't handle the load THAT ALL OF THE PRE-ORDER SALES FIGURES INFORMED THEM WAS COMING. I personally view this as incompetence or indifference on a criminal scale. As a paying customer, for the first time I felt abused, and I'm not going to put up with that again.
Clean up your act, EA. Come back to reality, Ubisoft. You are killing the golden goose.
Re:Blame piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Blame piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, if 80-90% of your potential customers are willing to expend the effort of piracy rather than purchase your product
Because the pirated version is BETTER because it doesn't have all the copy protection in the way of the game experience. Gaming is getting pretty weird psychologically, one minute you're having a blast playing something scientifically designed to be fun because you paid money and the game designers love you, next minute you're suffering through copy protection because the game designers hate the folks whom pay them money. Makes you wonder about the average non-pirate gamers sex life (if any)
perhaps your product is overpriced. You may not feel it is. You may feel entitled to greater pay for your work. The market cares not.
The stereotypical $1000 video card gamer doesn't care about the game price. Looking at the economics of it, I don't think price is why pirates pirate. Now cellphone gamers, they have a reasonable economic reason to pirate because cell phones are cheap. I've never pirated a game that doesn't have copy protection / CD checks / printed manual questions / etc.
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Re:Blame piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
As a long term PC gamer and both purchaser and pirater of said games, I have to say that Steam has pretty much single-handedly ended the pirate side of my gaming experience. While I will still occasionally give in and download pirated copies of games where they're available in advance of the official release, I still end up buying them (and usually pre-ordering them).
Over christmas, during Steam's insanely cheap sale, I must have spent close to £100 on all kind of games that I probably would never have played otherwise - frankly, for £3 or £4 even if you only play the game once you haven't really lost anything. I know Steam has its issues (Most notably the first sale ones), but I also think it's the way forward for games distribution in that it's very relaxed about how, when and where you play your games. I can install Steam anywhere at any time, download any of my games and play them without worrying about having discs or activiation limits (with the exception of a few retarded publishers who still insist on SecuRom or Games For Windows Live on their Steam distributed games) and if you plan ahead, you don't need an internet connection either.
I know others will inevitably try and emulate Steam, but if they do it in stupidly restrictive ways, like Ubi appear to be doing, they're only going to succeed in failing and they'll have nobody to blame but themselves (although they'll obviously try and place all the blame on the pirates).
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Re:Blame piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
1) The figure of 80-90% piracy is generated by the industry, and since it is largely unmeasurable it is an estimate (i.e. made up) I suspect no-one has any real idea how much is pirated
2) This is yet another layer of security, that the pirates will get round, and make easy for any one who wants to to get round
3) The only people this will annoy is the legitimate paying customers..... however many are left
This and similar anti-piracy schemes are why I stopped buying games (and playing them), it took too much effort to get the game working so I gave up, many people gave up and got the pirated version with all this stuff stripped out which meant that it "just worked" ....
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Re:Blame piracy (Score:5, Funny)
I think the rampant PC game piracy (almost 80-90%) can be blamed for this somewhat.
Source? The recently released Call of Duty MW2 sold 15 million units [telegraph.co.uk]. If that figure represents only 10% of the copies in existence, with the other 90% being pirated and not counted as sales, that means there are 150 million people playing the game. I'm convinced that the video game market is expanding, and will have increased social acceptance in the future, but I'm finding 150 million people a bit hard to believe. Furthermore, the same has sold more copies than it's predecessor, which only sold approx 14 million copies. More people are buying games.
Infinity Ward certainly doesn't seem to be suffering from rampant piracy. Perhaps people aren't buying Ubisoft's games not so they can pirate them, but because their products suck and treat customers like slaves.
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Re:Blame piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
If Ubisoft can create an "offline" patch, then so can crackers, and I'll bet they do a better job of it too.
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Re:Blame piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the rampant PC game piracy (almost 80-90%) can be blamed for this somewhat.
No, the idea that piracy matters is to blame for this. Caring about piracy is bad business. Two things matter when designing a good business plan:
The entire purpose of your sales and marketing strategy is to move people from the second category into the first. Some pirates are in a third category: people who definitely won't buy your product. Any money spent on this market segment is wasted. If they won't buy your product whatever you do, then it doesn't matter if they pirate it or just go without. It's frustrating, but that's an emotional issue and basing corporate decisions on emotions is rarely a good idea.
Some of the pirates are in the category of people who might buy your product. How do you turn them into people who will buy your product? There are several ways, but making your product worse, and making it comparatively worse than the pirated version, are not on the list. And yet, for some reason, they are the two strategies that most people involved in The War on Piracy seem to be choosing. Oddly enough, they are having about as much success as their counterparts in the wars on terror and drugs.
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Re:Blame piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Like I noted, this system has some parts of the code (savegames, possible game objects, etc) and requires ubisoft account login to play. It will require complete rewrite of those missing parts into the game and creating local equivalents to them. And no, you don't get to use c++ for this; you do it in assembly.
At first glance that is totally the wrong way to go. Rather than writing new routines for the games in assembly, you write an emulator for evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com in a modern interpreted language and add a line to your hosts file to point to 127.0.0.1. A modern interpreted language is way faster to develop for, and if it runs slow, who cares you've got 100s of ms of "internet" latency to work around. I imagine there'll be a CPAN perl module for this within perhaps a week of the release.
They could try to crypto sign the traffic between evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com and the game. Now, the crypto auth part of the game executable is where you go back to the old skool tradition of binary patching machine language branches into jumps and nops.
Bonus is you can use the evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com emulator for presumably all their games not just one, plus you can trivially integrate in a nice savegame editor, savegame backup system, etc.
This all seems terribly obvious to me, ergo I must be caffeine deficient at this early hour. All I'm really seeing is UBI wasting a lot of money to lose sales without affecting piracy? And they're creating yet another "big content" ecosystem where yet again, the "pirated" product actually provides a better end user experience than the "pay" product, aside from economic costs? Since this will tank UBI, I'm not predicting other marketing conglomerates copying UBIs idea, other than the usual tongue in cheek "I strongly encourage my competitors to also shoot themselves in their feet".
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Re:Blame piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, no, I don't. I remember when the Amiga died in large part due to mismanagement by Commodore. Did it die more than once? 'Cause I totally missed the piracy death.
Remember when the Apple ][ died in large part due to piracy? No? There was at least as much game piracy on that platform. Maybe piracy isn't a big contributing factor.
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Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Funny)
i doubt this new system will work for me. i do have 24/7 internet access, but my high-speed line is always saturated downloading pirated game from pirate bay. no way are any ubisoft.com bound packets going to get through
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Re:Community of Pirates (Score:5, Insightful)
Piracy = theft.
Agreed. Also, assault and battery = murder
Exceeding the speed limit = rape
Public intoxication = distributing child pornography
Any other minor crimes that we should rename to more serious ones for no good reason?
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