Future Ubisoft Games To Require Constant Internet Access 497
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."
Re:But why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Blame piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Savegames in the cloud? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Blame piracy (Score:2, Interesting)
i am all for the big players moving to the consoles if the pc market is too hard for them. By their attempts to gain total control they will destroy all benefits of pc gaming - mods, user created content, ease of multiplaying on lan, dedicated servers and what not.
music industry behemots had to admit that unrestricted product sells better, it's time for the game industry to do the same. I see paying for digital stuff as an absolutely voluntary act of rewarding creators' efforts in case their product is excellent. Paying in advance is asking to be scammed with the worthless piece of shit. No amount of drm would force me to pay if i didn't like what i saw.
Blizzard was an exception in my case, i bought almost every game up to 1st WoW. I knew they attract players with the quality alone because their copy protection was trivial to circumvent and yet millions were willing to pay - unfortunately they chose the same path of tightening the grip in case of upcoming Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, removing offline lan, requiring internet during install even when there is no multiplayer available without their servers (single player will be hacked in 1 day either way).
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" ....
Bullshit and Ubisoft now belong together. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But why? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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".
Alternatives to Big Brother being able to watch (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Blame piracy (Score:2, Interesting)
Steam is very nice, and they have great deals etc. I find Steam to be the best compromise we the gamer can possibly put up with.
I hope Steam does not change.
Re:Looking at Ubisoft on Wikipedia... (Score:3, Interesting)
admit to release low quality games that need additional promotion to be sold
At least they're admitting to it; that's more than say EA do...
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.
Re:Blame piracy (Score:2, Interesting)
Carmel recounted seeing torrents with upwards of "500 seeders and 300 leechers" and receiving emails from some who bought the title after pirating it, but flat-out said that "the piracy rate was about 90" percent. "We're doing ok, though," Carmel said in stride. "We're getting good sales through WiiWare, Steam, and our website. Not going bankrupt just yet."
Seems to be they don't mind too much and openly admit that piracy makes up a portion of the people who eventually bought the game. I still don't see how they can come up with this rate of 90%, it has to be an estimate there is no way to 100% know how many pirated copies are out there or being played. People could be downloading the game to try it and saying Not for me, others go out and but it. I'd bet the way they come up with 90% is by saying "Ok, we should sell 10000 copies of the game", then X time frame later they say we only sold 1000 copies, there must be 9000 pirated copies out there that's a 90% piracy rate.
Re:Blame piracy (Score:2, Interesting)
So we go from the current situation:
Sales: x units.
Piracy: 4x units.
And instead we have:
Sales: 0.0000000000001x[1] units.
Piracy: 0 units.
The words "Pyrrhic" and "victory" spring to mind.
[1] I'm sure somebody, somewhere, will buy it - if only by mistake.
Re:Ubisoft aren't even the worst ... (Score:1, Interesting)
I did manage to get a bank chargeback on my Cities XL blunder.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Blame piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
This is apparently where they got the figures from.... Although they got 80% piracy?
The comment from one of the developers is significant
2D BOY’s Ron Carmel : “by the way, just in case it’s not 100% clear, we’re not angry about piracy, we still think that DRM is a waste of time and money, we don’t think that we’re losing sales due to piracy, and we have no intention of trying to fight it.”
Re:But why? (Score:3, Interesting)
When will content providers realize that pirated software/media is not a potential customer. If they wanted to be a customer they would have been one in the first place.
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:But why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I'm seeing some of this with Dragon Age: Origins and their DLC. I bought the game. I bought some of the DLC. Now, whenever I start the game, I get to the menu and click "Resume Game". I may or may not get a message that "I'm not logged into the game and some content might not be available". Last night, I didn't get the message (I usually do) but I loaded up, get into a battle with some Dark Spawn and see my Warrior (Alistair) running at the bad guys in his skivvies!
Of course, seeing this was absolutely humorous, but also annoying as it didn't take long for me to figure out the game refused to load the special armor that came with the Pre-order of the game. The "some content might not be available" message I've seen before. Logging out and back in fixed the issue (the menu screen *said* I was logged in but in reality the game is actually trying to establish a connection behind the scenes) as it gave the system enough time to verify.
Regardless, I'm more than disappointed by this (after my initial laughter as seeing a mostly naked warrior wade into battle and no one blinked an eye). I've payed for this stuff and yet the system is tied to this very annoying authorization system for a single player game.
I'm not against DLC or micro-transactions. I'm fine with MMO games charging a subscription fee to maintain servers. But I'm pretty bothered that this kind of relentless activation is going on. It's a really poor choice and I certainly won't be buying any more DLC for DA:O. I'm done with that game once I finish what I've got.
@Ubisoft, I certainly won't (knowingly) purchase any games "offline" games that require endless online authorization to play. And this comes from a Steam user. Steam lets me play my games offline. At least, all the games I currently have.
Oh well. These game companies are really getting tin-foil hat about piracy these days when they should be looking at what they're doing to push people away from buying their games, like making them a PITA just to play them.
Re:dongle? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes it would be possible in theory, but good luck doing that for each and every game that comes out.
It's a bit like saying a 1024 bit private RSA key can be cracked by sheer trying of all possible combinations. Sure, it can be done, but it'll take a lot of time. The comparison is also not fair because RTMP was never meant to be uncrackable, the specification was just not open.
The point is that the dongle-scheme (when done correctly) is simpler and more user-friendly than the "always online" scheme, and also most likely offers better protection against piracy.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)