I still think that the Steam platform is the golden standard for DRM. The Assassin's Creed 2 DRM still comes from the old-school plan of restricting the legitimate needs of cash-paying customers, which makes the cracked version superior to the original. Steam, on the other hand, gives me more features rather than less: I can install the game on multiple machines, or the same machine multiple times, even if I lose the hard copy. It saves me a trip to the store, which was half the reason I pirated games back in college. I can pre-load the game and play it literally the second it comes out without having to camp outside a Fry's two hours away. They're by no means essential features and I rarely use any of them, but that whole thing about making sure your copy is legitimate is a hell of a lot easier to swallow when it's sold as the price of a new feature.
Steam is kind of like the old iTunes of software (or the Kindle store). Sure, there's DRM, but it's not too bad -- actually, it's often more lenient than what you'd get in the plastic version of the same software. In exchange, you get all of your games backed up remotely for the life of the service with zero re-install headaches.
For people like me who have grown with computers and games things like original disks, standalone copies, and accessible abandonware is like the National Archives.
I still play games from the 90's, even 80's, thanks to emulators. I don't want to buy something that won't run properly after 20 years which itself is about 15 years since any reasonable commercial interest.
To each his own, I guess. While I started playing in the 80s and still have a rotting away C64 in the attic (the floppies are probably beyond rot) storing and archiving the media, to me, is just darn painful.
So the fact that I have an implicit backup of all my games with nill re-install headache is the killer argument for Steam.
I'm fully aware of the drawbacks (including the, alas remote, possibility of the service going down, but am willing to chance this for the convenience received.
OTOH: Ubisoft just said hello to Sony (remember the rootkit fiasko, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit ) and a couple other companies on my eternal shitlist. Since it's eternal there's no escape and they won't see one mor Eurocent from me, no matter what. I also won't pirate anything Ubisoft for that matter.
In other words, Steam DRM comes with some carrots, instead of just extra sticks.
I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere...
I'm a fan for the same reasons you listed. Also, their aggressive sales and price reductions on older archival titles significantly increases my buy-in of the Steam service, which in turn makes me far more willing to turn to them when I am buying a full-price, day 1 title.
It's not just that Steam has carrots and Ubisoft used sticks. The point of introducing a stick is to hit the people who are misbehaving, so that they'll want to stop. But Ubisoft is inconveniencing the paying customers more than the pirates. They're using the stick on the wrong people altogether! That creates an entirely backwards incentive scheme.
Meanwhile, DRMing a game through Steam makes it more convenient for the consumer rather than less convenient[1]. They turned the protection scheme from a hindrance into a feature, and a desirable one at that. Most importantly, the carrot wasn't just stapled on to sweeten the deal, the features of Steam are leveraging the DRM itself. I have never heard anyone say "man Steam is awesome, but they should take out the DRM"--it's an intrinsic part of the additional features. That's what makes it so impressive to me.
[1] There are tradeoffs so YMMV, but the tradeoffs are easily worthwhile for the majority of players, which is Good Enough.
strangely, I agree, I love using steam, even though its completely DRMed and I don't get any control over the game -- but at the same time I can download games on new computers, pre-load games before release day, and do it all painlessly.
Yes, the first versions of steam were pretty terrible, but they have turned it into my preferred way of buying PC games over the years -- it really is a great platform now days.
They don't do stupid shit with DRM affecting the rest of your comptuer, or hacks on the DVDs, etc. They keep it clean and simple for the user.
In Australia, I see a mixture of:
1. reasonably priced games - often cheaper than physical copies, and,
2. ridiculously overpriced games - same price as RRP for a physical copy, even months later when physical copies are going for much less.
These days, less and less games fall into category number 2. At the moment its mainly Modern Warfare 2 and Borderlands.
The strength of Steam lies with the fact that Valve has created a service that people want to connect (and authenticate) with, and tying all your games together makes it a real loss if your account is banned.
Obviously online games are hard to crack on Steam (it was developed for Counterstrike). However, single-player games are as easy to crack on Steam as any other DRM system. All you need is a dummy account and a crack not to have to authenticate online.
The OP addresses this. The pirates claim that there's nothing missing besides the DRM; this makes it incomplete in Ubisoft's estimation. And Ubisoft isn't citing any particular things that it might lack.
No, Ubisoft may still be right. It's quite common to spread your checks throughout gameplay. For example, there were actually several copy protection checks in the old Karateka game. One triggered later in the level and made the eagle unbeatable. This caused the cracker group to have to re-release it.
This kind of in-game check led to the practice of cracking "100%". This means the cracker played the entire game through and verified everything worked properly. They'd often add "trainers" (eternal life patches) to make this process go quicker.
With a fully online system as Ubisoft claimed to have, you can just store the level code/data on the server. In this case, EVERY crack will be limited as you can always download new protection code with level N+1. It remains to be seen how well they adopted this approach to updating their protection, but you can see it work in fully online games like WoW.
We designed the Blu-ray protection scheme to have the same renewable property, it's just that the disc itself is the transport channel since your player is not guaranteed to be online. A PC-only environment can make that kind of requirement, and an online-only system is easier to protect.
Similar protection schemes existed with old dongle protected programs as well. Some were made nearly uncrackable because of how many checks were littered throughout the app. Most crackers wouldn't bother with patching every single location within the application and gave up on it.
A bit off-topic, but as you mentioned it: Did you expect Blu-Ray to be broken any faster/slower than it has been (even if only by SlySoft rather than publically)?
Having PC software players seems like the weak point to me; they'll always be analysed far more quickly than the turnaround time for key revocation/distribution/version updates.
It says that Ubisoft's opinion is that the DRM makes the game package "complete". That's not true - it's missing actual game data. Maybe not in the first 30 minutes of gameplay or so, perhaps.
I work for them. I don't know the specifics as I don't have anything to do with the DRM, but I believe that the general idea is similar to what NateLawson says above.
Well, not to troll, but I downloaded SH5 from a newsgroup to see if this claim is true (not a file sharing site as I don't have any wish to perpetuate the infringement and upload to others) and it's fine, I haven't noticed a single thing missing from the gameplay. I'll be uninstalling shortly and deleting the ISO, but I'm currently about 3 hours in.
Can you give specific info as to exactly what is missing?
It's a great game, I'll definitely be buying it when the DRM is gone despite not really being much of a gamer anymore.
I stress when, because it's the biggest backfire in copy protection history and Ubi know it. After all the development time and resource that has obviously gone into the DRM, I was surprised/amused to see that the hack is pretty much just a cracked exe.
I don't know anything about SH5, but until someone 100%s the game with a "cracked" copy I remain sceptical that the DRM has been cracked.
I really don't think there's going to be a "when", TBH. I don't know for sure, but I'm worried that this is a last attempt at trying to make the big-budget PC games market profitable. Either it works and stays, or it doesn't work and publishers start to drop out of the market. EA are doing exactly the same thing with the next C&C by the way.
Either it works and stays, or it doesn't work and publishers start to drop out of the market.
I think this attitude is a big part of the problem.
The mindset that they can only be profitable by preventing copying, whatever draconian measures that requires, puts them in a box that will prevent any innovation, either in gameplay or in business model.
It may be that efforts at copy protection are well past the point of diminishing returns. Perhaps the investment in these technologies, and the resulting loss in customer goodwill, are costing more than the actual piracy.
Maybe the vast cinematography, scoring, voice acting, etc., aren't what gamers really want, and the "big budget" games are really throwing away money. Maybe gamers just want new ideas like Tetris.
But the idea that "this DRM must work or the industry is doomed" will prevent the publishers from discovering these approaches, or others like them.
> Maybe the vast cinematography, scoring, voice acting, etc., aren't what gamers really want, and the "big budget" games are really throwing away money.
I was referring specifically to big-budget blockbuster titles. The major publishers have divested portfolios. If the big budget PC titles aren't profitable they'll be dropped and the investment will be elsewhere, like facebook games or whatever.
I'd argue that a lot of people do want these games though, because although PC sales are very low, millions of people play them.
I thought that the big drm issue was that the game saves on ubisoft's servers vs your harddrive.
To me that in itself is very unappealing, but that is what is "missing" from the game. If that has been cracked already then that just goes to show that good DRM can at best delay cracking the game, meanwhile there is a saying "Whenever DRM prevents a customer willing to buy the game form buying it, a pirate gets his wings"
I don't own (the PC version of) the game, but I've read in multiple places that storing saves in the cloud was optional; you could go into settings and store them on your HD if you didn't want to play your saves elsewhere. No personal confirmation of whether that's true or not.
(obligatory: http://xkcd.com/488/ )