Sup
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Interesting article on a small indie developer's blog:
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/03/DRM-can-be-effective
Immediate piracy of AAA games is not always a given, as I learned from Martin in the comments. The best example is Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory, which is, by all definitions, a AAA blockbuster game. It used the controversial StarForce 3.0 DRM and took 422 days to be cracked, well beyond the game's shelf life. StarForce 3.0 used a plethora of controversial methods to achieve this, most notably, it secretly installed mandatory device drivers. This obviously was highly controversial and there were many reports of new security vulnerabilities, performance degredation, incompatibilities, system instability, and other issues. As an aside, StarForce actually threatened to sue BoingBoing and CNET for reporting on these issues.Massive consumer issues aside, it worked. 422 days with relatively small amounts of piracy is unprecedented. Despite this amazing win against piracy, after it was cracked, Ubisoft dropped it, promising never to use it again. At the time, it seemed that they were listening to customer complaints, but in hindsight, it seems like they were just waiting for an even more invasive solution, which makes StarForce look welcome.
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There is a link on the Slashdot page that goes to the instructions included with the files needed to play SH5 offline. Ubi is trying to do damage control by stating that it hasn't been bypassed and yet, posters around the net are stating just the opposite. Ubi must have some clogged up noses as they can't smell what they are shoveling from the looks of things.
Wk, i don't mean any offense by this, but don't make assumptions about groups and cultures and activities you know nothing about. It is quite common in piracy circles for a cracking team to claim the game works perfectly and be completely wrong, through lack of testing/using a copy they'd already been experimenting with. It's unheard of for a publisher to spread false information to try and pretend a crack doesnt work.
What's MOST likely/most commonly the case is that the crack functions but only under a specific course or order of action, that either is or is not included in the instructions (perhaps followed by chance by the cracking team) or is not understood by a decent % of the people trying to apply toe crack (perhaps because they need to rtfm).
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update: unpack, copy folder, play. normal, easy pirating, ubisoft's drm does not work at all.
I take that back. This is cool:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03/05...all/#more-26477
draconian and unfair as this may be, it's at least an interesting angle on DRM.
Actually, reports are still pretty mixed. It's possible someone just leaked a broken version of the game on torrent sites, or that some users suck at reading instructions. I'd snag it and try myself, but i havent got the hard drive space or patience to pirate a game for science.
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Also, cracks are not all created equally. There's 'unzip and play' style cracking and then there's 'do a ridiculous rain dance involving blank dvds, changing file names around, and editing registry entries' kind of cracking. One, obviously, leads to more pirated copies than the other.
Snagging the readme for the crack out of curiosity to see which kind this is.
Also, i mean, while this is totally foolish and not getting anywhere, whoever made this drm -- inhouse or out of ubi -- pretty much sold the higher ups snake oil. They're out of touch for believing a system like this would be hard to crack, but not crazy for wanting to protect their product. Ubi loses a ton of sales in the PC market to piracy, while they lose very few sales in the console market. This was a (misguided) attempt to push back into the PC platform, which i would have thought the posters here would appreciate.
I mean, it was a completely, ridiculously stupid idea, but they were trying to do what you all have been demanding of them. Make PC games that they can devote big budgets to.
update: unpack, copy folder, play. normal, easy pirating, ubisoft's drm does not work at all.
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Finishing a game for digital download isnt free, man. And it's very possible they have debts from development that they'll need a full boxed release to cover.
Anyway looks cool. Dubious, with the developer's lack of experience on this kind of game, but if they pull it off and get it published it could be interesting.
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But unlike all of the babbling about RUINING FRANCHISES that still makes them money, this is at least a huge outright mistake that maybe ubisoft can learn from. The pc community has been railing agaisnt DRM for years. There is no excuse for something this draconian, whoever made this call is completely out of touch, and might actually take notice if all of their games underperform.
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The primary uses of DX11 in Bad Company 2 is to soften all the dynamic shadows as well as to improve performance in general with a few smaller DX11 optimizations that we are using.
Was there any point in this?, i would of rather the devs focused on extra levels/missions in sp.
The engine programmers are not level designers or mission scripters.
The improvement of the graphics engine has literally no impact on the amount of production time/budget that goes into level design. Everyone on the team's job is to improve the part of the game they work on, and the engine programmers optimized the game to run better in dx11. Would you rather they just show up to work to collect their paychecks and it be a glitchy, low FPS mess on modern hardware architecture?
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If fallout 3 can ripoff of the fallout series with no relation to the original, why cant this?
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I cant vouch for the SP at all, and im actually not too optimistic about it.. but it may at least be stupid fun.
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Having played a lot of the beta, the game is really, really good. It's an action game, but it's an action game with a lot of depth and tactical options. And most of the griefing ###### are gone thanks to no prone -- its a lot harder to find glitchy, cheap ways to move around and camp without prone availible.
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The console version of graw 1/2's multiplayer was a completely distinct game from the singleplayer, and was developed exclusively by red storm.
yes, you guys should be hoping for more of that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah3vozHfAgo...feature=related is what it looked like
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$5000 is a year of college tuition at a good in-state school in most of the US
I love videogames, and a high end computer helps me for school/future career, but my current pc is around 400 dollars off and on and my total expenses over the last 6 years is no greater than 1.5k. It's a great hobby and it's worth spending money on but i don't see it being worth sacrificing other things in life. I would have a hell of a lot less ability to pursue hobbies like boxing and jiujitsu or to cover transportation costs and school if i dumped that kind of money on PCs -- but i'm young, and dont have a lot of income atm.
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One studio under the ubi name develops the game. Another studio in another place who shares nothing but the same vestigial chain of command answered this faq.
anyway, this is seriously a horribly, hilariously bad idea, it doesnt warrant much further discussion. Ubisoft has silly ideas about DRM, ubisoft employees are forced to defend it in comical ways.
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Stardock does not do this. They outright do not. It's considered a bad idea in the development community, it leads to disastrous word of mouth -- people pirate the game, report it crashes a lot, people assume the game is buggy.
Stardocks games are strictly DRM free - no attempts to deter piracy. Mixed success.
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there's no reason to play arma1 before you play arma2. there isnt any kind of sequentiality to the games, arma2 just represents a new and improved platform for campaigns and modding.
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I'm pretty sure the soldier in the pictures is a model hired by EA to dress kinda like cowboy, actually.
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While arma2 is hilariously broken, it's also design-wise a huge breath of fresh air and amazing simulator. If you are playing custom missions by people who know how to script to avoid the game's ######ty, dysfunctional engine, there is nothing like it.
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awesome highres screenshots, thales. Wish i could run the game on those settings!
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Shared code in a multiplatform title doesnt really mean anything. Ghost Recon had references to the Xbox in its code, remember? It certainly wasnt a port, just a leftover option from when they were planning to port it to the xbox -- http://www.ghostrecon.net/html/x-box.htm
Anyway, as for the engine, are you sure you weren't experiencing latency? The first day or two of the beta with the broken server browser resulted in some insane lag in every server i joined, and there was so much warping and stuttering and input lag i thought framerate was part of the problem at first.
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Hideo kojima is the man. If every game developer were as creative, talented, and respectable as he was we would have an amazing industry. Probably a bit too much to expect, though.
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Game is awesome. I don't think it's a console port at all -- i play on an older computer and most console games i try demos of on pc run horribly. Frostbite is a nicely tuned and PC optimized engine. And the interface is nice and mouse-centric -- not like the mess we got with OFP:DR
The gameplay is very streamlined -- this is a simpler, less random, less 'realistic' battlefield game, but it works extremely well. Fantastic, but maybe not what BF2 vets are expecting. One big complaint is that you can't go prone, but this clearly wasn't a feature that was taken out at random. The game seems very balanced and tuned for standing/crouch only, and it doesnt hinder stealth or sniping at all.
There is a definite sense of evolution here -- between the incredible effectiveness of squad features (you can respawn near any squadmate, even if they are in the thick of a battle) and the environmental destruction this is a distinctly different Battlefield game.
Video EA tweeted, gives a good impression of what we've got:
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This is true in most major markets, but not in others. Devs write of whole regions for certain consoles and handhelds because of the pervasiveness of piracy. Same regions already written off for PC piracy as well, but some places, like the Phillipenes, are almost impossible to sell any software.
Thanks for the insight, i hadn't really considered that.
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One thing that was brought up on one of the Ubi forums was console piracy and how Ubi suffers from head in sand syndrome (I actually said that bit) when it comes to that. I even did a quick search via TPB for PoP torrents and found that the top downloads were for the PS2. Ubi wants PC gamers to buy games while totally ignoring the piracy of games for other platforms. Go figure.
Console piracy doesn't really impact the market of home console owners in a meaningful way. Most of the people who go out and buy xbox360s don't know how to modify them. The people who do aren't the people microsoft is trying to sell the console to, or the people ubisoft is trying to sell games to. Piracy eats up a huge % of the market share that companies are banking on buying their PC games, whereas it has a nearly meaningless impact on the people that companies are expecting to buy their console games.
There is definitely console piracy, and there are definitely some lost sales from it, but it isnt financially crippling on consoles like it is on PCs. Ubisoft doesn't care how often their games get pirated, they care how much money they lose from piracy. On the PC, it's considerable. On consoles, it's negligible. That's the difference.
Anyway, this news is hilarious and ridiculous. I can't imagine ubisoft will stick to this very long.
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The company has added the references to its sights for many years, but the issue surfaced only recently when soldiers complained to an advocacy group.
Let's be honest; the only reason anyone cares about the markings is that they don't want to offend Muslims.
Or Jews. Or Atheists. Or buddhists. Or agnostics. Or christians who feel their faith should be a private matter. Or Hindus. Or anyone with a 'pagan' faith, or any number of other smaller religions which members of the us armed forces include.
I mean, i think all of this furor over tiny little text etched into the sight is silly, don't get me wrong, but it's not like this is a concern over 'dem muzlims'.
And it's not like there's some worldwide muslim conspiracy to kill innocents and defile christian values, it just so happens that a couple of crazy [people] in the middle east happen to be of muslim faith.
Also, let's not forget the likely considerable amount of christians who are religiously pacifistic who could be offended by their scripture being inscribed on something designed to kill.
Ubi PC Titles To Require Online Authentication
in The Video Gaming Industry Discussion
Posted
He didnt suggest it was. It's interesting, though, i wasn't aware of quite how effective it actually turned out to be. Certainly less invasive than this system, and it lasted for a year longer.
I doubt the financial ramifications of the lawsuit had anything to do with it (ubisoft did not stand to lose anything there, only starforce, and even then weren't in any real danger,) but it was a rare instance of ubisoft paying attention to fan backlash.