I’ve avoided Ubisoft mainly because of the DRM. I did just buy Anno 1404 though, including the expansion pack. It turns out £6 is about the price point where I am willing to put up with the DRM. I’m not sure that’s all that preferable for Ubisoft to my simply pirating it, but okay, if that’s what they prefer.
After trying Uplay for the first time this weekend (1 dollar Driver deal), I can certainly see why people steal their games. It took me 2 days of trying to get the game to actually install and run. In the end I did the same steps I did the first time but it just happened to work.
Even at 1 dollar, I am annoyed. I would pay 10 times that to have it on Steam. (yes I never did pull the trigger on it during the summer sale)
No, no, no. If they removed their DRM, they’d have even higher piracy rates. Probably like 103%, at least.
All games are pirated when they are available in pirate versions. Draconian DRM is a topic usually only really interesting to a very vocal but rather minuscule minority.
So, the lesson Ubisoft learned here is that the actual strength of the DRM doesn’t matter and they may as well go back to lighter, less-annoying methods, right?
“Introducing Uplay 2, now with personal DNA-linked encryption and neural processing integration!”
Now, lets be scientific about it. 103.4%
A couple of those Ubisoft PC titles with the really restrictive always-on DRM still haven’t been cleanly cracked to this day. You can get the client rips, but the database stuff that would’ve legitimately come from Ubi’s servers are either incomplete or just glitchy. The cracker groups just lost interest in trying to get all the database info for the limited appeal titles. You could argue that this is a “success” for that DRM, but I’d wager that the lost sales negated any gains they got from the pirates not overcoming the DRM. Of course, it’s all speculation on both sides.
Really, the big threat to digital rights advocates is the general apathy of the consumer. No one cares that they are slowly losing ownership of software, so publishers will continue to remove offline access. Simple as that.
Shawn White - Skateboarding
Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2
Those 2 titles were never cracked as the groups didn’t want to spend their resources on them.
Guess those 2 must be the Ubi top sellers then and we can expect yearly iterations.
Oh we don’t? Hm wonder why…
Probably not particularly accurate but, according to vgchartz Anno 2070 sold 870 000 units.
Taking the 93% piracy rate, if I’m not botching my math, this means Ubisoft estimates that roughly 12 million people are playing Anno 2070. Pretty impressive.
I believe what he was saying is that perhaps some people target their games because of their DRM and perhaps others use cracks so they can play their legally purchased games without the onerous requirements (the latter group I suspect is more equivalent to the “very vocal but rather minuscule minority”).
Not being available as a cracked version does not increase the general demand for a game.
Companies like Ubisoft do not have to speculate blindly. They have usage numbers from games with e.g. auto-update functions.
Also, to the doubters, have you all already forgotten what happened to Demigod?
At the risk of sounding incredibly ignorant, what exactly is the restrictive DRM in place for Ubi games? I just got Driver:SF, and while the whole Uplay thing is annoying as all get out, is there some additional DRM installed, and does it have additional consequences (like the bad old days when they would install software that would mess up DVD drives)?
What he’s getting at here is that nobody pays for games in certain territories, and governments are uninterested in addressing that. Lower pricing (legit games costing $60 in US/EU are priced at $5-$15 in Russia) has had little effect on this, because free with zero consequences is a better deal than $15. Effective DRM just means that nobody plays your game, pirated or otherwise. These are challenging markets to penetrate.
Now I see what people mean by gamer’s entitlement.
“We have a business model problem: a 90%+ theft rate. How do we solve this? Make it harder to steal our product?”
Does Windows 7 make you authenticate our copy when you install it like XP? Do people pirate Win 7 because of that feature?
Now I see what people mean by gamer’s entitlement.
“We have a business model problem: a 90%+ theft rate. How do we solve this? Make it harder to steal our product?”
Does Windows 7 make you authenticate our copy when you install it like XP? Do people pirate Win 7 because of that feature?
Ubisoft requires an internet connection for full functionality of all of its newer games.
The impact varies from game to game. In Anno 2070, for instance, you need to be online to gain any advantages from the items in your Arc (a storage place for goodies). In Settlers 7, you need to be online to have any access to DLC. Cloud saves are used as well, so you may potentially miss out on accessing those (although I believe it does resync once you connect again).
To be fair to Ubisoft, they did add the offline modes after the fact so at least there has been improvement. Of course, that means it was once much worse.
Just to be clear, “gamer’s entitlement” != “pirate’s entitlement”
Windows 7 doesn’t immediately shut down my PC and lock it out if my internet connection has a hiccup. If it did, you can damn well be sure I wouldn’t be using it either.
Like the music industry, they love to play a number game that would end up with UBISOFT owning the entire games industri if piracy was gone…or would it just mean that a lot less would play their games…uhm I wonder.
Edit : It really sucked to read that demi-god story, I bought the game at launch and just could not get a good game in for over a week…which made me uninstall and never look back…
le suck