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The Two Things It Would Take for Me to Support UbiSoft’s New (draconian) PC Game DRM

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The Two Things It Would Take for Me to Support UbiSoft's New (draconian) PC Game DRMComic courtesy of Penny Arcade

I have already talked about the new DRM system Ubisoft has implemented in their games starting with Assassin’s Creed 2 – basically even for single player offline games you need to be constantly connected to the internet or the game boots you out and you lose all progress since the last checkpoint. While I bristle at the thought of such a system, I do accept that publishers need to find a way to protect their property from improper use and outright theft. I started writing this with a few quick ideas about how to make that system actually work a bit better, but so much has happened in the last few days that I need to talk about those first.

Predictably since the announcement there has been much outrage against Ubisoft, including those using this new DRM to justify stealing games … and also claims that the system would be broken quickly. As reported (via TeleRead) at The Inquirer and elsewhere, the new DRM system was cracked within 24 hours. Since then Ubisoft has updated the system (while continuing to deny the crack and also saying that if it WAS broken gamers would get an incomplete game).

Ironically, this weekend no one who bought the game legally (it is already out everywhere but North America) can play, because the authentication system went down. But naturally folks who pirated the game and used the cracks that broke the DRM have been playing without worry – because as usual DRM too often only serves to punish paying customers.

RockPaperShotgun commented on the outage, saying:

Ubisoft despite repeated warnings that it was untenable continued to boast the “feature” as a bonus for gamers. This weekend people have not been gamers, because their game wouldn’t run.

After Ubisoft’s emphatic denial that the pirated versions of both Ass Creed II and Silent Hunter V work properly, we’ve been receiving unofficial reports that, with a couple of slightly peculiar work-arounds, they work just fine. We have no first-hand evidence of this, so cannot state it as fact. But either way, those that paid for their product that have sat in fury as their game refused to run all day. Either way, legitimate customers cannot play the game.

Since then we have learned that the outage was related to an attack on the servers.

This gets to something I have always felt and recently spoke about in a web forum discussion: the piracy discussion is all wrong because it is not between the two parties of interest. Look at it this way – when you buy that cool new music release, are you buying it because it is published by Sony/BMG or because of the artist who actually made the music? Exactly!

The ‘war on piracy’ should be conducted between pirates and publishers, but is instead being played out between customers and developers. The problem – developers are the ones responsible for whether or not a game is good, and customers are the ones who pay for them. Pirates are not customers, and will never be customers. Publishers are not developers, and are not responsible for that thing that separates yet another average shooter like Alpha Prime from the next Half-Life 2.

Once again I want to note I am strongly anti-piracy – therefore when I heard about this system I said to myself “in protest I will not buy these games”, rather than the argument in the Penny Arcade comic above. Of course, since Ubisoft makes few games that pull at me the way something from Bioware does, for example, it isn’t such a hard resolution to make. But I also tend to take a long view – I mean, look at how many 10+ year old games I’ve talked about in the Netbook Gamer thus far, and how many of those developers are out of business now. I am constantly concerned that I will not be able to play games I love without resorting to means I find unacceptable.

So … for my original topic, how WOULD I support this type of DRM?

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