I wouldn't say anything UBI has done in the past few years is AAA by a long shot.

I think he was referring to AAA in the publisher sense, as in "big-budget and tons of marketing."

And who knows, if it is successful in thwarting piracy, it may return the PC to her glory days as the premier development platform.

No, it won't because piracy isn't the reason why consoles are the more popular platform. Consoles are more popular because they are more convenient and accessible. Even if piracy completely disappeared, this wouldn't change and Ubisoft's DRM certainly isn't making PC gaming more convenient and accessible.

Honestly, if it's a choice between this and not having good AAA games on the PC to play, I'll take this kind of DRM.

I wouldn't say anything UBI has done in the past few years is AAA by a long shot.

I'll give my money to publishers that don't treat me like a criminal. And I'm willing to bet I'll still find plenty of quality games to play.

@ Gilly. I agree, it sucks. In a perfect world SP games would be completely DRM free and standalone. But I can't blame Ubisoft for trying to protect their investment this way. Torrents for AAA games are in the millions. And it's not like this is some brand new paradigm. Online games, web games, Steam, etc. have all blazed a trail. It's just hard for me to understand the level of shock and anger when this is such an obvious next step.

There will always be standalone games. Most will be standalone, I will wager, since maintaining verification servers is a major cost and hassle that will be implemented for only the most expensive titles. And some companies will take the opposite tack and make "no online required!" a selling point.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that this will blow over and result in even wider adoption as time goes on. And who knows, if it is successful in thwarting piracy, it may return the PC to her glory days as the premier development platform.

KilrathiAce wrote on Mar 10, 2010, 03:33:
Talisorn, lets backtrack, you paid full price $50? for a game thats bugged to hell even some bugs from SH3.... the game will never get support it deserves for the price. I am veteran of Silent Hunter games and back in the days of SH3 I used to run biggest buglist for over a year. UBI cut off ubi romania from supporting the game early before many big bugs that modders could fix. Same thing happened with SH4. By looking at the state of SH5 same thing is bound to happen.

I understand your points about you not having problems with DRM, this is all cool and nice, now if only the game was ACTUALLY worth $50 then this would be truly wonderful story.

Yup. Actually I paid a good deal more ... but Aussie pricing of games is another issue all together.

All I can say is I've yet to strike any gamebreaking bugs in SH5. It's been pretty good so far. Maybe ... just maybe ... there was a little more quality control on this product (well .. we can hope anyway).

Talisorn, lets backtrack, you paid full price $50? for a game thats bugged to hell even some bugs from SH3.... the game will never get support it deserves for the price. I am veteran of Silent Hunter games and back in the days of SH3 I used to run biggest buglist for over a year. UBI cut off ubi romania from supporting the game early before many big bugs that modders could fix. Same thing happened with SH4. By looking at the state of SH5 same thing is bound to happen.

I understand your points about you not having problems with DRM, this is all cool and nice, now if only the game was ACTUALLY worth $50 then this would be truly wonderful story.

jdreyer wrote on Mar 9, 2010, 21:08:
I agree with Talisorn. I don't see what the big deal is about the Ubisoft DRM.

Really, what about those of us with gaming laptops at a lake, a DR's office, or any place else with no wifi connection?

I have a problem when I've supported the series for years and want to be able to play my game remotely. Kind of makes me feel like Ubisoft doesn't care about things like this.

So cynical, Tumbler. Could Ubisoft be lying? Sure, but I have no reason not to take them at their word. The announcement of this caused all sorts of animosity all over the web. I would be surprised if someone didn't try something like a DDoS attack on their new server set up exactly for this reason.

Steam HAS shown us how it is done, although Steam games with their offline mode are cracked almost instantly. Ubisoft WILL get their servers in order, or their PC game division will whither and die. Remember, it took years for Steam to get where it is today. Ubisoft has been up for mere days.

And it IS a choice between those two things, in large part. You see major developers leaving the PC platform in droves, citing piracy as a major reason. Sorry, I don't want my $1800 game machine relegated to playing Peggle and Galciv, thank you very much. When Crysis launched they sold 70,000 units the first month, but bit torrent was showing 1 million torrents for them. Would they have had 1m sales? No, but they would have had more than 70K. Even 10% lost sales can make or break a studio. Not everyone can be MW2. PC game torrents are ten times or more higher than the same game torrent for xbox or PS3. It's just too easy on PC. No mod chip, no ban risk, etc. etc.

Honestly, if it's a choice between this and not having good AAA games on the PC to play, I'll take this kind of DRM

LOL, it will never be a choice between those 2 things. Steam has already shown everyone how it's done, ubisoft is just doing it on the cheap, there is no reason to believe this is a Ddos attack. It could literally be anything, MMO's have all kinds of launch issues and they never bitch about DDos attacks, you don't think pirates would delight in taking down that POS on launch day when all the whiny trekkers are lining up to play? No, AC2 is the big target. I doubt hackers even give a shit about this, why the hell would they...the game they are playing doesn't have this.

Defending this like it somehow helps you or the industry or anything is just foolish. It's a bad idea and they didn't implement the plan well.

What works? Cutting off the PC market. Consoles, multiplayer-wise at least, are much more secure for them.

Um, how exactly does that work for them? They make PC games for profit. If there was no profit to be made, they wouldn't make PC games. Obviously PC games are profitable, even with piracy, otherwise nobody would be making PC games.

I agree with Talisorn. I don't see what the big deal is about the Ubisoft DRM. Millions of people around the world don't have an issue with this type of DRM when it's attached to World of Warcraft, Age of Conan or any other MMOG. Yes, AC2 is a single player game, but a large portion of MMOG players play them alone.

All of the same issues exist in WoW that exist with AC 2: If you lose your connection, you can't play, you can't play on the plane or other places that don't have a connection, you may not be able to play it in 5 years if the server gets shut down, etc. But millions buy and play them. As for the server issues, UO and WoW had major connectivity issues when they launched too. And the Ubisoft server issues are being caused by an external malicious DDoS attack, not by their own poor planning.

Do I wish that it could be standalone and I could keep it forever in my collection? Sure. I was playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri over the weekend on my laptop while my wife worked on my desktop. I like having standalone, SP games in my collection.

But I can't blame Ubisoft for trying something out of the box to get a handle on piracy. And most of us already play games on Steam with hardly a complaint. While it has an offline mode, I have yet to set it up and use it after 2 years and dozens of games because it has been so stable.

Will it cause trouble for real consumers while the pirates still get away with it? That remains to be seen. If it does, I hope Ubisoft does the right thing and patches the game so it can be played offline, but so far there are no stable cracked versions. If it has an effect reducing piracy rates (and it could take years to discern this) you'll quickly see everyone adopting this methodology for better or worse.

Honestly, if it's a choice between this and not having good AAA games on the PC to play, I'll take this kind of DRM.

Narf2029 wrote on Mar 9, 2010, 13:28:
Now that would be rich - a queue to play a single player game.

Priceless.

@Talisorn: That is the problem with the technique. In the real world, there are a ton of asshats that consider people who don't give them everything they want for free to be tyrants. This DRM deal fails because paying customers end up getting screwed in the process. What works? Cutting off the PC market. Consoles, multiplayer-wise at least, are much more secure for them.

As someone who has ACTUALLY paid for and played SH5, I don't have an issue with this form of DRM. No disc in drive. No limited installations. No limited activations. I just need a stable permanent internet connection .... which I have.

The asshats who are perfoming the DDoS attacks on the login servers are the pricks here. Fucking asshats! I have no sympathy for these pirate cunts; if it wasn't for them then DRM wouldn't be an issue.

99% of pirates won't do that though, they will wait for a cracked scene release. So the whole "pirates have fully cracked it" sounds more like weaselly lawyer talk because everyone knows only the mentally bizarre are actually going to sit there doing that just to play AC2. Effectively it is uncracked so far but regardless, I doubt it's setting the sales charts on fire either.

noman wrote on Mar 9, 2010, 15:03:
I think they probably found out how to circumvent the login process, but I am pretty sure they would later run into the issues the pirated copies are having.

That doesn't appear to be true. What I'm looking at is a way to tell the game to go to the next mission by alt-tabing and modifying the cofig files. Kind of a pain in the neck but probably easy to script.

So maybe Ubisoft can extend the billing period for a day or two. Oh right... this isn't a MMO!

I think they probably found out how to circumvent the login process, but I am pretty sure they would later run into the issues the pirated copies are having.

There's still no fully working crack for these games.

noman wrote on Mar 9, 2010, 14:01:
I haven't bought the game, and will likely wait till the price goes down or the DRM-less patch is out, but it's great to see a DRM scheme holding up against the pirates.

It's been beaten by the paying community. Probably because they didn't like not being able to play their game.

Looks like UBI pulled down the link. It involved a simple value change for Silent Hunter 5.

Both SH5 and AC2 haven't been fully cracked yet. If the game truly is using occasional server-side code, then it'll be a very tough scheme to crack.

Once Ubisoft can handle the server load (I doubt it's denial of service attack), things should improve for paying customers.

I remember in the early days Steam games had the same problem, with people locked out of HL2 for hours if not days, during activation. This new scheme likely goes beyond activation, and I don't expect it to run error-free initially.

I haven't bought the game, and will likely wait till the price goes down or the DRM-less patch is out, but it's great to see a DRM scheme holding up against the pirates.

Wish Ubisoft was this vocal and quick about support actual games and not DRM.