Ubisoft gives up on DRM

Nameless one

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RPS writes about Ubi stoping their idiotic DRM.
Did someone in company had brief flash of sanity?I believe it's bit too late now damage is done.Now they just need to fix quality of their games and they might start being profitable(As far as I know only AC series was profitable and somewhat HoMM most other games either just breaking even or losing money if someone has other more official informations please correct me).
 
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I'll give HoMM VI a try if they make it DRM free. Other than that, I can't think of anything from Ubisoft that interests me in the slightest.
 
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Even the "Gold" version of the latest SEttlers game has this "always on" DRM, which I found very annoying.
I had thought that t least for a "Gold" version they'd drop it ...
I won't buy no part of this series as long as this endures.
 
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What I don't get is why they created or bought an always online DRM, that is really easy to pirate :S I mean if you have a draconian DRM, at the very least you can make sure it is not easy to crack.......
 
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What I don't get is why they created or bought an always online DRM, that is really easy to pirate :S I mean if you have a draconian DRM, at the very least you can make sure it is not easy to crack…….

Personally, I don't care if it is easy to crack or not - I just don't want it.

And I don't want to use cracks either. The chance that they might be infested with virii is imho far too high.

I just want a plain, normal game without any hassles. Period.
 
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The problem with Ubisoft's DRM is that it's buggy. Cloud saves sync is not working as it should and often you lose your savegames, currently the only cure is to disable it (as it's activated by default). This is still happening although this problem is ages old. And if you can remember it had a security hole that could let anyone to access via any website and gain control over your PC, luckily that one got patched.

As stated in the article, you play the singleplayer game and if for some reason you get disconnected - you're kicked out of the game and lose your progress. I mean… Who's decision was that? It happened to me a few times in HoMM6 and it's very frustrating since I didn't save often.

Easy to crack or not, who cares if it's malfunctioning?
I also wanted it removed and I'm happy to see it will be removed.
 
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Well, my point was that since it is easy to crack I don't see any reason for Ubisoft to use it at all, instead I guess that it was a CEO somewhere who thought it sounded good and didn't know it was easy to crack.

From the user perspective.. as Diablo 3 has shown, some malfunctioning is obviously ok.... even if it is not acceptable in my opinion....
 
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Give how quickly most DRM is cracked, I'm curious what the cost benefit of it really is. It can't be cheap to implement these things, so are they really increasing their revenue enough to make it a cash flow positive venture? MY gut says no, but I don't know the finances well enough.
 
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I think that even if the DRM is cracked, and as such won't eliminate the possibility of downloading a game, it will prevent quite a few people from doing that. So while they can't prevent all piracy (which I don't think they try to achieve), it may very well be enough to justify the cost of implementing DRM and loss of sales.

However in the Ubisoft case I believe they decided it was not worth it, they lost more than they gained.

pibbur who
 
Well, my point was that since it is easy to crack I don't see any reason for Ubisoft to use it at all,

Yes, I see.

But I was trying to see it from a customer's point of view, someone who doesn't know about cracks (and honestly, I still don't know about them).


Besides, I'm currently reading through the interview … These two interviewed ones sound EXTREMELY cautious … In fact, they both sound as if there was an actual blade hanging over their heads. Or, in other words, as if they would be fired in an instant of they would use just ONE wrong word … That's unusual, to see such a pressure on PR people.

RPS: Whose confidentiality is being broken by publishing piracy rates?

Burk: It’s internally confidential meaning competitive, not necessarily that we’re breaking anyone’s confidentiality. It’s competitive information and therefore confidential.

This sounds like war. Don't let the enemy show any kind of weakness !

RPS: But do you understand how damaging it’s been to your argument to never actually say these numbers?

Perotti: Yes.
 
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Pleased about this, although like others the main game I'm concerned about is Heroes 6. I've recently run through the games in the AC series so was already aware that their DRM in these games had reverted to a one time activation.

Also agree fully with joxer - disable cloud syncing in Uplay should be the very first thing you do when you install. The forums are full of people with lost saves.
 
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Give how quickly most DRM is cracked, I'm curious what the cost benefit of it really is. It can't be cheap to implement these things, so are they really increasing their revenue enough to make it a cash flow positive venture? MY gut says no, but I don't know the finances well enough.
I expect that it depends on which intangibles you bring into the analysis, which will tie into the agenda of the person(s) doing the analysis. There's going to be a metric crapload of assumptions under the hood and a 5% swing in a few of them will probably skew the numbers a fair bit. What price do you put on pissed off customers? What percentage of pirates are "casual", in that they'll steal stuff that's easy but won't bother with stuff that takes a little work to get around? What percentage of pirates are "honest", that mythical being that is genuinely a "try it and buy it" pirate? What's the COPQ (cost of poor quality) associated with bugs in the DRM itself? What's the cost of increased lead times due to integrating the DRM with the product? And so forth...

We've fought the same battle in automotive for years with the make/buy calculations, and it seems that it usually boils down to picking the intangible factors that will justify what the powers-that-be want to do and throwing the rest of the factors in the crapper.
 
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We've fought the same battle in automotive for years with the make/buy calculations, and it seems that it usually boils down to picking the intangible factors that will justify what the powers-that-be want to do and throwing the rest of the factors in the crapper.

So to UBI this online DRM was just a business model based on some figures made by suits, not geared towards customer satisfaction as I doubt that they have done any research about this important matter. This business model has failed and UBI realised this which I am sure is because of their sales figures rather than customer feedback as they claim, and they are changing it now. I am happy for this, but there is nothing new here, we have seen this on much larger scales in the health, education and social services sectors in addition to industry.

One question though - are they going to remove this online DRM from their previously published games?
 
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Calculations like those are very easy to walk back, too. If Mahogany Row at Ubi has decided that they've lost the war, they "take another look" at the numbers--which entails tweaking some of the previous fuzzy numbers (based on the "latest data", of course), and maybe adding in a few intangibles that were previously discarded. Pull the lever and suddenly a new answer pops out. Everybody can congratulate themselves on a job well done (fully grounded in quantifiable data, mind you) and none of the big wheels has to admit that they made a really, really stupid decision.
 
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Big irony in all this is that people who pirated their games had better gaming experience.No need for constant online connection,no saves lost,and even free antivirus would detect any malicious code in crack/keygen so your data is probably safer than with Uplay and his security holes.Companies shouldn't allow things like that to happen.
 
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Yes because there going F2P on most of there games on the pc. This is nothing new.
 
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