Ubisoft's DRM cracked in minutes (News) - So much for uncrackable

So...... We are paying For this most annoying DRM & Pirates still play the game without any issue....WT#

 

Doesn't surprise me. Since a few years ago whenever I see a game at a store that interests me I go online and do research about the included DRM first. I'd say that from every 10 games I would buy, 7 or 8 stay in the shelves because of the DRM.

I could start a petition, or send a letter to EA, Ubisoft and others, but what for? It's clear that they will keep putting huge effort into DRM only to have the pirates take 5 minutes longer to crack it.

If this continues, I think one day I'll just start downloading pirate versions and either a) buy the game also or b) donate the same amount to some charity organization.

 

i really hope this forces ubi to take out the drm in silent hunter and assassins creed 2.
legitimate copies should add value instead of limiting its usage.
i really wanted to buy these games before i found out about the drm

 

I take it this means legal owners of the game needn't be connected to play using this now, so that is good news for them also.

As a laptop user I regularly look for the nocd etc for the games I buy, so I don't have to carry DVDs around with me, and don't have to swap them about meaning they are more likely to get scratched.

Piracy will be less of a problem if there is no DRM, it only stops people buying. Also if prices are more reasonable and games are of high quality then the majority will buy.

Many software devs I've spoken to don't mind about illegal downloads by people who genuinely can't afford or wouldn't have bought anyway for some reason.

 

that internet connection thing is a big pain.

i game a lot outside my house...and if there is no internet...starting games from steam is very annoying.


why cant they make DRM free games already? ...piracy will never go.


if pirates can pirate an entire OS..what big a deal is a game?

 

Reasonable pricing will solve all of these problems...

 

$50 for a single player game with no replay value is very steep isn't it? Luckily I have no interest in games like these anymore. BioWare got it right making single player games worthwhile with Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. Genius.

 

Really? DRM is pretty heinous, but you are going to complain about prices of games? At 50 or 60 bucks, if we say the average game is 15 hours long, you are paying about $4/hr for your gaming. Most people I know spend more than that per hour of entertainment at the movies, at a bar, at a concert, a comedy show... almost any form of entertainment out there. Hell, a $15 new release movie on DVD is about $7.50 per hour of content. As someone who has actually worked in the industry and seen first hand how much of the money actually makes it all the way to the devs, testers, and other people that work on games, I have absolutely no problem with how games are priced.

In any case, it is quite true about what is being said about DRM. DRM will always be cracked. The only way for a game to not be hacked is to not release it at all. It really is a waste of time and money for devs and pubs to implement DRM, as all it ends up doing is penalizing legitimate players and driving people towards finding pirated versions of the game.

 

Ubusoft denied it. In a statement it said that while a pirated version may seem to be complete at start up, any gamer who downloads and plays a cracked version will find that the version is not complete.

Miss that part?

 

That part is not wholly relevant since even if they are right today, they are sure to be wrong tomorrow.

The pride of the scene (crackers) is at stake. Like always, they'll get it right... eventually.

 

What that probably means is it is a leaked pre-release version from the studio. In any case, even if it hasn't been cracked yet, it will be. It's simply impossible to allow enough access to the software to run the game without it being hackable. The only types of things that are truely unhackable (at least in the classic sense) are the games played over those new cloud based gaming systems that basically serve you a video feed of the game you are playing on thier servers over the web. As soon as you put the compiled code on people's local machines, you basically guarantee that it will be cracked.

 

That could be Ubisoft PR spin as well, who knows if it's true or not. One thing for sure is that games dependent on internet activation (i.e. DCS Black Shark) or a persistent internet connection are usually harder to crack.

Some of it could be due to the popularity of the game but that type of DRM that needs to phone home takes the crackers a little longer to figure out. But if a game is massive in popularity then their is a lot of pride for the hackers so they will find a way to crack it.

IMO the best form of DRM is what some of the developers in the last couple of years decided to do. If you cracked their game they inserted landmine code that would screw up the game at an inopportune time. Mass Effect comes to mine.

 

Oh that's great. I wonder what's going to happen next. Maybe they will make us phone them and tell them the registration key to check it if its valid. Like some other guy said here, if people are able to hack an entire OS, how the hell can they think that a simple video game is impossible to hack as well? You guys know what would solve piracy?
Remove all this epic fail DRMs, and set some decent prices on the games. 20$ is enough for any game when it's released, no matter how good it is. A lot more people would buy PC games, therefore more profit, even tho they already got huge profits, all this wine about piracy is BS, but we all know how human beings act, we all want more.

 

Piracy most affected in poor countries not US/Europe . If game companies able to release games for low cost people will start buying it.

I(Family Business) worked for the computer shop in 3rd world county and M$/KIS/NIS start selling genuine products for less than £8(Anti virus) £50 (OS) and our sales up by nearly 600% within couple of months. Most people start buying genuine stuff because of the affordable price.

They need to adjust according to market otherwise piracy rule.

You might able to buy it, but not all can afford it, so before you guys make statements about price/hour ratio think about where piracy most affected.

 

Heck yeah.. I bought my Genuine Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 because after the mail in rebate it costs me only $5 I think. I would rather pay that than using a free antivirus

These DRM just turn potential buyers away instead of really helping to gain more profit. Most important thing about marketing man! Customer satisfaction!

 

Just because the percentage many devs get isn't fair doesn't make the price so. I don't mind the cost of games, but they are often overpriced and that is a cause of piracy. Any service outside your home is going to cost more per hour. DVD's high price also leads to piracy.

 

if there is someone to blame its a game publishers. theyre the ones who set the price and theyre the ones who implement this drm nonsense. in short theyre the corporate bast*rds everyone hates.
and they dont understand anything about the root causes of piracy.

 

They sure don't Cultural Anthropology and Psychology can help identify these causes, but they probably never had those. Hence why they're so ignorant.

I feel punished by all this...

There is no correlation between piracy and DRM on a widescale. BigSpin got it. But the question is... how low should they go without generating losses? It'll be so low, that it isn't feasible in the eyes of greedy corporations like Ubisoft.

 

They are actually promoting piracy with acts like this. Much like anti-biotics promote resistant diseases.

 

Of course the cracked version is not complete. It's missing the DRM! Honestly though, Ubisoft has to come out with a statement like that. They have to deny that the DRM has been cracked. It does not matter if it has or has not been cracked. Investors aren't normally smart enough to go digging through the internet looking for evidence of the crack in the wild. They want to hear that their investment is safe and paying dividends. Ubisoft wants to placate them by making them think everything is just fine and all that money invested in DRM was well worth it. It's a battle for the minds of investors and not to really stomp on the pirates. If it's not cracked today then it will be done soon. Everything gets cracked eventually.

It is my opinion that the best offense against piracy is to use morals and peer pressure, not software-based restrictions that impact the user experience. Take care of the people giving you money and they will continue to take care of you. Encourage them to go to bat for you and urge friends into buying the product too. Deliver them a shoddy product or one with draconian restrictions and they'll turn on you.

 

That is how it always has and always will be, the strict anti piracy issues have always hurt the honest users more.

Dont even get me started on the trouble I had with Secrurom in the past as a honest person legally buying a game. I actually had to use one of the "cracks" to play my game until they fixed it for me.

 

well there is no way in hell i will pay for a copy of AC2 or Silent Hunter 5 with this trash on it

They can go swing

 

That's correct -- they absolutely have to say something like this regardless of whether it is true or not. Management is one reason, but there's another: if people believe that the game hasn't been cracked, they're more likely to buy it. A lot of sales happen very close to release.

That said, even if what they're saying is true, it doesn't change the fact that the game is playable without going online. In other words, their fancy new DRM has indeed been cracked and in their best case scenario, they have been forced to fall back on the booby traps associated with past games that use online activation. At that point, it's only a matter of time.

 

well trchnically the game is incomplete....it has the drm missing...

 

dot.

"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more sales slip through your fingers."

I was actually waiting to buy the PC version of this game. Waited a long time only to be greeted by the most invasive, draconian DRM ever devised. I'd never buy it now.

that's $50 that Ubi really won't get now. Meanwhile, they thwart Pirates for maybe a week...and they wouldn't have bought the game anyway, so they're not even a market consideration.

Ubisoft am fail.

 

I wanted Silent Hunter 5 a lot more than AC2, and am quite disappointed that SH5 falls under the same DRM.

 

yup and its a decent game as well

bout time they did an atlantic revision

 

But I refuse to buy the game until they remove the DRM.

 

So do I.

the drm sucks and if anything promotes piracy

 

yeee my scummy m8 tried to get battle for middle earth 2 when it first was cracked. they put a 4 minute instant loss code in XD couldnt play more than about 4 minutes without insta-losing

 

Online sales platforms like Steam have shown the results of the sales they've done, and have found that price reductions of 75% (meaning that the cost is 1/4th of the original) have increased the number of sales to 1470% and above.

So, a 1/4 price cut resulted in 15 times the sales, or more.

 

The way those statistics are represented is misleading. The sales increases are as much of a result of the sales themselves rather than the pure pricing of the games. Futhermore, the "1470%" figure is calculated from sales in a set time period and not sales overall. It doesn't mean that if manufacturers price their games at 25% of retail, you'll see 15x the sales. It just means that the best sales strategy over a long period of time is to reduce the price of your game.

 

DRM that can't be cracked? That made me lol.

 

I already proved in another thread that you CAN create DRM that is uncrackable if you require that a client be connected to you at all times.

You guys need to stop belittling things if you do not understand them.

 

Can't you crack it so it won't need to be connected at all times? :S

 

No. That would be the definition of UNcrackable.

 

I apologize for the double post, but this is just hilarious:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/98927-Ubisoft-DRM-Authentication-Servers-Go-Down

 

that's fantastic.

 

lol at the complaints in the forum.

A kick in the nuts to them for buying this game. I hope they learnt their lesson

 

"With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM."

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/03/08/004219/Ubisofts-Authentication-Servers-Go-Down

 

All I have to say?

I wish I had been a part of the group that took the DRM server down, or a part of the group that cracked the DRM.

 

What!
If you did that you should be modded

 

I'm still part of a private tracker site that I no longer use for pirating. I only use it for dling freeware that is faster due to the p2p connection. Now that that's out of the way, on all the trackers I'm part of, there is no official skidrow release. I'm not sure where the source article is getting it's information from. There is no AC2 crack as of now. Every upload of the AC2 iso has the same comments about no crack. I think this is simply some kind of PR stunt

 

The cake...er ... crack is a lie!

 

a pr stunt by whom?

 

Maybe not a pr stunt but some kind of a story made up to make the pirate issue seem larger than it really is.

 

Maybe skidrow's just holding the crack and releasing it later, I really wouldn't be surprised if it was cracked this fast. Pirates win every time.

 

Or maybe it was only released among the close scene participants? But don't care! Don't play it!