Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.

Whoopsie


Remember Ubisoft’s amazing new DRM scheme? The one that would stop all those nefarious “pirates” by forcing legitimate purchasers of Ubisoft games to be constantly online? Yeah, well, it got cracked. Mere hours after the release, at that.

I know it’s a bit of a potshot, but I just couldn’t resist. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that this was what was going to happen, but, in addition to the predictably clueless Ubisoft execs, a few folks who are normally on top of things seemed to have a little trouble. The best quote by far was from Tim Buckley of Ctl+Alt+Del:

I mean, how ridiculous will it look to suffer through the bad publicity only to turn around a week after release and see pirates saying “derp, we cracked it!”

Tim Buckley, “Dee Are Em”.

Nope, not weeks, but hours. Ubisoft, determined not to learn anything from the experience, has attempted to downplay the issue:

…any gamer who downloads and plays a cracked version will find that their version is not complete.

Ubisoft via Kotaku

Ernesto’s response on TorrentFreak was excellent:

While many downloaders report that the game works just fine, Ubisoft’s statement does hold some truth because in their view the game is obviously ‘not complete’ without the DRM. At this point it is not entirely clear what else could be “missing” in the cracked version, but that is beside the point.

The bottom line is that their revolutionary DRM invention was cracked in a matter of hours, and although the crack might not be perfect yet, it will be eventually. The end result will be that the pirated version of the game will be more appealing and less restrictive than the actual retail product. Thus, the DRM is encouraging and increasing piracy instead of putting a halt to it.

It looks like Ubisoft has made a massive mistake with their strong focus on DRM. In fact, the time and effort spent on fine-tuning the DRM would have been better spent on game development, so that they didn’t have to release a patch with bugfixes a day after the game was released.

Ernesto, TorrentFreak

Ouch.


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2 responses to “Whoopsie”

  1. Andrew Avatar
    Andrew

    I’m all about paying for games, but seriously, let me play it when and where I want to. Obviously plenty of others feel that way too, and I hope Ubisoft’s sales start to reflect it.

    1. SteelWolf Avatar

      It’s pitiful when people like you who will enthusiastically purchase games would have to download an unauthorized version to get full functionality.

      It doesn’t make any logical sense.

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