Ubisoft's Passive-Aggressive Decision To Drop DRM

from the yet-again dept

Ubisoft has a long history of bad DRM choices, and tops it off with a usual misunderstanding of DRM, but its latest move is curious -- in a sort of passive-aggressive way. The company has decided not to include DRM in Prince of Persia, but posted an accusatory note about it:

You're right when you say that when people want to pirate the game they will, but DRM is there to make it as difficult as possible for pirates to make copies of our games. A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP [Prince of Persia] PC has no DRM we'll see how truthful people actually are. Not very, I imagine.

Of course, no one said that the only reason people pirate games is because of DRM, but it is most likely a contributing factor. So, there will certainly be plenty of piracy, but other experiments have shown that if the game is good and worthwhile, plenty of people will buy it as well. But of course, part of getting people to actually want to buy the game is treating your customers with respect, which is exactly the opposite of what this guy's note did.

And, of course, the guy is wrong in saying that DRM makes it "as difficult as possible for pirates to make copies." Once someone makes a copy, it's available everywhere. That's the core reason why DRM is ineffective. It's not about stopping each individual. For DRM to work, it needs to stop EVERY individual, because as soon as one makes a cracked version available, it's available to everyone, and no amount of DRM in the world will matter.

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Ubisoft Says It's Delaying A PC Game Due To Piracy; But That Makes No Sense

from the a-little-logic,-please dept

Ubisoft, the video game company that has a history of doing exactly the wrong things in response to unauthorized sharing of its video games, is at it again. A bunch of readers have sent in some odd quotes from Ubisoft exec, Michael de Plater, who blames PC game file sharing for a delayed release of the new game EndWar on the PC platform:

To be honest, if PC wasn't pirated to hell and back, there'd probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two. But at the moment, if you release the PC version, essentially what you're doing is letting people have a free version that they rip off instead of a purchased version. Piracy's basically killing PC."

Now, Plater may believe that, but it's hard to square up with reality. The video gaming experience on a console is quite different than on a PC. And you'd be hard pressed to find a serious console owner who would focus on playing a good game on their PC rather than on the console. You could potentially make the argument that if the game really sucked some might test it out on the PC and decide it's not worth paying for -- but unless he's saying the game sucks, it's hard to take the claim seriously.

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Who Can You Sue When It's Your Own Copy Protection That Hurt Your Reputation?

from the sue-everyone! dept

Video game maker Ubisoft has a rather long history of employing crappy DRM (and then even using someone else's code to crack their DRM when it caused problems for legitimate customers). However, this latest story involving a Ubisoft copy protection scheme may be the most bizarre. Chris Gruel writes in to let us know that Ubisoft is suing the CD duplicator firm it used to produce the video game Assassin's Creed, claiming that employees from that firm were responsible for the game leaking to the internet. It appears they have pretty good evidence that this did, in fact, happen (the leak was traced to an IP address controlled by an employee of the firm, and a copy of the game was found at that employee's home). So you can understand why they'd be upset about that (though, they had to realize that it would be pirated eventually).

However, here's where the story gets bizarre. Because Ubisoft was afraid that this might happen, the pre-release copy it sent to the CD duplicator included (on purpose!) a bug that would crash the game partway through. That was the copy that the employee leaked, so Ubisoft is complaining that this leak harmed their reputation, because people claimed the game was really buggy and crashed. Try to keep this straight in your mind here. Ubisoft put their own (crude, yes) DRM on the game because they were afraid it would leak. The game was leaked, and the DRM acted exactly as intended, and thus Ubisoft's reputation was harmed.

It makes you shake your head in wonder.

If Ubisoft had not included this DRM, then it would apparently have less to complain about. Thus, I think the only logical conclusion is that Ubisoft should be suing itself for including such damaging DRM on its own pre-release copies of Assassin's Creed.

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Ubisoft Uses Internet Crack To Get Around Its Own DRM

from the ah,-the-irony dept

Ubisoft, one of the larger video gaming companies out there, has a somewhat troubled history of overburdening its games with awful DRM. And, as with most DRM systems, the people it tends to hurt most are the legitimate purchasers who somehow run afoul of whatever DRM rules are in place. In this case, the Ubisoft game Rainbow Six: Vegas2 (R6V2) had some DRM that would check to see if the physical media (CD-ROM) was in the drive before it would let you play. Unfortunately, Ubisoft also offered the game as a download via IGN's Direct2Drive store. They had set it up so this would work even without the actual CD, but a recent patch didn't take that into account, and broke the game for anyone who had purchased it via D2D.

So, what does Ubisoft do? It releases a patch that isn't actually a "patch" but a well known crack that it downloaded off the internet. As TorrentFreak points out at the link, according to the way companies like Ubisoft look at things, it "stole" someone else's code and passed it off as its own. And, of course, there's the somewhat delicious irony that it didn't just "steal" any code for its own use, but the very code that companies like Ubisoft insist is evil, immoral and illegal. Except, of course, when Ubisoft is in desperate need of it, apparently.

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The Pirate Bay To Sue Entertainment Companies For Attacks

from the could-get-interesting dept

Well, this could get interesting. Following the leak of MediaDefender's emails, the folks behind The Pirate Bay now believe they have enough evidence to sue many major entertainment firms for "infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, hacking and spamming." Basically, there's evidence in the emails that a bunch of firms, including Universal, EMI, Sony, Paramount and others were using MediaDefender to try to mess with The Pirate Bay's system. Whether or not the lawsuit actually goes anywhere may depend on a lot of factors (including Swedish laws, which I am totally unfamiliar with). There may be some questions about how the emails in question were obtained. And, of course, the entertainment companies will likely counter that they were just trying to protect their own materials -- which could find a sympathetic ear in a courtroom. Either way it would be quite a lawsuit.

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