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    Assassin's Creed 2 PC DRM or Reap What You Sew

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    Teirdome

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    Edited By Teirdome

     Piracy burned the Goos too.
     Piracy burned the Goos too.
    PG gaming has long been heralded as dying as developers continue to flee the platform for the greener pastures of the console space.  An estimated 4.1 million pirated copies of Modern Warfare 2 was another nail in the platform's coffin, serving to continue discouraging PC development of AAA games.  Fuck, they were another 4.1 million nails in the coffin.  It's not limited to big games either, World of Goo had an estimated 90% piracy rate at one point.  Even the bold crusader against DRM- Brad Wardell of Stardock and Demigod- admitted that there were only 18,000 legitimate connections to their servers out of 120,000.  Those connections from pirated copies were one of the big factors in Demigod's terrible launch as they caused network problems.
     
    The simple truth if you are one of those goody-two-shoes that actually gave your money to the publisher and developer for a PC title, you are the minority.  I see this trend even among my friends that have not abandoned the PC altogether.  Only two of five of us do not pirate single player games, and that's because the two of us that don't are software developers.  Some modern proverb about shitting and eating prevents us from going there.  We're all well into our careers, all of us making oddles above the average wage, yet piracy is still prevalent.
     
     You steal my game? I kill you!
     You steal my game? I kill you!
    Today's report and subsequent outrage from sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun over the extremely harsh Assassin's Creed 2 DRM has me more pissed than a 1 year old's diaper.  Basically Ubisoft is making the game phone home every few minutes and if it cannot connect you get dumped back to the menu.  That's right, you will loose your progress since your last checkpoint save if it cannot call home because of a router problem, toddler chewing on your ethernet cord, foreign espionage agent jamming your wireless signal, or even if a cosmic ray strikes a transmission line and flips a bit.  Of course, there's also a reconnect button, and the real reason behind this is that your game's state is saved on the Ubi's cloud, but let's avoid those oh-so-damning points for sake of indulging these freak-out artists.
     
    PC gamers have no right to be pissed about this for two reasons: it is not unlike the PC's current most popular title and we more than deserve it.
     
    The most popular PC game possibly of all time requires constant internet access, and this has not been such a big deal.  It has consistantly been in the top three titles played on GiantBomb and is always in the top 5 on Raptr.  This bizarre phenomenon that must exclude tons of gamers without internet connections is known to laymen as World of Warcraft.  If WoW can be that successful, there is no excuse for another title- even a single player one- not requiring an internet connection.

     That night elf style's good for something.
     That night elf style's good for something.
    While it is a valid point that there is not 1-to-1 correlation between games pirated and a lost sale, there is certainly some correlation.  Regardless, attempting to argue from this point is akin to saying "they were not going to buy this car no matter what the manufacturer did, so why not let them steal it?"   Clearly the person pirating the game was interested enough in it to waste the time downloading the torrent, patch it, and get it up and running.  There had to be some interest there for the thief to get this far.  Is it now the publisher and developer's fault for not tapping into that interest?
     
    There's always the argument that Brad Wardell champions while adding DRM through Stardock: if you remove DRM and focus on the customer experience instead, the end result will be more sales.  Well, Ubisoft already tried that with Prince of Persia on the PC and it didn't fare so well.  Again, there are likely more factors impacting this flop of a console port, but the real point here is that the DRM-free approach did not benefit Ubisoft enough for them to be able to justify continuing down the DRM-free road.  You could argue that they released PoP DRM-free only to justify this new despotic approach at a future date, but if there had not been the piracy, it would have been much more difficult for them to justify it and to take the steam cloud approach (allow local saves if you fail to connect to the cloud) instead.
     
    In the end, I don't care what your attempts at justifying conceptual theft are or your faux consumer advocacy; PC gamers deserve the DRM.  When a farmer has bugs attack his crop, reducing his potential yield, he applies pesticide (or if he's organic, breeds bugs that eat the bugs that are eating his plants).  Demanding publishers not do the same thing and actively try to prevent protective measures (DRM or otherwise) will only continue to make the PC the forgotten platform just as the farmer would we wiped out without some kind of pest control.
     
    So please, tell me why I'm wrong.  Is piracy not really that bad?  Is it more important to the growth of the medium that people experience games instead of people making a profit making games?  Am I the overreacting drama queen instead of the patsies at Rock, Paper, Shotgun?
     
    Note: GB editor totally freaked out, so I'm going to have to edit this post... darnit.
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    Teirdome

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    #1  Edited By Teirdome

     Piracy burned the Goos too.
     Piracy burned the Goos too.
    PG gaming has long been heralded as dying as developers continue to flee the platform for the greener pastures of the console space.  An estimated 4.1 million pirated copies of Modern Warfare 2 was another nail in the platform's coffin, serving to continue discouraging PC development of AAA games.  Fuck, they were another 4.1 million nails in the coffin.  It's not limited to big games either, World of Goo had an estimated 90% piracy rate at one point.  Even the bold crusader against DRM- Brad Wardell of Stardock and Demigod- admitted that there were only 18,000 legitimate connections to their servers out of 120,000.  Those connections from pirated copies were one of the big factors in Demigod's terrible launch as they caused network problems.
     
    The simple truth if you are one of those goody-two-shoes that actually gave your money to the publisher and developer for a PC title, you are the minority.  I see this trend even among my friends that have not abandoned the PC altogether.  Only two of five of us do not pirate single player games, and that's because the two of us that don't are software developers.  Some modern proverb about shitting and eating prevents us from going there.  We're all well into our careers, all of us making oddles above the average wage, yet piracy is still prevalent.
     
     You steal my game? I kill you!
     You steal my game? I kill you!
    Today's report and subsequent outrage from sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun over the extremely harsh Assassin's Creed 2 DRM has me more pissed than a 1 year old's diaper.  Basically Ubisoft is making the game phone home every few minutes and if it cannot connect you get dumped back to the menu.  That's right, you will loose your progress since your last checkpoint save if it cannot call home because of a router problem, toddler chewing on your ethernet cord, foreign espionage agent jamming your wireless signal, or even if a cosmic ray strikes a transmission line and flips a bit.  Of course, there's also a reconnect button, and the real reason behind this is that your game's state is saved on the Ubi's cloud, but let's avoid those oh-so-damning points for sake of indulging these freak-out artists.
     
    PC gamers have no right to be pissed about this for two reasons: it is not unlike the PC's current most popular title and we more than deserve it.
     
    The most popular PC game possibly of all time requires constant internet access, and this has not been such a big deal.  It has consistantly been in the top three titles played on GiantBomb and is always in the top 5 on Raptr.  This bizarre phenomenon that must exclude tons of gamers without internet connections is known to laymen as World of Warcraft.  If WoW can be that successful, there is no excuse for another title- even a single player one- not requiring an internet connection.

     That night elf style's good for something.
     That night elf style's good for something.
    While it is a valid point that there is not 1-to-1 correlation between games pirated and a lost sale, there is certainly some correlation.  Regardless, attempting to argue from this point is akin to saying "they were not going to buy this car no matter what the manufacturer did, so why not let them steal it?"   Clearly the person pirating the game was interested enough in it to waste the time downloading the torrent, patch it, and get it up and running.  There had to be some interest there for the thief to get this far.  Is it now the publisher and developer's fault for not tapping into that interest?
     
    There's always the argument that Brad Wardell champions while adding DRM through Stardock: if you remove DRM and focus on the customer experience instead, the end result will be more sales.  Well, Ubisoft already tried that with Prince of Persia on the PC and it didn't fare so well.  Again, there are likely more factors impacting this flop of a console port, but the real point here is that the DRM-free approach did not benefit Ubisoft enough for them to be able to justify continuing down the DRM-free road.  You could argue that they released PoP DRM-free only to justify this new despotic approach at a future date, but if there had not been the piracy, it would have been much more difficult for them to justify it and to take the steam cloud approach (allow local saves if you fail to connect to the cloud) instead.
     
    In the end, I don't care what your attempts at justifying conceptual theft are or your faux consumer advocacy; PC gamers deserve the DRM.  When a farmer has bugs attack his crop, reducing his potential yield, he applies pesticide (or if he's organic, breeds bugs that eat the bugs that are eating his plants).  Demanding publishers not do the same thing and actively try to prevent protective measures (DRM or otherwise) will only continue to make the PC the forgotten platform just as the farmer would we wiped out without some kind of pest control.
     
    So please, tell me why I'm wrong.  Is piracy not really that bad?  Is it more important to the growth of the medium that people experience games instead of people making a profit making games?  Am I the overreacting drama queen instead of the patsies at Rock, Paper, Shotgun?
     
    Note: GB editor totally freaked out, so I'm going to have to edit this post... darnit.
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    monkeyroach

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    #2  Edited By monkeyroach

    40% of world of goo sales came from pc in 2008 and didn't come out on steam till 2009.

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    HitmanAgent47

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    #3  Edited By HitmanAgent47

    Your wrong because most of the time, drm doesn't do anything at all to deter pirates, they already have their version of the game without drm, espically with installation limits . Your only punishing those who bought the game with drm, not the pirates.
     
    If this new drm, phoning to ubisoft every few minutes does work and the pirated copy of the game doesn't have that, then it fails. However if it's part of the pirated copy too and they can't get around it, I don't mind it. If it doesn't affect the pirates, it will affect 2/5 of the ppl who actually buys the game and we don't deserve that, the pirates does.

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    vaiz

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    #4  Edited By vaiz

    Cool. Good job, Ubisoft, you've now guaranteed that fucking no one will buy your games. CLEARLY a preferable alternative to piracy!

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    Binman88

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    #5  Edited By Binman88

    The last time I had trouble with DRM was Ubisoft's disc check on Prince of Persia Warrior within. I literally could not play the game at all as the game kept telling me I had the wrong disc in the drive. Apparently it was a compatibility issue with my type of DVD drive at the time, and the software they were using. I would not have been able to play the game had I not gone online and downloaded a crack to play it without the disc. I thought the whole irony of the situation was quite funny.
     
    I'm all for developer's protecting their games, but if I notice the DRM running, like if it interferes severely while I'm playing the game, then of course I will be pissed. 
     
    I also don't quite understand your whole "pc gamers deserve it" bullshit. I don't really see how the actions of pirates should incur any sort of punishments for me.

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    Skytylz

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    #6  Edited By Skytylz

    Assassins Creed 2 won't work on my Xbox, it always gets a disc read error, and i was thinking about getting this on pc.  I'm not sure now, i'll wait and see how this works or if it's really touchy.

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    Colonel_Cool

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    #7  Edited By Colonel_Cool
    @Teirdome said:

    "

    While it is a valid point that there is not 1-to-1 correlation between games pirated and a lost sale, there is certainly some correlation.  Regardless, attempting to argue from this point is akin to saying "they were not going to buy this car no matter what the manufacturer did, so why not let them steal it?"   Clearly the person pirating the game was interested enough in it to waste the time downloading the torrent, patch it, and get it up and running.  There had to be some interest there for the thief to get this far.  Is it now the publisher and developer's fault for not tapping into that interest?
     

    Without advocating piracy in any way, shape, or form, I must say this. Pirating isn't stealing in a conventional sense. When you steal a car, you physically take it away. When pirating a game, you are copying the game files, and no copies are missing from the stores. And DRM does little to actually prevent game piracy. If Ubisoft's incredibly invasive DRM actually stopped piracy, then maybe its use would be justifiable. But it won't, and it only ends up being a pain in the ass to the people who buy the game. I don't mind disk checks, or even online activation checks (so long as there is some sort of de-activation system), but this "authenticate every few minutes online over and over again" system is total bullshit. How long will it be until it is circumvented?
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    udabenshen

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    #8  Edited By udabenshen

    Well, as a member of the minority who buys PC games (I know, I'm a jerk), the key thing this AC2 is doing for me is keeping myself from buying the PC version. 
     
    Piracy is a serious concern for PC sales, but one thing that is hard to gauge is how many people would buy the games if they couldn't pirate them.  Its an unknowable fact. 
     
    Too bad.  I love my gaming pc. 

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    PureRok

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    #9  Edited By PureRok

    Wait... what if you don't have an internet connection at all? There are people who don't have internet, believe it or not.
     
    Edit: Also, DRM only effects a person who buys the game, not the pirates. A pirate has cracks and workarounds for DRM, while the paying customer is the one that has to suffer. All DRM does is slow pirates down for a few minutes/days.

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    yani

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    #10  Edited By yani

    I wouldn't mind DRM if it didn't cause problems for legit users.  While I'm waiting for crashed activation servers or trying to work out why DRM program X doesn't like my dvd drive, yonder pirate has been playing the game for 2 weeks.
      Also I like to play games on my laptop.  Ubisoft thinks that makes me a bad person.  I'll go give Bioware my money instead.

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    Jrad

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    #11  Edited By Jrad

    I think it's silly for people who can afford to buy games to pirate. It doesn't really matter to me either way, as I haven't bought a PC game in ages (well, I haven't bought a console game in ages, either). I do most of my gaming on my PC because I'm a pirate and pirating things is so easy nowadays everyone and their mother can do it.
     
    I rent most of my console games and pirate all my PC games, so yeah. Having no income sucks. I've had my 360 since '07 and I only have 4 games for it. I've had my PS3 for a few months and I only have 1 game for it. Meanwhile, my PC's hard drive is filled with games. If a game has some sort of terrible DRM, I don't mind waiting until it's cracked.

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    Skald

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    #12  Edited By Skald

    You can't lump pirates and legitimate users together like that. That's exactly what Ubisoft is doing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it affects their sales accordingly. Pirates actively disable DRM, so they don't have to worry about it after they apply their crack, while actual customers will have to use a shitty product for the rest of the product's existence. World of Warcraft has no bearing on what Assassin's Creed 2 should be doing, because World of Warcraft has a very clear rationale as to why you need internet access. World of Warcraft is an MMO, and you literally could not play it offline, whereas AC2 is an offline game that will probably be patched twice in the entirety of it's existence. Ubisoft's cloud service does nothing for me. I would much rather have it on my hard drive anyway. 
    Sure, piracy is a problem for publishers. That's a given. But escalating DRM until a game becomes tedious to legitimately play will not help the publisher's cause. Personally, I think that the more DRM you slap on a game, the more people WILL turn to piracy. I'd rather break the law than have a bunch of shifty programs on my computer, or have a game contact the publisher's authentication server every two minutes. I'm not going to buy a wifi device so I can play on my laptop when I'm somewhere other than my house. If a publisher gives me a bad experience after I give them fifty or sixty dollars for a game, that's akin to theft, and any lost sales they get in return are wholly deserved.

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    ajamafalous

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    #13  Edited By ajamafalous
    @extremeradical said:

    " You can't lump pirates and legitimate users together like that. That's exactly what Ubisoft is doing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it affects their sales accordingly. Pirates actively disable DRM, so they don't have to worry about it after they apply their crack, while actual customers will have to use a shitty product for the rest of the product's existence. World of Warcraft has no bearing on what Assassin's Creed 2 should be doing, because World of Warcraft has a very clear rationale as to why you need internet access. World of Warcraft is an MMO, and you literally could not play it offline, whereas AC2 is an offline game that will probably be patched twice in the entirety of it's existence. Ubisoft's cloud service does nothing for me. I would much rather have it on my hard drive anyway. Sure, piracy is a problem for publishers. That's a given. But escalating DRM until a game becomes tedious to legitimately play will not help the publisher's cause. Personally, I think that the more DRM you slap on a game, the more people WILL turn to piracy. I'd rather break the law than have a bunch of shifty programs on my computer, or have a game contact the publisher's authentication server every two minutes. I'm not going to buy a wifi device so I can play on my laptop when I'm somewhere other than my house. If a publisher gives me a bad experience after I give them fifty or sixty dollars for a game, that's akin to theft, and any lost sales they get in return are wholly deserved. "

    Basically this.
     
    When publishers start doing stupid things, the number of pirates escalates. DRM will not stop pirates from pirating a game, but it will stop some legitimate customers from buying. Why do you think there's an uproar every time a publisher announces that New Game X will have DRM? It hurts customers but not pirates. Can you think of any recent games that had highly-publicized DRM that can't be pirated? That haven't been cracked?
     
    You cite Modern Warfare 2's speculative piracy numbers. How many people do you think would've pirated it if IW and Activision hadn't pulled the bullshit they did?
     
     
    The bottom line is that DRM hurts sales and customers, but doesn't hurt pirates in any meaningful way. And, personally, I won't be buying Assassin's Creed 2 until they remove this outrageous DRM.
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    deactivated-57b1d7d14d4a5

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    @Teirdome: 
    I buy my games so yeah, I'll be pissed off all I want. Certainly not gonna buy the game.
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    L33tfella_H

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    #15  Edited By L33tfella_H

    Just so you know, i BOUGHT Splinter Cell Chaos Theory when it came out (great game, get it on steam if you don't have it), but one thing i didn't realize until a little detail caught my eye was that it ran on Starforce.
     
    You see, Starforce installs a rootkit onto your harddrive when you install any game with it on it. It detects Virtual Drives and won't run if the game is ran off an ISO and not a legitimate disc, but the side effect is that it messes up Disc drives. It basically screwed up my DVD-Drive and also, it doesn't remove Starforce when you remove the game that it's USED FOR. (What's interesting is that SCCT wasn't cracked until about 8 months after release, a record for a pc game)
     
    DRM is certainly an important part of keeping a game out of pirates hands for those essentials first few weeks, but the problem with DRM in the current times is that it hinders legal customers while pirates simply disable it altogether.
     
    Now i don't know wheter or not i agree with this tactic that Ubisoft are doing for AC2, but i'm sure no matter what, the PC sales will still end up being a dissapointment.

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    Tennmuerti

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    #16  Edited By Tennmuerti

    You can really see how much Ubisoft values it's PC customers in the following official FAQ:
     
     Is there an "off-line" option?
    No. The added services to the game (unlimited installs, online storage of saved games and the fact that you don’t need the game disc to play) require you to have an online connection while playing the game.

     
    "unlimited installs" - WOW that's fucking great!!! your company did this bad thing in the past where they limited my installs on the games I paid for, but now the absence of a BAD feature is guess what ... a FEATURE
     "online storage of saved games" - shit yeah! I can play my game ANYWHERE if I happen to not own a USB flash drive for taking my save files with me, I'm too cheap to buy one
    "you don’t need the game disc to play" - on the PC? for realsies? KEWL! now I don't have to download those pesky NoCD cracks for my legit games in order to counter an artificial and useless inconvinience introduced by the publishers in the first place.

    What will happen if I lose my Internet connection when I play the game?
    If you lose your Internet connection the game will pause while it tries to reconnect. If the Internet connection is unable to resume, the server will have stored your last saved game and you will be able to continue from where you left off once your internet connection is restored. 

     
    Translation:
    If you loose internet for any reason beyond your control, youre screwed.  If your connection is interupted you WILL LOOSE ALL PROGRESS in the game up untill the last time you rememberd to save. You will now be reliant on your ISP, our servers, geographical location and a bajilion other factors in order to play your game. If you go on a business trip and your hotel happens to not have a connection, you can't play the game. Friend doesn't have internet? Can't play it at his house. Going to visit grandparents that don't have internet? Nope can't play game there. In the Army posted overseas? Sorry buddy.
     
     
    I have 2 copies of Assassins Creed on PC.
    1st I bought while I was on holiday visiting grandparents in Russia.
    2nd copy, I bought the EU english version because I could not stand the awful translation but really liked the game, so I did not mind paying more money to get a better experience.
    I will buy 0 copies of AC2 on PC if it will come with their online "feature"

    This is ridiculous, how do they think this move is smart in any way? It won't stop pirates, just inconvenience legit buyers. If anything this might introduce said paying customers to the world of piracy in the first place if they will go to torrents and try to get the pirated version after having problems playing the copy they bought. It's not even just AC2 we are talking about here, they want to do it to ALL their games in the future. Why oh why? I find it hard to believe that their executives are dumb enough to think that this will help sales.
     
     
    To address some of your references to other situations directly:
    WoW is an online game where your ENTIRE gaming experience relies on interaction with other people all the time, the game is based around the fact that you CAN and usually do constantly play with groups of people, this has nothing in common at all with AC2, that is why its not a BIG DEAL for WoW. Next thing you know people will suggest you have to pay monthly fees to keep playing your single player games. (Also FYI WoW has been successfully pirated long time ago)
      Prince of Persia on the PC was a fucking SHAM, they sold you an unfinished game and released the DLC that contained the GAME ENDING but it only came out on consoles (btw I own a steam version of PoP) I'm pretty sure it would have gotten more legit sales if customers could actually get the full product and not a game with no ending.
    Your farmer/pesticide argument is funny tho, as ironically the "pesticide" (DRM) in this case is completely innefective at killing the "pests" (pirates) while making the "fruits" (games) less apealing to the buyers.

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    SeriouslyNow

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    #17  Edited By SeriouslyNow
    @Teirdome:   One company's ridiculously draconian measures do not prove that piracy is evil.  These measures just indicate that said company is out of touch with their market.  Steam's phenomenal 200% growth over the last fiscal year proves that many PC gamers do actively purchase and support legitimate PC gaming and there are many games on Steam which use further methods of DRM above and beyond what is provided by Steam itself.  Ubisoft had many options to choose from and they selected the worst; one which makes the customer feel a slap in the face for doing the right thing.  Ubisoft are foolish if they think this will prevent pirates from copying the game and they are equally foolish to have elected to chastise their customers instead of pleasing them.
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    deactivated-6418ef3727cdd

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    Who cares, I played AC on my PC and my friend's 360 and the controls were horrible on the PC. I wasn't going to buy it or pirate it for PC anyway, now I'm REALLY not going to buy it for PC.

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    Leptok

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    #19  Edited By Leptok

    I grabbed AC1 on Steam this Christmas, liked it and was stoked to get the next one on PC, now, fuck that shit. I'll grab it when the torrent comes out.

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    Leptok

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    #20  Edited By Leptok

    And your World of Goo guys said this:
     
     “by the way, just in case it’s not 100% clear, we’re not angry about piracy, we still think that DRM is a waste of time and money, we don’t think that we’re losing sales due to piracy, and we have no intention of trying to fight it.”

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    Eurobum

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    #21  Edited By Eurobum
    @Teirdome: 
    From a point of view economics, having no piracy at all combined with the ability to copy digital property infinitely is a recipe for infinite stream of profit from royalties. 
    On the other hands pirates have access to almost infinite wealth (more music, films, books and games than a single person could possibly ever have time to enjoy). In a world with no intellectual property, the laws of supply and demand hit absolute extremes because supply in form of digital copies is not limited. 
     
    Like a Sony ad from the 90s, digital means: "Each copy is an original." 
     
    Copy Protection, Installation limits, DRM etc. are ways to make capitalism work for intellectual property. But since all these are artificial restrictions, all prices are artificial as a result. There is no easy way to determine fair prices for single products, or something like a flat rate pricing model. Decisions over such restrictions also give publisher cartels an enormous power. Deciding whether I can lend a game or give a copied disc to a friend or a stranger, is not a natural right of developers! However because companies are out for short term profit and are competing with one another, they are not primarily interested in providing fair pricing or best bang for the buck. 
     
    Examples: Games have no educational (or arguably cultural) value, they are never improved and polished but instead steadily re-made, addictive elements are consciously added while fair competition has become almost inconceivable, with very few exceptions. Games are aggressively marketed to children, who can not really decide if games are good for them in comparison to - say - piano lessons. [/rant]
     
    Piracy is the only way for a customer to protest against pricing to access digital media. It changed the music business, in the way that music is freely accessible now, albeit in lower quality. 
    Whether a person is infringing copy right, or a company copying a game concept and creating a competing game title. The good solution will be a compromise between sharing intellectual property and charging for it, not a total clamp down. 
     
    Old extremely restrictive solutions, like paying for a movie before you have seen it, never will feel quite fair and satisfying.
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    RagingLion

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    #22  Edited By RagingLion
    @Colonel_Cool said:

    " @Teirdome said:

    "

    While it is a valid point that there is not 1-to-1 correlation between games pirated and a lost sale, there is certainly some correlation.  Regardless, attempting to argue from this point is akin to saying "they were not going to buy this car no matter what the manufacturer did, so why not let them steal it?"   Clearly the person pirating the game was interested enough in it to waste the time downloading the torrent, patch it, and get it up and running.  There had to be some interest there for the thief to get this far.  Is it now the publisher and developer's fault for not tapping into that interest?
     

    Without advocating piracy in any way, shape, or form, I must say this. Pirating isn't stealing in a conventional sense. When you steal a car, you physically take it away. When pirating a game, you are copying the game files, and no copies are missing from the stores. And DRM does little to actually prevent game piracy. If Ubisoft's incredibly invasive DRM actually stopped piracy, then maybe its use would be justifiable. But it won't, and it only ends up being a pain in the ass to the people who buy the game. I don't mind disk checks, or even online activation checks (so long as there is some sort of de-activation system), but this "authenticate every few minutes online over and over again" system is total bullshit. How long will it be until it is circumvented? "
    You should be commended for taking the time Teirdome to write a post which was on the whole well written and thought out and it is absolutely right to stand back and think about these things clearly without being swayed by popular opinion, however I very much agree with this guy.  I was also going to point out that your car analogy does not work exactly the same in the context of digital media.  Also, as someone else wrote, your analogy of pesticide does work if this proves to not hinder pirates.  I'm not an expert on cracking games I just know that the hackers that exist atm have a reputation for being able to break into anything and probably see it as a challenge apart from anything else.  If they are able to crack AC2 then it is purely the honest PC-game-buying public that suffer and not pirates which makes the reason behind carrying out this DRM surely silly and redundant (the cloud stuff and no CD? stuff could be cool btw if that's the case).
     
    You mention WoW.  Yes it gets played by many people but there are those without internet connections and they just know that they won't be able to play it but expect to be able to play single player games.  Now that segment may only be a small percentage, maybe tiny, I don't know but the far bigger issue is for those that only have sporadic internet connection and that's something that certainly affects many many people.  I don't know how WoW works but does it kick you out of the game to a menu screen when you lose internet connection losing any unsaved progress?  This is apparently what AC2 does.  Maybe checkpoints are fairly regular, I don't know, but if you're the kind of person that can lose internet connection often that's quite a hassle and very annoying not to mention breaking you severely out of the game experience.  This could be severely detrimental to some people and it seems foolish.  Maybe that's needed for the whole cloud thing but maybe that should just be an option and not for everyone.  I don't know if there's any technical ideas I'm oblivious to that might also have a bearing on this.
     
    Ultimately I only own a PC and Assassin's Creed is one of my favourite games so AC2 has been perhaps my most anticipated title for quite a while.  I can't see any way I won't buy this but I really hope this DRM doesn't prove to be a big hassle.  There are those who will certainly be less fortunate with internet connection than me.
     
    (Final thoughts:  I'm a big fan of RPS so I respect those guys and don't expect them to be inflammatory for no reason - I think they have solid reasons for coming out with such a strong reaction.  I really want someone to do some really well executed research into piracy and what the possible links to lost sales might be - there's so much riding on that question that it desrves to be looked into to in some way.)
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    Meowayne

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    #23  Edited By Meowayne

    The bottom line is that DRM hurts sales and customers, but doesn't hurt pirates in any meaningful way.
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    Jimbo

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    #24  Edited By Jimbo
    @Teirdome said:
    "While it is a valid point that there is not 1-to-1 correlation between games pirated and a lost sale, there is certainly some correlation.  Regardless, attempting to argue from this point is akin to saying "they were not going to buy this car no matter what the manufacturer did, so why not let them steal it?" "
    This was where you lost me btw.
     
    Anyways, I'll say the same thing I say about all of these attempted anti-piracy measures:  the publisher can do what they like and the consumer can choose to buy it or not.  It's that simple.  Pirates will just crack it anyway and paying customers will be less inclined to buy it because it now has less value.  If publishers want to keep wasting resources repeating the same mistakes over and over again, that's their business.
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    animateria

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    #25  Edited By animateria

    I think DRM is wrong but the problem is that all these DRM is that they punish the person who legitimately bought the game.
     
    Sadly, I can't see a way to avoid that while preventing piracy.
     
    But either way, somebody is going to figure out how to prevent this new type of DRM. So in the end paying customers get the short end of the stick.

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    Death_Unicorn

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    #26  Edited By Death_Unicorn

    Well if I was planning on buying ACII for the PC, I would no longer buy the game for the PC after this nonsense.

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