Copyprotection thread (continued from PS3 thread)

I continue here for now:

Im sure you understand why the copyprotection sucks; game is available for only as long as you (Ubisoft) keeps your servers up. One day you will discontinue the service and game wont be available to ANYONE. period. That is something I am strongly against, as one who plays lot of old games.

Even if Sega closes the matchmaking servers, we can still keep playing VF5 offline. Imagine if we couldnt play it at all just because the servers go down? And for a singleplayer game thats played offline that makes no sense whatsoever.

And it doesnt prevent actual piracy much cause iirc Ubisoft new DRM was cracked in like 10 hours or something.

A service that already sucks for this reason is steam. Which, while making some golden oldies available, is a steaming pile of horse manure in my eyes because it will just stop working one day and all my purchases go poof up in the air.

 

Just to clear up a few points:

- We can remove the protection at any point. So should we shut down the servers, the protection will go with it.
- A fully working version took about 6 weeks to come out.

 

STEAM is the best "shit" that ever happened to PC gaming.

best DRM i can live with.

now what pisses me off is when game companies decide to put their own DRM on top of steam...like WTF!?

 

Steam is horrible compared to Impulse/Gamersgate.

I make a point to avoid buying Steam games unless absolutely necessary.

As for Ubi stuff, I don't need to buy their crap, so if they want to drive me away as a customer, I don't need them.

 

I'm curious, what is exacly horrible / wrong about steam?

 

I love the blasted thing.

 

Agreed ^. I LOVE steam. What can you find wrong with it?

 

It functions the same way as Ubisofts DRM. I bought empire: total war offline on a dvd. It requires steam account and online confirmation to be played.

We only have your word for it, and frankly it does not weigh much.

In the meantime I continue to enjoy being unable to play the games when your servers are having a fit. Has happened few times too many with Steam. OR if my own internet connection has a problem.. I was out of internet for a week last winter. This is not the future of gaming Im looking forward to.

Ubisoft remains on my boycott list for the unforeseeable future.

 

Get used to it. You'll either be dealing with the Ubi DRM or a pay to play system. The two are essentially the same, but one you have to pay 15/month too.

Doubt my word as much as you want, I'm not offended, but it's a bit silly to think that Ubisoft didn't think of a plan in case they want to shut the servers.

In all honesty PC gaming has no future outside of MMOs.

And this is a reason why I'm really opposed to Ubisoft porting console games to the PC at all. Why bother? The sales are laughable, and we get bad press for trying to curb the piracy rate.

Most seem to go with the logic that if pirates can crack any DRM why bother having one. The reality is companies are more likely to not bother with the PC.

Out of curiosity, what's a DRM that would prevent piracy, that wouldn't cause you grief?

 

I only know one MMO that Id be willing to invest more time into than singleplayergames, and btw that isnt wow. 99% of MMOs are garbage. Not to mention they have their own lifespan as well. One day they will cease to function.

Also, I think they said that 10 years ago too.

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And this is a reason why I'm really opposed to Ubisoft porting console games to the PC at all. Why bother? The sales are laughable, and we get bad press for trying to curb the piracy rate.
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What do consolegames got to do with this?

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Out of curiosity, what's a DRM that would prevent piracy, that wouldn't cause you grief? </div></div>

I dont care about your problems, Im willing to pay money for a working product that I know wont be taken away from me sometime in future. Thats the part that Im really annoyed. Its not copyprotection itself that bothers me. If I dont see that my money is well spent, then I wont spend it. As long as I have to rely on another party for access to the product I have bought, you wont ever convince me. I have seen more services discontinued than I can shake a stick at.

Im fairly certain that about 98% of my game collection is neither. Keep in mind that while I mean primarily PC games here, only online portion of Xbox games require xbox gold. Im not counting that. The whole reason why Im so vocal is because I see this progress toward online copyprotection as harmful and its happening in consolegames too.

ps. Steam should be what it advertises itself as: a distribution service. NOT authentication service.

 

I assure you that how much a game I worked on doesn't sell on PC is not a problem for me. The problem is companies won't make products that don't return on their investement, thus shrinking the available games to play on my platform of choice. That is my problem, and frankly it is one that you should care about.

 

Im voting with my wallet here, feel free to tell me what else I can do. Im also telling you why.

 

If more people did like you we wouldn't be having this discussion

 

Offline mode for steam:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3160-AGCB-2555

Yes I know it needs some preparation online for it to work but you CAN play offline -if- you plan to

 

Steam rocks. That is all there is to it. You can't loose a game. It can't get scratched.

 

put every game on a dual layer blu ray and fill the remaining disk space with dummy data.

why would you pirate that when blu ray burners are $200 and dual layer blu rays are like $25 each?

(i am being 100% serious)

 

Using Blu-ray would initially plug the piracy hole for when the game released, but they would still crack each disc within 3-6 months of it being in the market.

It would also initially reduce potential PC customers by fragmenting the user base further, and would accelerate the fall in price of BD-R discs/drives to repeat the DVD story; I think.

Imo the current set up with online DRM is a necessary evil, but would like if they agreed to send a non-drm disc based copy to people 18 months after the game released.
An 18 month protection window for any game is a reasonable period to get a return on investment; on a game like Assassin's Creed.

This would also be enough time to ready the next iteration of a game; if they wanted to release one. The torrent piracy that would occur from the discs based versions would most likely promote more sales of a sequel; which would still be protected so the piracy could then almost be used as marketing.

Related to the topic, I think all these problems and companies like steam might disappear with the PC gaming market in 5-10 years. Sony are probably going to release a ray-tracing capable console next-gen; something like a cut down configuration of a TriBlade.
And ray-tracing is probably too expensive for PC hardware, incompatible for scalability with existing console/PC graphics that would make PC gaming niche for casual games development.

With the performance of current consoles; and their ability to overlap PC functionality, and with the abundance of high-grade GPL software (Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox, MySQL, Postgres, GNU imp, Eclipse, Netbeans, Blender, Evolution Mail, etc) I'm not sure the PC market will be here as it is for much more than 5 years.

 

What on earth are you talking about? Are you saying there wont be a PC gaming market in 5-10 years?

 

I'm saying that aggressive timing of real-time ray tracing for games in the console market; could kill the domestic PC gaming market for high end gaming.

Microsoft are aware of the threats from all sides; hence they entered the console market and the search engine market. They know how old the average PC is, and they know that homogeneous PC CPUs (including the Core i7) aren't going to do ray-tracing graphics; which means no other older PC will either.

I'm not saying it will definitely happen, I'm just saying don't be surprised if that does happen.