I think you underestimate the pirates. It's a community, like any other, people will let others know if the game doesnt work and it will be quickly taken down from the site. Besides, most sites have "trusted" members who release working games, the average pirate only has to wait a game to be uploaded by one of these "trusted" members and he knows immediately that it works.

Unfortunately, Pirates are much smarter than this.
The people who write and distribute the cracks have reputations to uphold. If some new guy pops onto the scene and offers something, and it turns out to be "broken," nobody will seed that torrent and it will quickly die. Most people will only download torrents from a well-known "reputable" source. The guy who downloads a .exe from an unknown hacker is the same type of guy who would walk alone and unarmed into a bad area of Detroit wearing a Rolex watch and $500 shoes.

The only purpose this would serve is to strike back at a few dumb kids who decided to try a game for free. Whooptie doo. It wouldn't put a dent in the pirating of a game.

The biggest defense this game will have agains pirates is the fact that it's a niche game, and as much as UBI wants to reach the mainstream market, not many people are going to be interested in a submarine simulator (or even a "shooter", depending on how it turns out.) It's too much work to interest casual gamers, even with health bars and auto-targeting. Compared to games like Call of Duty, it's like watching grass grow to a casual gamer.

The only sales they will "lose" are the ones from the fence-sitters who MIGHT buy it, or MIGHT download it illegally. Offering them incentives is about the only way to sway them in your direction. Giving them a demo to try would help a lot too. Strong-arming them into restrictive DRM will only send them in the other direction.

:yep:

I still have my Silent Service and Their Finest Hour stuff for my old Atari, and Aces Of The Deep and SH1 with all those goodies.:salute:

There's a difference between pirates that are indeed clever and organized, and your everyday downloader that does not know the teams and etc. They just launch a torrent client and bareky do a search. They only knows, and that's not even all of them, to merely check if the size of the torrent is credible or not. Those downloaders are the greatest amount of people that represent the piracy threat, not the pirates by themselves... However, I do recognize that the seeding problem is one of critical matter

Ubifans are as peeved as weare

Moo

Noooo, you're underestimating them again. :03: When someone makes a search for a game, if their IQ is anything higher than 1, they will look for the most popular torrent they see and these are in most cases, the torrents that work.

Yarr!

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/4476/44927191.jpg

Hello,
i have a quite simple idea for the perfect DRM model, no permanent internet conection required, only now and then, maybe depending on time interval or level (date-related) of a campaign. Would probably also work with other games, however it could be implemented perfectly into the Silent Hunter series.
It is not invincible, but the effort to crack it would be enormous, and you would have to do it again from time to time, thus piling up real-time decyphering computing time.

The trick is that every paying customer gets a one time pad with his sim - everyone another one, that is - maybe depending on the serial number that also has to be unique for each sold sim. You could clutch this to PGP military encryption, or think out something else just for the sim.
(For those who are not familiar with PGP or pretty good privacy, just google it).

The thing is the SH 5 or whatever-user sends a request to Ubi, for getting HIS own one time pad, being sent encrypted. You can then enter this code into your in-game enigma (a real working one, as can be found to download all over the web, but being pretty useless without the rigth settings), programming it with the serial number of your game, and read out the outcome following your unique registration number. Without this rigth code the game will then cease to work.

Maybe receive a message from BdU/UBI (lol), and act according to the order. If you cannot decypher it and act accordingly (reach a certain position, sink a special ship, meet a milk cow or other boat/commerce raider giving you new orders within a certain time), the sim will stop.

Would this work ? I guess it would, but it's certainly overkill - but then this current UBI-DRM idea also is - and the pgp idea is not intruding at all.

Greetings,
Catfish

Catfish,
Your idea sounds intriguing. I wonder if the brains at Ubi would be able to understand it :D

I liked most:
"I want to dive with my laptop but it has no connection to internet" :cry:

Shoot me now.

You wouldnt believe it , i bought a house and today it settled and when i read the documents it says i dont actually own it and the landlord can turf me out whenever he wants . Sound familiar .

:haha:

the so called "entertainment" industry has turned into a drugstore, which has full control of its customers. and if you dont want to be addicted, you need to throw all of your electric gadgets out of the window...far from home. this is the only way to be free again. and boycotts will never work, as too many dumb asses are weak, consuming and supporting the drug-suppliers. the nicely and open minded "casual gamers"...the new heaven for gaming.

theres nothing new on that.

:nope: