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Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk
Probably not. The game does not need to phone home anymore. Perhaps the last patch would provide the MP capability. Maybe in a pay for addon with additional content. It worked for SH4. Lets do the math logically. The game gets released. There is the initial glut of purchases at $49.99 or whatever. This goes on for say 6 months. Meanwhile, there are patches made for a fix or a "thanks from UBI' boat added. Others are still making purchases at full price. Eventually the price drops to $19.99 and then $9.99. Does not take long. Does it make financial sense to run, have upkeep and staff this server for DRM? In the long run I would say no. It is diminishing returns on the sales of the games that overrides the cost to keep this server up and running. So really, at $9.99 for a game most will just buy it instead of pirating a copy I would think. What does UBI really get to keep this DRM going for years? I can't think of reason to do that. What is your thoughts? I could be way off base but that is how I see it.
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Well, EA is currently shutting down online capabilities for games that are just one year old and beyond. If online support is dropped eventually, they'd sure have a DRM fix ready for us, to at least allow us for SP play, but I doubt they'd go through the trouble of programming a bypass for their MP servers, specially if the stock SH5 doesn't include LAN/IP/Ded. server/client creation capabilities, which could be bound to have bugs too which would require fixes if critical.
However, EA's server are much complex than what Ubi might have planned, because EA uses them not just for authentication, but for data transactions with the games, all the time. OSP/DRM might be as fast as a single server ping, and just having 1 machine for it would suffice and not get overloaded (at least, with SH5)... what would happen with the savegames issue is a different matter, probably independent from OSP, and that's probably what will be the most costly to mantain. But money is money of course, so I wouldn't exclude any possibility.
Cheers
