Slightly worrying article

[exponent8246]

Hi all,

Ive just had a read of this article which doesnt bode well for the DRM issue!!

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/assass...ews-32813.html


Any comments???

[Onkel Neal]

Some of you are going to hate this.

Understatement

[Darkreaver1980]

Well, if the new DRM ist allmost not crackable than i will buy it any day

[Seafireliv]

Looks like UBI KNEW it would be controversial and went ahead anyway. Their jester must`ve told the boss that everything will be alright and not worry about the `few` rebels who will be upset- Everyone else will buy!

Methinks yonder jester will be losing his head soon.

[Heretic]

Originally Posted by Seafireliv

Looks like UBI KNEW it would be controversial and went ahead anyway. Their jester must`ve told the boss that everything will be alright and not worry about the `few` rebels who will be upset- Everyone else will buy!

Methinks yonder jester will be losing his head soon.

Well of course they knew it would cause a sh*tstorm. I'm sure they have it all planned that just need to stick it out for X weeks or X months and it will all blow over. They've made the calculations and done all the marketing research and focus groups and all the stuff corporations do before they spend a dime on anything. They believe that in the long run, they'll lose less sales to piracy than they'll lose to DRM. Time will tell.

[Hitman]

You know, I think that the best solution for fighting effectively piracy and not bothering legitimate users is easy: Set death penalty for pirating games. Once two or three pirates have gone in front of a firing squad after summary trial, the rest of us will be able to enjoy in peace our games

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Hitman

You know, I think that the best solution for fighting effectively piracy and not bothering legitimate users is easy: Set death penalty for pirating games. Once two or three pirates have gone in front of a firing squad after summary trial, the rest of us will be able to enjoy in peace our games

I love you, man

Even better (because it's legal and such, lol) would be to have the developers make a special pirate copy of the game and have many people release it into the wild. After x number of days, the game erases the hard drive and sends an e-mail to the FBI.

[exponent8246]

Originally Posted by Hitman
You know, I think that the best solution for fighting effectively piracy and not bothering legitimate users is easy: Set death penalty for pirating games. Once two or three pirates have gone in front of a firing squad after summary trial, the rest of us will be able to enjoy in peace our games


I second that opinion mate!!! Excellent!

[Nisgeis]

All these 'new' articles seem to just quote the original PC Gamer article - are they the only ones given a review copy of AC2 and Settlers VII? Someone else must have one by now.

[Platapus]

The platform requires a permanent Internet connection. We know this choice is controversial but we feel is justified by the gameplay advantages offered by the system and because most PCs are already connected to the Internet.

Has Ubi described what these gameplay advantages are for the customer. Clearly there are advantages for Ubi, but I am not understanding what they mean by gameplay advantages.

I can tolerate the internet connection requirement if it is just something that Ubi, the owners of software, want. But if they are justifying this requirement by claiming that there are some gameplay advantages for ME, I would be interested in knowing what these advantages are.

[difool2]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

I love you, man

Even better (because it's legal and such, lol) would be to have the developers make a special pirate copy of the game and have many people release it into the wild. After x number of days, the game erases the hard drive and sends an e-mail to the FBI.

I guess the impact would likely be less than my imagination wants to think, but has releasing bogus pirate copies (either by a dev company itself or "counterpirates") ever worked? IIRC there were a few games released fairly recently which had built in limitations if they were pirated-I guess the warez types would just circle the wagons and "everybody" would know which sites had copies that worked (and which didn't), but if I was more technically minded I'd almost be inclined to throw together some code which subtly porks gameplay in a bunch of weird ways, and try to disseminate it anywhere I could-eventually if taken to the logical extreme nobody would ever know which copies were the good ones and which ones were the bad. [Note to Neal & co. I'm just indulding in idle speculation here understand]

The best part of this is that the resulting "bugs" would immediately indicate who was using the warez, as they would be coming on a subsim message board and complaining that the sun never moved in the sky or that his torpedoes only traveled at 5 knots (and hence he could never hit anything), or something. Scarlet Letter and all that.

[IanC]

Originally Posted by difool2

<snip> if I was more technically minded I'd almost be inclined to throw together some code which subtly porks gameplay in a bunch of weird ways, and try to disseminate it anywhere I could-eventually if taken to the logical extreme nobody would ever know which copies were the good ones and which ones were the bad. [Note to Neal & co. I'm just indulding in idle speculation here understand]

The best part of this is that the resulting "bugs" would immediately indicate who was using the warez, as they would be coming on a subsim message board and complaining that the sun never moved in the sky or that his torpedoes only traveled at 5 knots (and hence he could never hit anything), or something. Scarlet Letter and all that.

They already tried something similar with a game (forget which one), it would crash, somewhere half way through, if it wasn't a legal copy. What happened? Well it totally backfired on the company, people started to complain about the crashes and the game got a reputation as 'unstable'.