Just Because

March 12, 2010 | 3 Comments Tags: 360, Eidos, Just Cause 2, pc, ps3, Square Enix, steam

Neon Anderson: DRM and You

Article written by Neon Anderson

I have been and always will be a strong opposer of broken DRM, note how I said broken DRM and not DRM. Here is the thing. I support DRM that will combat piracy, as I am against piracy, people who make games should get paid for their work no matter what and if they make a shit game then people should just not buy it and it will sell badly and the game developers will lose money. But I find it unfair for game developers to have made a game, whether good or bad and then to see people go pirate it.

Those of you who have me on your Steam friends list will probably have noticed that I frequently buy a lot of games on Steam, the most recent two being Serious Sam HD (it’s on 50 percent sale) and Napoleon: Total War pre-order. Most all of the games I play now-a-days, I have bought, mostly on Steam. Games I can’t afford to buy (like Eufloria and some others on Steam) I simply don’t play and only play them once I can afford to buy them on Steam on some sale or something.

Now don’t get me wrong I don’t personally hate pirates either, I know full well their motivations often for pirating a game, but what I said still stands. If your reason for pirating a game is that it is not worth buying, then why waste your time playing it if it really is that bad? Of course some people just can’t afford games and such and I can understand that. Also it is important to remember that there is no direct loss to developers if their game gets pirated by people who would never have bought it in the first place, but it is still wrong, as the developers put work into the game and it probably hurts to see people playing it for free while they are sitting their losing money. On big games piracy does not seem to affect sales that much though, games like Spore and such which despite the large amounts of piracy did record breaking sales.

Ok that was probably the longest introduction to this topic I have ever given… anyway now that I have defined some issues with piracy and some of my views on it, I can get on to actually talking about the topic at hand

Namely Assassin’s Creed 2 and the issue with DRM

Ubisoft (in their ignorance) has decided to implement a brand new DRM on their PC games which they already have said will be in all their upcoming releases. The first of which being Assassin’s Creed 2 on PC.

Here is the rundown of what it does and how it works. Basically this DRM is integrated into the game through some kind of online remote saving system. So while you are playing Assassin’s Creed 2 your save games are stored locally as well as remotely on the Ubisoft servers, sounds good right?

Well here is the catch… to play Assassin’s Creed 2 you need a constant and uninterrupted internet connection. OH SNAP!

Yeah, at first I thought, well the game is great so I still will buy it. But then I found out that if and when you lose your internet connection, which to no surprise does happen, even here at the internet connection I have (I get like 6 MB/s download speed on Steam ) it does fall away once and while, on top of that if the Ubisoft servers crash or go offline this will also stop the game you are playing.

When I say stop the game, what I mean is the game pauses and waits for your internet connection to come back, if you quit the game you will have to restart at the point at which your game last saved next time you start it again once you have internet back. It gets even better… when and if you lose your internet connection or their servers go offline, the game pauses and once your internet is back the game resumes at your last checkpoint; Source

This means that no matter what if and when you lose connection to their DRM save servers, you will be put a few minutes back into the game, which could be very frustrating. I also have quite a few friends who play on wifi, as such this game would be a risky game to buy as their wifi tends to drop out and it can take a few seconds to reconnect or even a full minute.

In my introduction I said I support DRMs, just not broken ones. Since this DRM will be cracked nonetheless and probably even before the game is out on PC! It was entirely useless and has just eliminated any customers who are on gaming laptops and game on the move and such or even those on wifi might be worried to buy this. Heck I am not even on wifi and I am worried about buying this.

On top of this Ubisoft said they did not include an offline mode like Steam has, as this does not help combat piracy. I found this extremely ignorant, seeing how it is more or less fact that Steam is one of the strongest and most effective anti-piracy platform out there.

I support DRMs like Steam, the reason why Steam works so well as an anti-piracy mechanism and DRM control measure is due to Valve views on piracy. Gabe Newell (CEO and co-founder of Valve, i.e. he knows his shit when it comes to the PC gaming industry) even have a conference not so long ago about how Valve thinks piracy should be combated and how DRM measures like the EA activation system do not help in the slightest to combat piracy (and he was spot on with that, just look how much Spore was pirated).

Instead Gabe proposed that game developers and publishers should implement features that can only be accessed by buying the game, that are lost when you pirate it, instead of a DRM penalty system such as the new DRM in AsC 2 that only penalizes people who buy the game while allowing pirates to still find a way around it and end up with a hassle free pirate version of the game.

As such Gabe went on to explain that Steam combats piracy primarily through its benefits for buying the games on Steam, if you pirate the games you do not get to play on VAC servers, you do not get to have a community page with your gameplay stats and achievements there for people to be jealous of. You cannot use Steam to easily join up with friends in a Steamworks server and on games like MW2 you cannot use the MP matchmaking system thus having only the pirate dedicated servers to play on that are full of cheaters and insane and not so fun mods.

As such people have a reason to actually buy the games on Steam if they use the Steamworks integration that is found on all the Valve games and a growing number of third party games, such as Killing Floor, Red Orchestra, Empire Total War, Napoleon Total War, AvP, MW2 and a few others…

February 26, 2010 | 1 Comment Tags: DRM, steam, Ubisoft