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Monday, March 8, 2010

UbiSoft's DRM faux-pas

11:17 PM / Games / 8 Comments

If you're a PC gamer, chances are you've heard about the fiasco surrounding the latest insidious digital rights management (DRM) system designed to screw legitimate customers... sorry, I mean't to say "designed to combat piracy". Funny now the two always seem to go hand in hand, isn't it?

Anyway, faced with the knowledge that, no matter what sort of copy protection or forced activation system they put on the game disc, the crackers will find a way of bypassing it, letting players get straight to the good stuff (often before the game is actually available on store shelves - SPORE, I'm looking at you), UbiSoft hit on an ingenious scheme: to force the player to authenticate and remain online at all times, connected to UbiSoft's servers and streaming a significant portion of the game data NOT stored on the physical disc. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Well, yes, until you break it down and figure out what it actually means. You have to remain connected to the internet the whole time. If your connection dies, for whatever reason, the game quits. Depending on which game it is, it might save your progress, but that's not a given. ASSASSIN'S CREED 2, for example, uses a checkpoint system, so if your connection dies, the game will only restore you back to the last checkpoint. As per Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

No matter what you're doing, no matter what the reason, the game will refuse to let you continue playing if it decides you're not online. You're dumped right back to a menu, losing any progress made since the last checkpoint. If you don't have a constant, uninterrupted internet connection, you can't play. Let's list some of the reasons you might drop your net connection, shall we? Router crash, ISP problems, cat playing with the cable, microwave muddling your wi-fi connection, train going into a tunnel when you're on 3G, Windows having a networking befuddlement, someone else in the house torrenting the bandwidth dry...

And let's get something straight here: we're talking about SINGLE PLAYER GAMES that require you to remain connected. That's a load of horse-hooey. A player's ability to run a single player game should not be dependent either on his/her web connection or the stability of UbiSoft's servers. It's ludicrous. It benefits no-one but the publisher. As Phill Cameron put it in his article at Gamasutra:

It's not there for our protection, it's there to stop people who aren't us (the paying customers), from getting their hands on the game.

[...]

Recently, PC Gamer managed to have a talk with Ubisoft about the technology. They claim that 'The real idea is that if you offer a game that is better when you buy it, then people will actually buy it. We wouldn't have built it if we thought that it was really going to piss off our customers.'

While it might be tempting to call them naive or blindly optimistic, the base theory there is sound; if you offer a better service than the pirates, you'll have more people buying the game. The problem is that here, with Assassin's Creed 2, we're not getting a better game when we buy.

The last point, which I emboldened, is in my opinion the most pertinent. From a shareholder's point of view, this new DRM system sounds wonderful in theory. After all, the bottom line is what counts, and what bigger bottom line is there than preventing the loss of sales due to piracy? (Let's, for a moment, run with the fallacy that every pirated copy directly equates to a lost sale.) Unfortunately, for the end user, it's meaningless. There's nothing to be gained by the gamer from this sort of content protection. The gamer is being asked to accept more stringent limitations being placed on their usage of the product in return for... nothing. Zilch. Nada.

The stupidity of this new system was laid bare for all to see when the aforementioned ASSASSIN'S CREED 2 was released on March 5th, and the servers were promptly brought to their knees due to the sheer demand placed on them, preventing legitimate customers from playing the game they'd just bought. That's right: people were unable to play a single player game because the servers couldn't cope with the number of connections. I hate to say "I told you so", but the sadist in me derives a considerable amount of schadenfreude from this whole affair. Rock, Paper, Shotgun again:

The DRM was clearly ludicrous from its first announcement, and Ubisoft could not have been sent a more clear message by a worldwide reaction of outrage. They persisted with it anyway (quashing some people's suspicions that this was a deliberately OTT announcement so they could appear to back down on it later), and despite repeated warnings that it was untenable continued to boast the "feature" as a bonus for gamers. This weekend people have not been gamers, because their game wouldn't run.

And don't forget that the game has currently only been released in Europe. Just imagine what's going to happen when it comes out in North America on the 9th...

This new DRM scheme is supposedly going to be employed for every subsequent UbiSoft PC game, including THE SETTLERS VII: PATHS TO A KINGDOM, which I was previously looking forward to playing but now won't be bothering with. Well, it'll be used until UbiSoft's managers cotton on to the fact that this is a major faux-pas and backtrack. That may take some time, given that all the evidence suggests that UbiSoft's managers are SPECTACULARLY stupid, but I'm confident that it will happen eventually. Electronic Arts, for example, eventually backed down on the ridiculous "three/five installs and you're out" scheme that they imposed on SPORE and RED ALERT 3, among others. It's a shame wary customers are going to have to miss out on the likes of ASSASSIN'S CREED 2 and THE SETTLERS 7, but them's the breaks, and I feel reasonably confident that the inevitable ASSASSIN'S CREED 3 and THE SETTLERS 8 will not be crippled to this extent. (That, or UbiSoft will devise something even worse, which I suppose is always a possibility...)

If nothing else, the ASSASSIN'S CREED 2 fiasco is a cause for celebration because it serves as a clear demonstration of just how dangerous this sort of DRM potentially is. If you bought the game, fully aware of the included restrictions, and found yourself unable to play it, then I sympathise, but maybe it will teach you not to be so trusting in future.

8 Comments

 
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