Always Online DRM

Thats unrealistic however when they shutdown server(s) they should dispatch an auto update that removes DRM for affected game. If they dont then thats damn low.

EDIT: Beaten by Pjbliverpool twice over the head.

 

What most of these publishers would like us to fail to understand is that once you have a requirement for online connections to play the game, they go from providing a product, to providing a service. This is a service that has been bought and paid for and must be available to all those that purchased or own the game. It's not our fault they need to provide us with robust 24/7 online servers, especially for single player games.

No one expects support ad-infinitum, but if the game is still available to buy and previous owners still want to play, and if it has a single player portion that only needs to go online for authentication, then there is a moral obligation to continue to provide servers, or else patch out the online requirement.

Otherwise it's yet more reason to buy other games without such restriction, and will once again drive customers to piracy where the online checks have been patched out for the single player game. This will do more long term damage to the relationship between customers and publishers (and their profit margins) than any imaginary short term benefit of implementing these DRM schemes.

 

Oh, I do if they go down the road of the game needing a server to run then they have to accept the consequences provide an indefinite server or remove the requirement the auto update idea is not a complete solution either as they would have to run the auto update server indefinitely

 

What I meant by that, is I wouldn't expect a game released for a couple of OSes ago to necessarily work today, so at some point a few years down the line, when I'm running Windows 9 and a game doesn't work right I won't expect the dev to fix it.

But I agree with you, while there is a self imposed requirement by the publisher to use a service to play, then that service should be provided, no question. It's for the publisher's benefit, not ours, so to effectively take away the game from a customer by removing the authentication servers (for whatever reason) is totally unacceptable.

 

Do you need a hug?

I just refuse to touch anything Ubi altogether. I'm not going to buy anything from them until they stop this bullshit, the more invasive and onerous their anti-piracy "protection" becomes the bigger the penalty is for their PAYING customers, and the bigger the advantage of actually pirating the game rather than buying it. So I'm not participating in their ploy. They can go to hell, all of them. TBH, I hope their whole damn company goes bust.

Who needs Ubi anyway? Other than the original FarCry I can't think of a single title of theirs I've really enjoyed, and that game was a buggy mess literally for years. Last couple times I played it the mouse wouldn't work unless you did a full reset of all keybinds every time the game was first installed, so aiming and steering was impossible... How the fuck can a bug like that slip through quality control? Answer: they must not have any.

 

The original Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six games were sweet. But I have to agree that their content of late hasn't been terribly compelling.

 

Both the times I tried to play Far Cry(Stuff kept happening in RL...), I did not have that bug. *shrug*

As for Ubi, yeah, I boycott them and Activision. Their shit is just intolerable, and damaging to the game industry as a whole(Though what Activision does is very different than Ubi).

Oddly enough, most of Ubi's games have not appealed to me over the years, but recently they've had a few I've wanted to check out. Not happening while they do this shit.

 

Good writeup on DRM by Cory Doctorow if you are interested:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal-tech/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201000854&pgno=1

 

But it better damn well work if I run it on the recommended OS with the recommended hardware! Forever!

 

Remember this? And this? Yeah.

 

Interesting. I had it on at least two completely different PC systems with 100% all-different hardware and different OSes (well, both of them had NV graphics, but I doubt that's going to affect the mouse...)

What specifically are you thinking of (other than Bobby Kotick being a fat, obnoxious greedy moneygrubber )?

I guess their outspoken and deliberate strategy to run each and every franchise of theirs into the ground by issuing repeated sequels consisting of nothing other than more of the same until the games stop selling (and then subsequently firing the "responsible" dev-team and dismantling the studio) might be a strong reason to dislike the company...

Their desire to "monetize" as much as they can of their games through "microtransactions" and subscriptions and other fees on top of the purchase price of the game itself would be another...

Kotick is also busy squeezing WoW's tit purple for cash, blizzard "paid services" for example are an utter joke as far as pricing is concerned. You have to pay €25 to transfer one single character from one game realm to another for example, the actual price in costs incurred to the company would be more like €0.25, if that much even.

 

Basically, I am referring to Activision's shortsighted greediness and the bullshit they do to their employees(A friend of mine used to work at Vicarious Visions. The stories he would tell me got progressively more bitter towards the end of his stay there, and he no longer has anything good to say about Activision at all. He was a tools/engine programmer).

 

I have a q. Since draconian DRM doesn't help with piracy, damages the value of games and is actually increasing piracy rather than decreasing it, Ubisoft and other companies that use it certainly must know that. That begs the question what is the real reason why it exists, to circumvent the resale rights? Like EA did with Spore:
Despite that, by the end of october 2008 the game sold 2M copies and probably more by now, even though it is a shallow turd of what was promised.


So why they are spending resources implementing it when the game could simply be registered/tied to an online account during the installation for the intention of restricting the sales rights? Or use Steamworks which can, for a change, actually help by blocking out day zero piracy, addds value to games that use it and is free to use?

 

I suspect the idea is to acclimate the customer to living with DRM. It's a bit counter-intuitive--the natural expectation is that multi-national corporations will be completely short sighted. But I think the digital age struck sharp fear into many hearts; the idea that the physical product merely evaporated into thin air. Add to that the promise of SW subscription, and it's an industry changing paradigm, and threfore worth f***ing the customers for 10-30 years with no direct return. Implicit I think are the assumptions that customers will always be customers, and pirates will always be pirates. So how best to f*** the customers?

 

Just Cause studio boss calls DRM 'completely useless'

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/20665

Someone who understands!

 

Makes me just that much happier that I bought JC2 right when it came out -- and it has easily 130 hours of play time according to my Steam stats. I think they've just found themselves another 'free sale' for their next game, pretty much no matter what.

 

Whatever Sandberg and devs like him say, and we think is right, I don't think it will change anything, say, Ubisoft instead of going the lowest common denominator route, making the PC version of the next Rainbox Six at the Raven Shield level.

 

I have to admit I do not mind efforts to stop piracy if they are done like the stardock people did. So that you need a key to get additional content or something. I absolutely despise regular DRM though. I have personally dealt with enough hassles on that front it certainly diminishes the amount of money I am willing to spend on software.

 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/16/oh-ubisoft-torrented-their-own-music/


http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/03/17/volition-boss-says-no-more-duff-pc-ports/

FreeSpace 3 and all will be forgiven.

 

A new Heroes of Might and Magic is coming and I can't buy it, because it's ubisoft that owns the franchise nowadays...