Ubisoft commit commercial suicide

[ChichiriMuyo]

ZenfoldorVGI said:

ChichiriMuyo said:
Zen - Wow has been pirated many, many times. Clone servers have been put up, allowing people to play their pirated copies 100% for free. You have to be incredibly naive to think the devs/publishers have a shot in hell at stoping piracy.

Miguel - I'll spare the attitude if you stop being lazy. All the information in the world at your finger tips and you want people to post sources on wide-spread information? Come on, dude.

I never thought of clone servers as piracy. In WoW, the gamecode is freeware. It's the community that you log in and pay for.

With AC2, perhaps, the code could be piratable, but maybe the boss interactions and phase changes would be streamed from their servers.

It might not stop piracy, but it would reduce it by a huge margin.

Also, it's extremely naive to believe that developers will never stop piracy. They could. The question is, how much hardship is the consumer willing to accept due to modern technology, and does it keep things nice and profitable?

One way to prevent piracy, is to send a ninja with every copy of the game sold, to watch you while you play. When you're not playing, the game will be handed back to the Ninja. Once you've beaten it, the Ninja destroys the game, and flys off into the night. You are never left alone with the game, and your computer blows up after it's over.

See, easy. I just stopped piracy. Problem is, not everyone is willing to live with a ninja, and ubisoft can't afford them.

Point is, there is a way to do anything. However, when preventing videogame piracy, publishers are limited by what is financially prudent, and also by what their customers are willing to put up with, in the name of playing their game. You get it?

Ubisoft is pushing the boundries on the latter.

Blizzard sure thinks of a lot of them as piracy, which is why they've sent cease and desist orders to many of them.

I already pointed out exactly how to get over streamed data.  Once somebody streams that data and cracks it, that's the end of that anti-piracy method

No, they can't.  It's not within their power.  They keep spending more time and resources developing tougher security and the hacker community just keeps breaking it faster.  Piracy is so much more powerful than these corporations now that you can get the pirated version of many games before the legitimate one.  If pirates can get your product out into the market (and break your security) before you've released it, you know it's time to throw in the towel.  As it is they are already throwing everything they can at the pirates and they are losing, they are losing by more than they were 5 years ago and that was more so than 10 years ago.  Why is this supposed to suddenly reverse?  The fact is, the harder they make the more fun is to try for a hacker, and even using hardware to stop piracy has limited impact at best.

So the best thing you can come up with would add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of each game, and even then it's not airtight security?  Even if it were cost effective, if even one of those ninja were to die or get bought off the whole system fails utterly.  And, uh, how much did you want to pay to play a video game?

No, you didn't stop piracy.  As I said, if the security system is compromised even once the whole thing goes to waste.  What would you like to suggest next, that we post a gaurd next to every operable piece of computer hardware in the world?

Oh, I get it.  The thing is, it won't stop piracy even one bit.  It's an inconvenience to the paying customer and has no impact on pirates.  Is this something they deserve praise for?