Quite possibly the worst DRM and most ridiculous idea ever

[zexen_lowe]

WilliamWatts said:

zexen_lowe said:

WilliamWatts said:

I have seen cracks take out copy protection but I have never seen a crack put features back in. Its far easier to rip something down, like for instance an HD -> Wii conversion than it is to build it back up. The best I can think of is spoofing the pirate save server but if it requires a unique key then its the same situation as any online authenticated game.

It's nor putting a feature back in, it's just removing the part where it connects to a server. I don't know how cracks work, so of course I don't know how it could be done, but there have been games that connected to servers for authentication (GTA4, for example), and they've all been cracked, so it's logical to expect this one will too

The Ubisoft protection means you can crack it as many times as you want but you cannot save your game unless you authenticate on Ubisofts server.

Famousringo

That's the crucial thing. This doesn't affect piracy at all.

This method of DRM raises the cost for the publishers and legitimate customers, while the cost to pirates remains the same. And when you raise the cost to the customer, your revenues drop as fewer customers are willing to buy. Everybody loses.

Oh, except the pirate. He gets to enjoy the game just fine because some clever supergeek saw Ubisoft's brilliant plan as an interesting challenge.

Ubisofts anti-piracy protection may do just that. It may finally be an effective anti-piracy deterrant and if it increases the time between release and piracy from T minus 14 to T plus 7 days before/after release to say a month then its done its job. See above, you can't save your game and its difficult to add that functionality back in.

Imagine the game code were something like this

User wants to save game;
var = connect to ubi servers to check if user authenthicated correctly;
if  (var)
   save game
else
    return error

 

And you only have to rewrite it to

User wants to save game;
var = true;
if  (var)
   save game
else
    return error

 

And there, it doesn't connect. Of course, this is a rough generalization done in pseudocode, but you get the idea