Ubisoft Strike Again

Ubisoft, the company PC gamers love to hate, are once again interrupting gamers ability to play their game due to their "successful" always online DRM. This time it is due to a server switch which will cause disruption to their DRM servers.

According to Eurogamer games such as Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Might and Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7, along with a number of other Mac ports will become completely unplayable. So if you do plan on playing these games during the server switch, which starts on the 7th February until a currently unknown date I suggest you go to your favourite download site and get a patch allowing you to play the game you rightfully own.

Once again because of this fantastic DRM policy in place. They are going to be pissing off actual customers while pirates would be able to play their games without any problem at all. I don't own any of the games in question not being available so it doesn't affect me personally, that is irrelevant though. If I did own the games in question and wanted to play through the single player campaign I wouldn't be able to. I would be fine if only the multi-player portion of the game went down as that is perfectly understandable. But the fact you can not play the single player due to online servers being down is frankly ridiculous.

DRM "costs money and makes you lose money"

So says Paradox CEO Fred Wester in an interview with Gamespy, it's actually a good read. I would totally agree with this. If you take a look at damn near every game with DRM, then look at torrent sites a number of days after you will usually fine a patch to bypass the DRM in question. At best you will stop your game getting pirated for the first couple weeks or so while a crack is being worked on. 

I have always seen games as a long term investment, which is of the reasons I don't like games such as Call of Duty, they focus on sales until the next rendition of the game comes out which is when they generally stop supporting the game. Good games should be supported for years to come, look at the likes of Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead those games are what about 5 years old? and they still get constant updates from the developers which is why to this day people still buy these games. Anyway getting back to my point, If a game is a long term investment and DRM is a short term solution, surely you would be better off investing the money spent on DRM (which I'm guessing isn't that cheap, especially if you use a third party solution, I really don't know how much these things cost tbh) on developing the game further. At the end of the day if release good quality goods at a reasonable price people will buy it. Like it or not piracy isn't going any where and pirates will always find a loophole in whatever system you put in place. So focus more on putting out better quality things than worrying about keeping pirates at bay (see what I did there) for a couple of weeks.

If DRM intrudes on my gaming I'm not going to play those games (I'm looking at you Ubisoft). If it comes out in the form of say Steam for example, which actually benefits me (cheap games, library of my games to download at my leisure, social features) I'm okay with it. DRM isn't necessarily a bad thing but you have to make it worth putting up with.

Ubisoft are at it again.

As we all know. PC gamers aren't exactly the biggest fan of Ubisoft due to the likes of their restrictive DRM, but I'm not here to bitch and moan about that. I'm going to bitch and moan about a new (and frankly stupid) policy they have implemented. It would seem that they do not allow more than three separate installs.

There have been many games I have installed more than that over the years. I buy a game I play it for awhile either finish the game or get bored with it. I then uninstall it to make space for some other crap. A few months later I want to play the game, so I reinstall. It's fine I can still install it once more. Let's see I decide to buy a new computer and sell the old one. It's still fine I'm on my final install now. Wait, no... it gets a virus or the hard drive dies, or even you have to much crap on your computer again and need more space, can't afford a new hard drive so we'll just uninstall it. Now my game is useless. Ubisoft you useless bunch of *insert word of choice here*. I buy a game I expect to be able to use it whenever I want.

That's not the best bit yet, according to a article at Rock, Paper, Shogun, just swapping graphics cards will use up one of your three installs. So this DRM monitors hardware changes and apparently can't tell the difference between you upgrading hardware to the game actually being freshly installed. It's like they want people to hate them and not buy their games, I wasn't the greatest fan of their DRM on PC but I still buy their games if they are cheap on Steam. From now on I am completely avoiding them and I hope everyone else does too.

I'm sorry but what they fuck are they thinking. Surely they realise people upgrade their computer. They must realise that people are not going to buy their games if they can not choose where and when to play their own games. It amazes me how Ubisoft can actually be in business with this frankly retarded frame of mind. Hell I just reinstalled Red Alert 2 the other week for about the 20th time. If it just stopped working because I installed it too many times I would be extremely pissed. Anyway I'm going to stop ranting now as I'm going to start going round in circles now.

Long story short Ubisoft can fuck off and we should all boycott their PC games. They do make decent console games but when it comes to the PC side of things they haven't got a clue.

Immortal Scorpion DRM

Recently PC gamers have been pummelled with ridiculous amounts of DRM that hurt and piss off paying customers, while pirates get away with hassle free with no restrictive bloatware (I'm looking at you Ubisoft) . The guys at Croteam have come up with quite the ingenious DRM system to protect they're latest game Serious Sam from pirates. Anyone that gets them self a pirated copy of the game will be harassed throughout the game by an immortal scorpion which will follow you on your journey through the hordes of enemies in this game. I fully support stuff like this, if you want to deter pirates from pirating do things like this that will make them more likely to buy the game so they don't die every two minutes, instead they'll die every 5 minutes, (this game is ridiculously hard). This is how DRM should work, none of this you have to be online every single second or we will stop you playing shite (again looking at you Ubisoft). Below is some footage of the annoying scorpion bastard.

Gabe Newell on video game economics.

The mighty Gaben has sat down recently and spoke about 'how Valve experiments with the economics of video games'. There is a full article about it on geekwire here it is quite an interesting read. He talks about about piracy stating;

"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market."

At the end of the day piracy isn't going anywhere and excessive DRM doesn't really stop it, if pirates want to crack a game they will getting round the likes of Ubisofts always online DRM for example, leaving pirates with a nice offline version of whatever game they happened to cracked, while genuine punters that may happen to have an unreliable internet connection can't play the game they paid for, which is generally why people dislike Ubisofts DRM. Anyway I don't want to get in to a full blown rant about that so I'll stop before I do. I must admit because of Valve and Steam I have bought a hell of a lot more games than I normally would have purely due to constant deals on games, games that I may or may not would have pirated if it wasn't for that, I mean I don't pirate games that's illegal. Shhh... Nothing to see here, move along people.

Anyway go read the article linked above.

Ubisofts DRM so successful it's getting removed

Everyone knows about Ubisofts constant online DRM and the majority hate it with a passion. They recently called it a success, as it apparently reduced piracy figures. Or it could be do to the amount of people boycotting the company due to this system whose to say. Anyway with the recent release of a wee little game called 'From Dust' which was apparently not going to have this 'successful' DRM implimented, but ended up having it anyway, thus pissing even more people off. They have now decided this was a bad idea and are now removing it according to a post on their forum. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come and they will start using DRM people have accepted with the likes of Steamworks or GFWL (I know alot of people hate it but I want more gamer points dammit).

Rage introduce a new DRM for used copies

I say DRM, it's not quite drm but anyway id seem to be implimenting a system where if you buy the game used you will miss out on part of the game, albeit side quests of the game so you won't miss out on the actual storyline. I'm not entirely sure how exactly this is going to be enforced maybe through the disc key being used on multiple systems. While it is obviously going to annoy alot of the used gamer community, you have to admit it is a clever rouse on ids part to incentivise you to buy the game new. I for one don't really care one way or another about it as I tend to buy games new anyway albeit (as yes I use that word quite alot) at discounted prices a couple months or so later.