Ubisoft devising new tools to combat piracy on PC

by Ludwig Kietzmann on Jul 30th 2009 12:30AM

According to statements made by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot in a recent investor call (via Shacknews), the publisher is looking to implement new anti-piracy tools within its PC releases. Though the platform isn't the only one beset by shady software shenanigans -- Guillemot highlighted the existence of piracy on every console, including DS, PS3 and Xbox 360 -- it is drawing the most internal ire.

"All together, on home consoles, the piracy is low," he said. "But on the PC, the piracy increases quite a lot, and we are working on tools that will allow us to actually decrease tremendously the piracy on PC, starting next year in fact and probably one game at the end of this year." Will they also mark a tremendous decrease in consumer friendliness? We'll have to wait for that one game at the end of this year, and with Splinter Cell: Conviction out of the picture, Ubisoft's new measures will most likely debut in November with Assassin's Creed 2.

Remember what that game's creative director, Patrice Désilets, told us about the 35 million people who played Assassin's Creed 1? "Not all the people bought it. They played it on PC."

Source

Tags: assassins-creed-2, piracy, ubisoft, yves-guillemot

Reader Comments (74)

A better title for the article would've been:

"Ubisoft devising new tools to keep water dry"

Here we go again... *glares at Spore disc*

My thoughts exactly...

Valve ftw. I will most def get AC2 on steam because it will come with AC1 as a preorder bonus.

I played Assasin's Creed on PC.... and I bought it. I kind of wish I hadn't, though. As well as feeling like a clumsy port, that thing was buggy as hell and would crash consistently at one point in the game. I tried and tried, waited a while for a patch, but eventually just binned the files as it basically amounted to nothing more than wasted HD space at that point.

I have a great way to help reduce piracy.

Make your game worth buying. When a pirate site gives me better service than a lot of these so-called DRM methods do you know something is fucked up in the world.

Also give us on the PC some way to legitimately rent games, please. I'm not going to cough up $60 on a game that is going to last me the weekend (*cough* assassins creed *cough) but I will pony up the $6-$9 to rent it for a week. There are plenty of ways to do this (steam already limits playing time on certain games through free to play game weekends) and it would only help sales. As it stands I'm not going to pay a ton of money on a game that is going to last 10 hours and have no replayability or online functions worth doing. Unless that game is extremely good.

I've been silently preaching a two-step method for grossly decreasing PC piracy as well as increasing performance of games on the same hardware:

1) Don't install or leave any files on the harddrive.
2) Don't make it require a specific OS, but just hardware. Have it so when you insert the game into your disc drive, you reboot into the game as it's own trimmed-down OS. This is more like how consoles work which is why an apples-to-apples comparison of console hardware to PCs usually result in the same game requiring much higher specs on PC than console (just go and see how Halo runs on a 733 MHz Celeron with 64 MB of RAM shared between CPU and GPU).

So your solution to piracy is to make MS-DOS games again.... Piracy was high even during those times. Just ask MC Double Def... Don't Copy that Floppy.

How exactly does that increase piracy???

Decrease*

@Sheppy That is very far from how MS-DOS worked. DOS had a very similar interface as any other command-line interface. When you ran a program in DOS, DOS was still running. This structure negates the need for a full-fledged OS.

@Sprinkles Most PC piracy is achieved due to the nature of installing. Most (if not all) files are installed to the harddrive, then a hack is done to the primary executable to make it think that the game DVD has been inserted into the drive. This was countered by having the game always check with an active server and only allowing a fixed number of installs. Since this negates the need for installs and the executable loads from a read-only medium, this could help decrease piracy.

Alright, fine then. Allow me to shoot the shit out of your idea.

So all PC games should come with ALL the drivers for ALL the hardware out there. This eliminates the ability to patch software, naturally. So then you can only play games on the PC made before the game released since the game would stare at nest years video cards pointing slacked jawed asking, "Yo, what the fuck is that?!? Is it a motorcycle or an ostrich, or perhaps a naughty part?"

I say this because you seem to think consoles have NO operating system. In the days of NES, even this was not the case. The OS on the game console says how things are handled and where they should go, etc. Xbox, PS3 PC, PSP, PS2,DS, and Wii all have operating systems.

The reason PC games tend to need "MAOR" power is because yes, the operating system but also the higher resolution and framerates they run. PC to Console gaming is often night and day.

Umm... that's why I said the game could run it's OS, likely even a standardized one that many developers could take advantage of and build their games on. Alternatively, it could be an installed OS very much like those on consoles (which I was very aware of thank you) and games ran on top of it, but still without the installing portion (this would also enable updates for games).

A large portion of the operating system overhead factor is the OS that most PC games are developed for, Windows, has a far larger overhead than other complete operating systems (used to dual-boot XP and Ubuntu, and the same game would almost always run much better using Wine than it did natively on Windows). The dedicated-game-OS idea would go a long way into getting rid of that overhead.

microsoft should make a windows 'game' os for this that way, all of the current games would work and nobody would need to rewrite drivers. (can you imagine all of the obscure sound and lan cards that wouldn't work)

A more economical choice would be a custom Linux distribution. You could just take Ubuntu or Fedora and strip out the desktop environment and much of the meat not needed for games (a vastly easier task due to Linux modularity than with Windows), making what seems like core services optional (networking, for instance, would not be needed for most games), and offer it as a free PC game development kit.

I saw this coming. After all, last holiday season, Ubisoft experimented with going DRMfree on most of their holiday releases. Hoping to gather some good will. And by all accounts, they had their most soccessful game saturation ever... just too bad nobody deigned to pay for the games.

You want to know why this is happening? Because when they trusted PC gamers, legitimately trusted us, we gave them record piracy numbers. I'm tired of blaming PC companies for the piracy rates. It's about time everyone on a torrent site take some fucking ownership for this problem THEY created. Not EA, Not SecuRom, Not Ubisoft, etc. If people would quit STEALING the fucking games, companies would back off DRM. But that's not going to happen. We live in a culture of entitlement. Gone are the days where, if a company didn't treat you with respect, you just didn't do business with the company. Nowadays if a company even exists, most feel it's their right to loot the bastards into oblivion.

Considering you can't play H.A.W.X. or EndWar online without a legitimate key, I'm not seeing your point.

Joystiq forgot to mention that this "new DRM" will be cracked, likely before the title is even made available in stores, and will do nothing but cause hell for consumers while pirates will roam free.

The problem with anti-piracy techniques is that they're always cracked - the only people who actually are affected by them are honest paying customers. Basically, it needs to be easier, quicker, and less annoying then "Extract Crack Here".

I think the solution is two fold - first, quit making crappy, buggy ports of console titles. No one wants to pay $50 for a game that probably won't run correctly until a patch is released 6 months later. Second, tie it into online services that provide people an incentive to register / activate their product. Online activation is not a compelling reason but, for example, Xbox Achievements is.

I have nothing wrong with DRM and I think that a gaming company has the right to implement software that protects their revenue stream. What I do have a problem with is the fact that many software companies have forgot how to please their life blood (the customer). I think that a lot of piracy stems from years of overpriced junk games that are filled to the brim with bugs and are not patched for months after release. The fact that expansion packs and micro transactions are becoming the norm is adding to the problem. Don't get me wrong, a company has EVERY RIGHT to have DRM (as long as it doesn't do damage to the game system) but the customer will not stop stealing games until gaming companies understand that a game should not be a commodity but a carefully thought out customer pleasing product.

First on my priorities will be to get a gaming PC, then Steam, then worry about what everyone says about this crap.

Since DRM just gets cracked all the time anyway, publishers need to realize that piracy on the PC is going to happen and is a cost of doing business, just like used game sales and license fees to Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo are for consoles. Used game sales take millions if not billions of dollars from publishers every year yet you never see keycode nonsense and install limits for them. Imagine if you bought the latest AAA game on PS3/X360 and could not trade it with your friend or take it to your friend's house to play it and you certainly couldn't sell it due to install limits. PC gamers are expected to pay almost as much as console gamers and live with all these restrictions as well.

I just had a hell of a time installing my legitimately purchased copy of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It took TWO separate downloaded cracks to get it to work.
Why?
Because the Starforce DRM included with the game wasn't compatible with Vista 64-bit!
This is what happens when VG companies treat their real customers like crooks. I hope Ubisoft realizes this in time. But they won't.

Invariably I buy the legit copy and then leave it in its shrinkwrap on my game shelf while I play a pirated version. Good example would be Bioshock. Only way to get around retarded DRM really. At least you can count on the fact that the DRM will likely be cracked pretty much sooner than you can actually get your legit ball-and-chained version to work.

Most likely some beancounter is sitting somewhere gnawing his fingernails off as he counts my bittorrent download as another lost sale. Idiots.

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Ubisoft devising new tools to combat piracy on PC

Reader Comments (74)

Posted: Jul 30th 2009 3:20AM War Machine said

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