8 ms·

The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

121 points by jeff18 17y ago

snitko 17y ago
Honestly, I believe people shouldn't be pirating videogames at all. And most gamers actually don't. So nobody's going to hate them. On the other hand, I think no one's planning to do the same thing for MS Office in the nearest future, that would be insane.
- nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  I had to use a pirated copy of SF4 to be able to legitimately play online using the key that came with the copy I purchased due to an install error.
- tdoggette 17y ago
  No, the hate will come from 2 directions: One is the pirate crowd that are mostly angry that they can't get the game for free. The other is the people that bought the game and now the damn thing doesn't work because the servers are down or there's a connection issue or they're trying to play the game they paid for on their laptop somewhere where there's no internet.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    Don't forget my direction - a guy who always buys his games, but has been deeply disillusioned by the way games have been "consolified" of late, hence has spent less and less on games, and has built up a level of resentment of publishers who think that reduced game sales is owing to piracy, rather than crappy ports.
    - rick888 17y ago
      "Don't forget my direction - a guy who always buys his games, but has been deeply disillusioned by the way games have been "consolified" of late, hence has spent less and less on games, and has built up a level of resentment of publishers who think that reduced game sales is owing to piracy, rather than crappy ports." Maybe if there was less piracy, we could make a logical conclusion that it was a "crappy port".
    - wmf 17y ago
      Just give in a buy a console; that's what I did. If the developers are going to develop console-style games, there's no point in playing them on the PC. And since the PS3 hasn't been cracked, there's no ridiculous DRM.
      - barrkel 17y ago
        I don't have a TV to attach a console to, and I really couldn't be bothered with having to manage with multiple physical tokens for each game - I don't pirate, but I do use nodvd cracks and the like. And the games I enjoy, primarily first person shooters, work best with keyboard and mouse.
- henrikschroder 17y ago
  Do you have anything to back up that statement? The article says that 90% of all copies of popular games are pirated, but he also doesn't back it up. However, it's important to always remember that a pirated copy doesn't equal a lost sale. Many people download a game, but never install it or play it. Others download and play it, but if they couldn't have downloaded it, they would never have played it. And finally, there's a percentage of downloaders that would have bought it if they hadn't gotten a pirated version first. It will be interesting if this experiment by Ubisoft can determine how large that percentage is. It's definitely not 100%, and it's definitely not 0%. I would guess that it's a single-digit percentage of the people that would normally pirate a game that could go and buy it instead. However, this new DRM is so vile, that they will also lose sales on it, and I wonder if the sales they gain from delaying the pirating of it is larger than the sales they lose from having a horrible DRM.
  - teamonkey 17y ago
    The 90% figure is based on the scant amount of information released by a few indie studios. http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy-rate/ http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy...
  - firebird84 17y ago
    There's also a (likely small) percentage of people who pirate games they have already bought in order to "simply play it." I can't tell you how many NoCD hacks I've used, which while different from outright piracy, is very similar in concept and likely prone to inflating piracy figures. Lastly, there is also the (likely small) category of those who pirate and later buy the game once the price comes down. Many games drop to $5-$10 on Steam after a year or two, which is rather enticing even to a pirate.
- jasonkester 17y ago
  RE: MS Office... Office, and plenty of other desktop software will nag you relentlessly until you "Activate your copy online". This is especially annoying for people like me, who spend months at a time off in the sticks where there may be occasional generator power but there certainly is no internet. Just a few weeks ago, I "activated" my copy of CodeSmith with 5 days to spare (out of 30). If I had had to make a special trip to a city just to do it (which from the pacific coast of Colombia would have required a flight), I would have been pretty upset with that company.
- sgift 17y ago
  I think you miss a point in your thoughts: People will hate it because they've payed for the game. First they invest money and then they find out that due to an draconian protection scheme they are unable to play the game at their discretion. And after that happens - and now they will hate Ubisoft - a significant portion of them will probably find out that there is a pirated version out there which does not have this problems. A version which can simply be played. And then Ubisoft has lost many customers. Maybe forever. One would think the software industry / computer games industry has learned something from the fates of the music and film industries. When their sales declined they put DRM into their products. When that didn't help they made the DRM systems more draconian. And, unsurprisingly, the customers hated it and their sales declined faster. But the software industry / computer games industry seems to be unable to understand this lesson.
  - billybob 17y ago
    Agreed. DRM in music becomes annoying eventually - when you want to copy your files or use them in a different player. But DRM that makes your game suck whenever your internet connection is flakey - that's going to make paying customers very angry, very quickly. It's a terrible idea.
- Tichy 17y ago
  The reason they will be hated is aptly summarized in this (though that's for DVDs, but same principle): http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg
fbu 17y ago
Does anybody have any idea how long it took for pirate WOW servers to be running ? IMO, most game will go towards becoming MMOG or be played online anyway, people will just get craftier at having pirate servers running.
- noarchy 17y ago
  People were running private WoW servers as early as beta, but it really took off after the game went live.
martinp 17y ago
Somewhat informative article, but I disagree with the conclusion. Assassins Creed 2 isn't going to be the best game ever, it's not even an original game, just another sequel. So it's not like people are going to buy it no matter what kind of crazy DRM they must suffer through. I imagine that Ubisoft will loose a lot customers because of this decision.
- bozmac 17y ago
  I've been playing it on my 360 and if you could forgive some of the seemingly simple things that Ezio can't do, it's a pretty good game. I like the fact that money isn't hard to come by if you focus on upgrading the villa early.
- alextgordon 17y ago
  This is a test on Ubisoft's part. They're testing how the crackers, pirates and market react. I'm sure if they make significantly less money than expected they'll scrap the idea. On the other hand if they make more money, they'll roll it out to future releases. My guess is that they'll make less money. Even if a some people buy the game instead of pirating it, the abysmal reviews on Amazon will have a stronger effect.
  - Avshalom 17y ago
    > I'm sure if they make significantly less money than expected they'll scrap the idea. OR they'll still blame piracy and try to make it even harder. until it's nothing more than a streaming webcam pointed at a TV playing it on an xbox.
    - nitrogen 17y ago
      Those days are probably just around the corner. At least one company is trying to make 1080p streamed games playable. They could install beefy compute servers with 8 video cards per machine in ISP local offices to deal with latency issues.
- ErrantX 17y ago
tumult 17y ago
1. Make your own, free saved game server and alter the application code to use it. This means a lot of work and expense, both to duplicate Ubisoft's game saving code and to set up and maintain the servers. Won't happen. I'm not even a very good game hacker, and I've done much more dramatic things. It's really not a huge deal. People have reverse-engineered entire online game protocols in order to have their own unofficial servers before the games were even out of beta. The client<->server model of protection is actually a good thing to cracking and the people who use cracks, since the original binary doesn't need to be modified in any way. You just run a little thing in your system tray that emulates whatever portion of the server protocol it needs to. And now you can also get the official updates from Ubisoft, re-activate with your own fake server any time, etc. It's not a "disable one line of code" type deal, but if you think that's even a simplification of how things have been for a while, that's pretty naive.
- niyazpk 17y ago
  3. Hack the game to not need to save games on a remote server. This means a hacker has to figure out the saved game format, somehow jam into the application new code to write the saved data and new code to read it, TEST IT, and get it to work. In most of the cases, there is no need to figure out the game format. Just read the binary data sent to the server and save it. Usually save game files are not that large and I suspect that most games read them at once to the memory. Again you don't have to write a lot of code to do all these stuff. Just redirect whatever is sent to the Ubisoft server to a local server host in the same machine. This way the user can carry the save file anywhere. This is an added advantage for pirates while legitimate users should rely upon Ubisoft to save their game files for them. Heck, they can even play when the Ubisoft server is down, or even if there is no internet connection.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    They could (probably have) limit that approach too by signing the data (as already suggested) or encrypting it with different keys for sending / receiving.
    - 17y ago
jeff18 17y ago
I believe that the article is overestimating how hard it will be to reverse engineer the save game code and is fallaciously assuming that crackers will need to maintain a public facing internet server for people to use. a) You don't need to maintain a public facing save game server -- you simply need to have a local server running at localhost:31337. A successful crack will have this running transparently as you run the game. b) Many companies entire purpose is to provide "uncrackable" DRM. AFAIK, all of these companies' solutions have failed. Often before the games even publicly ship. I mean, at the very least, a script kiddie will naively crack the protocol and manually generate save files from each of the levels, so that you can play the game one area at a time. I am confident that it will be properly cracked though. Or as someone else on HN mentioned: you could ship the crack with a light virtual machine and just save states of the entire VM. There is a huge incentive to crack the game, both monetarily for pirates who will be reselling the game, as well as for the huge prestige for cracking groups. I am not aware of any high-profile game that has not been cracked within a week of release, if not days.
JeffL 17y ago
Or you could just disable the save game feature and then run it inside a virtual windows machine where you just save the state of the machine. =)
- pvg 17y ago
  It's a 'checkpoint' system. Save game or not, the game is constantly checking with Ubisoft's servers - if it can't talk to them it just boots you out. The save thing is a bit of a red herring.
  - pyre 17y ago
    How does that work though? Can't the points where that check is called just be hex-edited to NOOP in the binary? The point of the article was that taking non-trivial portions of the game logic out of the game and pushing them to the server makes it harder to crack the system. Unless the game is constantly getting information from Ubisoft's servers that it needs to function (i.e. save-game logic, AI logic, etc), then the "verify with the server" code can just be ignored in a hacked binary.
- habs 17y ago
  I'm not sure if a virtual machine (VM ware player) allows you to have direct access to your graphics hardware. I think VMware workstation allows you to use the hosts video card. But is only supports acceleration for OpenGL. Besides, this makes justifying PC gaming and the PC as a games platform even more difficult. Especially considering that the xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have already had this game for a while and don't have this DRM system. Shame, seems like a good game.
jasonkester 17y ago
You missed Option 4, which is what will actually happen: 4. Make it easy to set up your own local game server and alter the hosts file on your machine to point to it. That is dead easy to do. I actually did it for the game FantasticContraption, not to steal it (it's well worth ten bucks. go try it: http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/ http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/), but because their server is so hopelessly overloaded at peak times that the game is unplayable. Sniff network traffic with Fiddler or similar, construct a simple webapp to mimic what's needed (which for this game would only involve storing what you're given and handing it back when asked for it), and run it on localhost. Sorted. It'll end up the same as every other copy-protection scheme: An annoyance for paying customers, no sweat for pirates. I suspect legitimate paying customers will be running their own servers too.
- jvdh 17y ago
  While I agree that this is probably what will happen, it is probably not going be as easy as you make it seem. There is a very good chance that in this case the entire conversation with the server will be encrypted. In order to emulate this, the encryption will have to be broken. That's hard enough as it is, and you also don't really know what the plaintext is.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Many of the major game protocols are not only encrypted, but are extremely complex and irregular. They're absolutely no fun to reverse.
    - pyre 17y ago
      Though it's sad that the 'extremely complex and irregular' part is probably not by design, but due to haphazardly adding features just to push out a product.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        In a couple cases, I know that to be the truth. You're basically looking at the results of getting PC LAN developers to implement Internet protocols, and getting Win32 systems programmers to implement encryption.
pvg 17y ago
The premise is inaccurate - the game allows you to save games locally. You still have to be online but local storage of the save games is a selectable option.
mambodog 17y ago
Jeez guys, have none of you ever played a ROM on an emulator? You know how they save and resume? By taking a snapshot of the RAM and restoring it later on. Sure, its not great to have to take a snapshot of the 2gb+ of memory being used at runtime by a modern AAA game, but it wouldn't be hard to work out what is just content (textures, geometry, sound), and what are the variables (player location, progress, etc) and just save/load that. And that's only if its too much work to emulate the back-and-forth with the DRM server. And even that is only if its too hard to patch those functions out. All these people talking about 'significant portions of the game running on the server'... are you serious? Do you realise how fast game engines run? People have enough trouble putting up with the lag on multiplayer games with relatively few actors/entities, running on dedicated servers. If this were truly the case, single player games would also be susceptible to lag, not to mention the amount of load of millions of players' AI routines running on Ubisoft's servers. Damn. No, this will be cracked, patched or emulated, and the only people negatively effected will be legitimate customers. I'd say that would be the exact opposite of the system 'working'.
- danparsonson 17y ago
  > it wouldn't be hard to work out what is just content (textures, geometry, sound), and what are the variables (player location, progress, etc) and just save/load that As the saying goes - I'd love to see you try it! In order to capture the state of a running application in such a way that it can later be restored, you need, not only the memory contents, but also the processor state. Imagine that the app is in the middle of modifying an in-memory data structure: the variables used while doing that (e.g. loop counters) will likely be stored on the stack and/or in processor registers. Just as an example! Even assuming you could accurately pause an application and capture its state completely, how do you propose restarting it? You'd need to reinitialise all the external stuff (graphics device, sound, file handles, etc.), then start the application code at exactly the right instruction. Maybe installing some sort of hypervisor underneath the OS would allow these things? Good luck :-) Emulators can do all this with impunity because they're virtual machines - a computer running within a computer. The emulator always has complete control over the memory and (virtual) processor state, display, sound devices, etc., and saving/loading that state is therefore much easier.
lhorie 17y ago
1. Make your own, free saved game server and alter the application code to use it. This means a lot of work and expense, both to duplicate Ubisoft's game saving code and to set up and maintain the servers. Won't happen. Ragnarok Online private servers anyone?
DarkShikari 17y ago
"Probably work"? It was already cracked two weeks before release! From a few days ago on Buzz: Just saw a post on the Steam Forum for Assassin's Creed 2 that the impossible to beat, always online, can't save your game or even play the stupid thing without being connected to the internet DRM for it has already been cracked 2 weeks before its release. sigh Did Ubisoft really expect this to work any better than previous attempts to crack down on piracy? Now what they're left with is a piece of software which is being pirated just as much as any other game, except that it treats its legitimate buyers like they're suddenly going to turn into pirates after they've already bought the game.
- tptacek 17y ago
  That's a good point, and it does refute the post, but there are content protection schemes in major titles that haven't been broken; I imagine you pay more attention to games than I do, and I can't name anything I'm thinking of. (I'm not sure I can name a title that is unplayable cracked because of content protection; I'd broaden my definition to other security objectives besides piracy).
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    other security objectives besides piracy How about identifying someone who plays a cracked game, not immediately but a week or so later? There's all sorts of stuff you could do with that to discourage piracy. It would also be more easily hidden in code. Not sure if any of these strategies are really new, or if they've ever really worked.
- teamonkey 17y ago
  A lot of things are said on the Steam forum.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- vaksel 17y ago
  precisely, the only people stuff like this hurts are the legit users who pay the money. The hackers will rewrite the whole game if they have to, to make it free. It might take a little longer for them to release it...but can you honestly name a single game that hasn't been cracked?
teamonkey 17y ago
In Assassin's 2 save games aren't exclusively online. They're synced to Ubisoft's servers but they're not exclusively online. You can even opt out of syncing them so that they're always local to your PC. The net connection is still required though. However Jeff vogel's conclusion is still valid: "But they are engaged in a grand experiment. They are seeing if an adequately pirate-proof game can make money. Will keeping cracked copies off the Torrents for a month make extra sales? And enough extra sales to make writing PC games worthwhile?"
cabalamat 17y ago
The solution to onerous DRM is: just don't buy any product using it. No-one needs to buy Assassin's Creed II; there are plenty of other computer games out there.
- tptacek 17y ago
  That's a valid point but it dodges the thrust of the post, which is that piracy is pushing the industry in this direction --- this is a mainstream title from a mainstream vendor that is making a clear and visible usability concession to protect the new release window from pirates. Most users probably won't care (remember that we're a disproportionately vocal minority --- or, you are; my job is to make these titles worse for you, and I don't ever play video games), and vendors are going to get users to adapt to concessions like this.
  - marciovm123 17y ago
    Agreed - I don't care at all and would buy this game if it was my style. Am I going to give up on having an internet connection at my place, ever? No. So how would this negatively affect me? A little bit of downtime? We all need bathroom breaks. I understand the resentment at these anti-hacking measures given that this is a hacker community but not all companies choose to make their products in the open-source tradition, and that's a perfectly valid choice for them to make.
    - steveklabnik 17y ago
      You'd put up with the game crashing and losing your save data when your internet gets a little bit wonky? I have fiber to my house within the city, and my connection still gets flaky at times. And you're right, it is a valid choice. Doesn't mean their choice won't be criticized. This also has nothing to do with open source, and everything to do with treating your paying users like criminals. This pic from the other day is perfect: http://t1.xavimg.com/2010/02/piratelegal.jpg http://t1.xavimg.com/2010/02/piratelegal.jpg
      - 17y ago
NathanKP 17y ago
From the comments on the article: "Also, you don't hold onto your saved games anymore. They do." I'm surprised at how many people are making this mistake. Straight from the FAQ: "Will all my saved games be stored online? Yes! They will be stored both online and on your PC." -- http://support.uk.ubi.com/online-services-platform/ http://support.uk.ubi.com/online-services-platform/ That, right there, is why the system will fail. The DRM will be cracked within a week of release.
jsz0 17y ago
Everyone hates DRM but I feel like we're not giving the pirates enough blame here. My unscientific conclusion judging from BT sites is PC game piracy is really off the charts these days. A new PC game release often blows away popular TV shows and movies in seeders/leechers. I have some sympathy for the game makers here. If you're already facing declining PC sales and you're releasing a console port months after the initial console release the piracy factor could make a huge difference. I feel like anyone who doesn't like this DRM scheme needs to talk to their friends/family who pirate PC games and explain to them how much they're screwing up the industry for everyone. DRM isn't effective and just ends up punishing honest customers but those honest customers may have to face the reality that they just won't be getting nearly as many PC games in the future if this trend of massive piracy continues. DRM and PC pirates are the enemies here.
samd 17y ago
Here's a solution no one seems to consider: make video games cheaper. $50-$60 is an outrageously high price for a game, especially when most of them are of forgettable quality. The people over at Valve/Steam have been saying the same thing, and they would know, they see the sales numbers; cutting prices for their weekend deals greatly increase sales. If companies brought game prices down to a reasonable level, say $20-$30, I bet a significant amount of piraters would start buying games. The music industry is struggling to learn the same lesson, but iTunes and streaming services have shown that making content accessible and cheap means people stop pirating.
- gommm 17y ago
  Maybe, but on the other hand, on the app store where games are really inexpensive there is still a lot of piracy and a lot of developers can't make end meet because their price is too low... So, I'm not convinced that making video games cheaper is the answer...
  - samd 17y ago
    Well obviously pricing them too low won't make you any money. There is a big difference between 25 dollars and 99 cents.
    - rick888 17y ago
      "Well obviously pricing them too low won't make you any money. There is a big difference between 25 dollars and 99 cents." But what he said disproves your point. Even if something is 99 cents, it will still be cracked. What makes you think they will pay $30? The community is filled with excuse after excuse to justify piracy. Many people have even said that the industry needs to find a "new business model". I think this article shows that they already have: Software as a service. Piracy will eventually drive all software in this direction.
    - benologist 17y ago
      Somehow I think if they dropped it to $25 the same people will argue that $25 is too much and $10 is the most anyone should be reasonably expected to pay. People still argue that $1 is too much for music, like somehow in teh internets that dollar is worth 100x more than the real world where it gets you close to nothing.
lutorm 17y ago
X3 Terran Conflict had an annoying, disruptive DRM that only allowed you to install the game 5 times and would count any significant change in hardware config as a new machine. When I got more memory and had to return them, plus reinstalled my OS, I used up 4/5 in the first two weeks. Normally, I wouldn't touch this with a five-foot pole, given that it puts me at the mercy of them having their servers up to give me a new license just to play my own game. But they did something really reasonable: After 9 months or so, they released a patch to remove the DRM. That seems like a reasonable compromise to me.
lmkg 17y ago
The author seems to assume that being hard to crack will be a discouragement. The people cracking games are hackers. For a significant chunk of them, the game being difficult gives the draw of being an interesting challenge, as well as a way of getting street cred in the cracking community.
TheTarquin 17y ago
You want an anti-pirate system that will work? That's easy, we've had a working system for centuries! You hang 'em from the yardarm as a warning to others, and then you burn their ships to the water line. Pardon? Oh, you mean the OTHER kind of piracy.
- TheTarquin 17y ago
  So, out of curiosity, down-voted because it wasn't funny, or because jokes aren't encouraged?
  - wmf 17y ago
    Probably a little of both.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Hanging by the yardarm also had loopholes. (Ann Bonny and Mary Read both realized this.)
sdfghbvc 17y ago
I wonder if they turn off, or downgrade to the point of unusable, the servers the day that Assasin's Creed III is launched? They wouldn't do that would they?
- wmf 17y ago
  Some game companies have already turned off servers for their older games. It's not a question of whether this will happen but when, especially when the service is provided for free.
  - sdfghbvc 17y ago
    For free ? I paid $80 for a game and they turn it off when they have a more profitable replacement.
marilyn 17y ago
The people behind DRM don't seem to get what they are dealing with. The people who pirate/steal their products are not making a choice between buying the product or stealing it, they are choosing between stealing it or not having it at all. DRM, specially of this invasive variety punishes the valid customers who pay good money for the product, while trying to combat the folks whose money the company will never see.
Groxx 17y ago
This will "probably work" just like MMORPG's "probably don't get pirated". But have you seen how many 3rd-party hosts there are for many MMORPGs, some built by hand to mimic the original servers? Requiring a server connection does not stop piracy, it just annoys people.
rmorrison 17y ago
This would be one example where the DRY coding principle would backfire on them, at least for their purposes. If all of the Game Saving code funnels to one function, then the hackers may be able to relatively easily find and break just that function, and consequently the entire DRM.
invisible 17y ago
What would probably work best is just allowing 200 installs per key (any more requires calling and pleading). Also, every 5 minutes the game sends something to the server and uses SSL to ensure it's communicating with the right server. This seems like an overly simple problem that isn't being approached right.
keefe 17y ago
Nice article overall, however... "2. Trick the Ubisoft servers into believing you have a legit copy, so that they will let you save your game." I haven't got a clue what exactly their mechanism is, but I believe that this is a solved problem in cryptography which should be intractably hard to solve if implemented properly.

121 points by jeff18 17y ago

Honestly, I believe people shouldn't be pirating videogames at all. And most gamers actually don't. So nobody's going to hate them. On the other hand, I think no one's planning to do the same thing for MS Office in the nearest future, that would be insane.

nazgulnarsil 17y ago
I had to use a pirated copy of SF4 to be able to legitimately play online using the key that came with the copy I purchased due to an install error.
tdoggette 17y ago
No, the hate will come from 2 directions: One is the pirate crowd that are mostly angry that they can't get the game for free. The other is the people that bought the game and now the damn thing doesn't work because the servers are down or there's a connection issue or they're trying to play the game they paid for on their laptop somewhere where there's no internet.
- barrkel 17y ago
  Don't forget my direction - a guy who always buys his games, but has been deeply disillusioned by the way games have been "consolified" of late, hence has spent less and less on games, and has built up a level of resentment of publishers who think that reduced game sales is owing to piracy, rather than crappy ports.
  - rick888 17y ago
    "Don't forget my direction - a guy who always buys his games, but has been deeply disillusioned by the way games have been "consolified" of late, hence has spent less and less on games, and has built up a level of resentment of publishers who think that reduced game sales is owing to piracy, rather than crappy ports." Maybe if there was less piracy, we could make a logical conclusion that it was a "crappy port".
  - wmf 17y ago
    Just give in a buy a console; that's what I did. If the developers are going to develop console-style games, there's no point in playing them on the PC. And since the PS3 hasn't been cracked, there's no ridiculous DRM.
    - barrkel 17y ago
      I don't have a TV to attach a console to, and I really couldn't be bothered with having to manage with multiple physical tokens for each game - I don't pirate, but I do use nodvd cracks and the like. And the games I enjoy, primarily first person shooters, work best with keyboard and mouse.
henrikschroder 17y ago
Do you have anything to back up that statement? The article says that 90% of all copies of popular games are pirated, but he also doesn't back it up. However, it's important to always remember that a pirated copy doesn't equal a lost sale. Many people download a game, but never install it or play it. Others download and play it, but if they couldn't have downloaded it, they would never have played it. And finally, there's a percentage of downloaders that would have bought it if they hadn't gotten a pirated version first. It will be interesting if this experiment by Ubisoft can determine how large that percentage is. It's definitely not 100%, and it's definitely not 0%. I would guess that it's a single-digit percentage of the people that would normally pirate a game that could go and buy it instead. However, this new DRM is so vile, that they will also lose sales on it, and I wonder if the sales they gain from delaying the pirating of it is larger than the sales they lose from having a horrible DRM.
- teamonkey 17y ago
  The 90% figure is based on the scant amount of information released by a few indie studios. http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy-rate/ http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy...
- firebird84 17y ago
  There's also a (likely small) percentage of people who pirate games they have already bought in order to "simply play it." I can't tell you how many NoCD hacks I've used, which while different from outright piracy, is very similar in concept and likely prone to inflating piracy figures. Lastly, there is also the (likely small) category of those who pirate and later buy the game once the price comes down. Many games drop to $5-$10 on Steam after a year or two, which is rather enticing even to a pirate.
jasonkester 17y ago
RE: MS Office... Office, and plenty of other desktop software will nag you relentlessly until you "Activate your copy online". This is especially annoying for people like me, who spend months at a time off in the sticks where there may be occasional generator power but there certainly is no internet. Just a few weeks ago, I "activated" my copy of CodeSmith with 5 days to spare (out of 30). If I had had to make a special trip to a city just to do it (which from the pacific coast of Colombia would have required a flight), I would have been pretty upset with that company.
sgift 17y ago
I think you miss a point in your thoughts: People will hate it because they've payed for the game. First they invest money and then they find out that due to an draconian protection scheme they are unable to play the game at their discretion. And after that happens - and now they will hate Ubisoft - a significant portion of them will probably find out that there is a pirated version out there which does not have this problems. A version which can simply be played. And then Ubisoft has lost many customers. Maybe forever. One would think the software industry / computer games industry has learned something from the fates of the music and film industries. When their sales declined they put DRM into their products. When that didn't help they made the DRM systems more draconian. And, unsurprisingly, the customers hated it and their sales declined faster. But the software industry / computer games industry seems to be unable to understand this lesson.
- billybob 17y ago
  Agreed. DRM in music becomes annoying eventually - when you want to copy your files or use them in a different player. But DRM that makes your game suck whenever your internet connection is flakey - that's going to make paying customers very angry, very quickly. It's a terrible idea.
Tichy 17y ago
The reason they will be hated is aptly summarized in this (though that's for DVDs, but same principle): http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg

fbu 17y ago

Does anybody have any idea how long it took for pirate WOW servers to be running ? IMO, most game will go towards becoming MMOG or be played online anyway, people will just get craftier at having pirate servers running.

noarchy 17y ago
People were running private WoW servers as early as beta, but it really took off after the game went live.

martinp 17y ago

Somewhat informative article, but I disagree with the conclusion. Assassins Creed 2 isn't going to be the best game ever, it's not even an original game, just another sequel. So it's not like people are going to buy it no matter what kind of crazy DRM they must suffer through. I imagine that Ubisoft will loose a lot customers because of this decision.

bozmac 17y ago
I've been playing it on my 360 and if you could forgive some of the seemingly simple things that Ezio can't do, it's a pretty good game. I like the fact that money isn't hard to come by if you focus on upgrading the villa early.
alextgordon 17y ago
This is a test on Ubisoft's part. They're testing how the crackers, pirates and market react. I'm sure if they make significantly less money than expected they'll scrap the idea. On the other hand if they make more money, they'll roll it out to future releases. My guess is that they'll make less money. Even if a some people buy the game instead of pirating it, the abysmal reviews on Amazon will have a stronger effect.
- Avshalom 17y ago
  > I'm sure if they make significantly less money than expected they'll scrap the idea. OR they'll still blame piracy and try to make it even harder. until it's nothing more than a streaming webcam pointed at a TV playing it on an xbox.
  - nitrogen 17y ago
    Those days are probably just around the corner. At least one company is trying to make 1080p streamed games playable. They could install beefy compute servers with 8 video cards per machine in ISP local offices to deal with latency issues.
ErrantX 17y ago

tumult 17y ago

1. Make your own, free saved game server and alter the application code to use it. This means a lot of work and expense, both to duplicate Ubisoft's game saving code and to set up and maintain the servers. Won't happen. I'm not even a very good game hacker, and I've done much more dramatic things. It's really not a huge deal. People have reverse-engineered entire online game protocols in order to have their own unofficial servers before the games were even out of beta. The client<->server model of protection is actually a good thing to cracking and the people who use cracks, since the original binary doesn't need to be modified in any way. You just run a little thing in your system tray that emulates whatever portion of the server protocol it needs to. And now you can also get the official updates from Ubisoft, re-activate with your own fake server any time, etc. It's not a "disable one line of code" type deal, but if you think that's even a simplification of how things have been for a while, that's pretty naive.

niyazpk 17y ago
3. Hack the game to not need to save games on a remote server. This means a hacker has to figure out the saved game format, somehow jam into the application new code to write the saved data and new code to read it, TEST IT, and get it to work. In most of the cases, there is no need to figure out the game format. Just read the binary data sent to the server and save it. Usually save game files are not that large and I suspect that most games read them at once to the memory. Again you don't have to write a lot of code to do all these stuff. Just redirect whatever is sent to the Ubisoft server to a local server host in the same machine. This way the user can carry the save file anywhere. This is an added advantage for pirates while legitimate users should rely upon Ubisoft to save their game files for them. Heck, they can even play when the Ubisoft server is down, or even if there is no internet connection.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  They could (probably have) limit that approach too by signing the data (as already suggested) or encrypting it with different keys for sending / receiving.
  - 17y ago

jeff18 17y ago

I believe that the article is overestimating how hard it will be to reverse engineer the save game code and is fallaciously assuming that crackers will need to maintain a public facing internet server for people to use. a) You don't need to maintain a public facing save game server -- you simply need to have a local server running at localhost:31337. A successful crack will have this running transparently as you run the game. b) Many companies entire purpose is to provide "uncrackable" DRM. AFAIK, all of these companies' solutions have failed. Often before the games even publicly ship. I mean, at the very least, a script kiddie will naively crack the protocol and manually generate save files from each of the levels, so that you can play the game one area at a time. I am confident that it will be properly cracked though. Or as someone else on HN mentioned: you could ship the crack with a light virtual machine and just save states of the entire VM. There is a huge incentive to crack the game, both monetarily for pirates who will be reselling the game, as well as for the huge prestige for cracking groups. I am not aware of any high-profile game that has not been cracked within a week of release, if not days.

JeffL 17y ago

Or you could just disable the save game feature and then run it inside a virtual windows machine where you just save the state of the machine. =)

pvg 17y ago
It's a 'checkpoint' system. Save game or not, the game is constantly checking with Ubisoft's servers - if it can't talk to them it just boots you out. The save thing is a bit of a red herring.
- pyre 17y ago
  How does that work though? Can't the points where that check is called just be hex-edited to NOOP in the binary? The point of the article was that taking non-trivial portions of the game logic out of the game and pushing them to the server makes it harder to crack the system. Unless the game is constantly getting information from Ubisoft's servers that it needs to function (i.e. save-game logic, AI logic, etc), then the "verify with the server" code can just be ignored in a hacked binary.
habs 17y ago
I'm not sure if a virtual machine (VM ware player) allows you to have direct access to your graphics hardware. I think VMware workstation allows you to use the hosts video card. But is only supports acceleration for OpenGL. Besides, this makes justifying PC gaming and the PC as a games platform even more difficult. Especially considering that the xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have already had this game for a while and don't have this DRM system. Shame, seems like a good game.

jasonkester 17y ago

You missed Option 4, which is what will actually happen: 4. Make it easy to set up your own local game server and alter the hosts file on your machine to point to it. That is dead easy to do. I actually did it for the game FantasticContraption, not to steal it (it's well worth ten bucks. go try it: http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/ http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/), but because their server is so hopelessly overloaded at peak times that the game is unplayable. Sniff network traffic with Fiddler or similar, construct a simple webapp to mimic what's needed (which for this game would only involve storing what you're given and handing it back when asked for it), and run it on localhost. Sorted. It'll end up the same as every other copy-protection scheme: An annoyance for paying customers, no sweat for pirates. I suspect legitimate paying customers will be running their own servers too.

jvdh 17y ago
While I agree that this is probably what will happen, it is probably not going be as easy as you make it seem. There is a very good chance that in this case the entire conversation with the server will be encrypted. In order to emulate this, the encryption will have to be broken. That's hard enough as it is, and you also don't really know what the plaintext is.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Many of the major game protocols are not only encrypted, but are extremely complex and irregular. They're absolutely no fun to reverse.
  - pyre 17y ago
    Though it's sad that the 'extremely complex and irregular' part is probably not by design, but due to haphazardly adding features just to push out a product.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      In a couple cases, I know that to be the truth. You're basically looking at the results of getting PC LAN developers to implement Internet protocols, and getting Win32 systems programmers to implement encryption.

pvg 17y ago

The premise is inaccurate - the game allows you to save games locally. You still have to be online but local storage of the save games is a selectable option.

mambodog 17y ago

Jeez guys, have none of you ever played a ROM on an emulator? You know how they save and resume? By taking a snapshot of the RAM and restoring it later on. Sure, its not great to have to take a snapshot of the 2gb+ of memory being used at runtime by a modern AAA game, but it wouldn't be hard to work out what is just content (textures, geometry, sound), and what are the variables (player location, progress, etc) and just save/load that. And that's only if its too much work to emulate the back-and-forth with the DRM server. And even that is only if its too hard to patch those functions out. All these people talking about 'significant portions of the game running on the server'... are you serious? Do you realise how fast game engines run? People have enough trouble putting up with the lag on multiplayer games with relatively few actors/entities, running on dedicated servers. If this were truly the case, single player games would also be susceptible to lag, not to mention the amount of load of millions of players' AI routines running on Ubisoft's servers. Damn. No, this will be cracked, patched or emulated, and the only people negatively effected will be legitimate customers. I'd say that would be the exact opposite of the system 'working'.

danparsonson 17y ago
> it wouldn't be hard to work out what is just content (textures, geometry, sound), and what are the variables (player location, progress, etc) and just save/load that As the saying goes - I'd love to see you try it! In order to capture the state of a running application in such a way that it can later be restored, you need, not only the memory contents, but also the processor state. Imagine that the app is in the middle of modifying an in-memory data structure: the variables used while doing that (e.g. loop counters) will likely be stored on the stack and/or in processor registers. Just as an example! Even assuming you could accurately pause an application and capture its state completely, how do you propose restarting it? You'd need to reinitialise all the external stuff (graphics device, sound, file handles, etc.), then start the application code at exactly the right instruction. Maybe installing some sort of hypervisor underneath the OS would allow these things? Good luck :-) Emulators can do all this with impunity because they're virtual machines - a computer running within a computer. The emulator always has complete control over the memory and (virtual) processor state, display, sound devices, etc., and saving/loading that state is therefore much easier.

lhorie 17y ago

DarkShikari 17y ago

"Probably work"? It was already cracked two weeks before release! From a few days ago on Buzz: Just saw a post on the Steam Forum for Assassin's Creed 2 that the impossible to beat, always online, can't save your game or even play the stupid thing without being connected to the internet DRM for it has already been cracked 2 weeks before its release. sigh Did Ubisoft really expect this to work any better than previous attempts to crack down on piracy? Now what they're left with is a piece of software which is being pirated just as much as any other game, except that it treats its legitimate buyers like they're suddenly going to turn into pirates after they've already bought the game.

tptacek 17y ago
That's a good point, and it does refute the post, but there are content protection schemes in major titles that haven't been broken; I imagine you pay more attention to games than I do, and I can't name anything I'm thinking of. (I'm not sure I can name a title that is unplayable cracked because of content protection; I'd broaden my definition to other security objectives besides piracy).
- stcredzero 17y ago
  other security objectives besides piracy How about identifying someone who plays a cracked game, not immediately but a week or so later? There's all sorts of stuff you could do with that to discourage piracy. It would also be more easily hidden in code. Not sure if any of these strategies are really new, or if they've ever really worked.
teamonkey 17y ago
A lot of things are said on the Steam forum.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
vaksel 17y ago
precisely, the only people stuff like this hurts are the legit users who pay the money. The hackers will rewrite the whole game if they have to, to make it free. It might take a little longer for them to release it...but can you honestly name a single game that hasn't been cracked?

teamonkey 17y ago

In Assassin's 2 save games aren't exclusively online. They're synced to Ubisoft's servers but they're not exclusively online. You can even opt out of syncing them so that they're always local to your PC. The net connection is still required though. However Jeff vogel's conclusion is still valid: "But they are engaged in a grand experiment. They are seeing if an adequately pirate-proof game can make money. Will keeping cracked copies off the Torrents for a month make extra sales? And enough extra sales to make writing PC games worthwhile?"

cabalamat 17y ago

The solution to onerous DRM is: just don't buy any product using it. No-one needs to buy Assassin's Creed II; there are plenty of other computer games out there.

tptacek 17y ago
That's a valid point but it dodges the thrust of the post, which is that piracy is pushing the industry in this direction --- this is a mainstream title from a mainstream vendor that is making a clear and visible usability concession to protect the new release window from pirates. Most users probably won't care (remember that we're a disproportionately vocal minority --- or, you are; my job is to make these titles worse for you, and I don't ever play video games), and vendors are going to get users to adapt to concessions like this.
- marciovm123 17y ago
  Agreed - I don't care at all and would buy this game if it was my style. Am I going to give up on having an internet connection at my place, ever? No. So how would this negatively affect me? A little bit of downtime? We all need bathroom breaks. I understand the resentment at these anti-hacking measures given that this is a hacker community but not all companies choose to make their products in the open-source tradition, and that's a perfectly valid choice for them to make.
  - steveklabnik 17y ago
    You'd put up with the game crashing and losing your save data when your internet gets a little bit wonky? I have fiber to my house within the city, and my connection still gets flaky at times. And you're right, it is a valid choice. Doesn't mean their choice won't be criticized. This also has nothing to do with open source, and everything to do with treating your paying users like criminals. This pic from the other day is perfect: http://t1.xavimg.com/2010/02/piratelegal.jpg http://t1.xavimg.com/2010/02/piratelegal.jpg
    - 17y ago

NathanKP 17y ago

From the comments on the article: "Also, you don't hold onto your saved games anymore. They do." I'm surprised at how many people are making this mistake. Straight from the FAQ: "Will all my saved games be stored online? Yes! They will be stored both online and on your PC." -- http://support.uk.ubi.com/online-services-platform/ http://support.uk.ubi.com/online-services-platform/ That, right there, is why the system will fail. The DRM will be cracked within a week of release.

jsz0 17y ago

Everyone hates DRM but I feel like we're not giving the pirates enough blame here. My unscientific conclusion judging from BT sites is PC game piracy is really off the charts these days. A new PC game release often blows away popular TV shows and movies in seeders/leechers. I have some sympathy for the game makers here. If you're already facing declining PC sales and you're releasing a console port months after the initial console release the piracy factor could make a huge difference. I feel like anyone who doesn't like this DRM scheme needs to talk to their friends/family who pirate PC games and explain to them how much they're screwing up the industry for everyone. DRM isn't effective and just ends up punishing honest customers but those honest customers may have to face the reality that they just won't be getting nearly as many PC games in the future if this trend of massive piracy continues. DRM and PC pirates are the enemies here.

samd 17y ago

Here's a solution no one seems to consider: make video games cheaper. $50-$60 is an outrageously high price for a game, especially when most of them are of forgettable quality. The people over at Valve/Steam have been saying the same thing, and they would know, they see the sales numbers; cutting prices for their weekend deals greatly increase sales. If companies brought game prices down to a reasonable level, say $20-$30, I bet a significant amount of piraters would start buying games. The music industry is struggling to learn the same lesson, but iTunes and streaming services have shown that making content accessible and cheap means people stop pirating.

gommm 17y ago
Maybe, but on the other hand, on the app store where games are really inexpensive there is still a lot of piracy and a lot of developers can't make end meet because their price is too low... So, I'm not convinced that making video games cheaper is the answer...
- samd 17y ago
  Well obviously pricing them too low won't make you any money. There is a big difference between 25 dollars and 99 cents.
  - rick888 17y ago
    "Well obviously pricing them too low won't make you any money. There is a big difference between 25 dollars and 99 cents." But what he said disproves your point. Even if something is 99 cents, it will still be cracked. What makes you think they will pay $30? The community is filled with excuse after excuse to justify piracy. Many people have even said that the industry needs to find a "new business model". I think this article shows that they already have: Software as a service. Piracy will eventually drive all software in this direction.
  - benologist 17y ago
    Somehow I think if they dropped it to $25 the same people will argue that $25 is too much and $10 is the most anyone should be reasonably expected to pay. People still argue that $1 is too much for music, like somehow in teh internets that dollar is worth 100x more than the real world where it gets you close to nothing.

lutorm 17y ago

X3 Terran Conflict had an annoying, disruptive DRM that only allowed you to install the game 5 times and would count any significant change in hardware config as a new machine. When I got more memory and had to return them, plus reinstalled my OS, I used up 4/5 in the first two weeks. Normally, I wouldn't touch this with a five-foot pole, given that it puts me at the mercy of them having their servers up to give me a new license just to play my own game. But they did something really reasonable: After 9 months or so, they released a patch to remove the DRM. That seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

lmkg 17y ago

The author seems to assume that being hard to crack will be a discouragement. The people cracking games are hackers. For a significant chunk of them, the game being difficult gives the draw of being an interesting challenge, as well as a way of getting street cred in the cracking community.

TheTarquin 17y ago

You want an anti-pirate system that will work? That's easy, we've had a working system for centuries! You hang 'em from the yardarm as a warning to others, and then you burn their ships to the water line. Pardon? Oh, you mean the OTHER kind of piracy.

TheTarquin 17y ago
So, out of curiosity, down-voted because it wasn't funny, or because jokes aren't encouraged?
- wmf 17y ago
  Probably a little of both.
stcredzero 17y ago
Hanging by the yardarm also had loopholes. (Ann Bonny and Mary Read both realized this.)

sdfghbvc 17y ago

I wonder if they turn off, or downgrade to the point of unusable, the servers the day that Assasin's Creed III is launched? They wouldn't do that would they?

wmf 17y ago
Some game companies have already turned off servers for their older games. It's not a question of whether this will happen but when, especially when the service is provided for free.
- sdfghbvc 17y ago
  For free ? I paid $80 for a game and they turn it off when they have a more profitable replacement.

marilyn 17y ago

The people behind DRM don't seem to get what they are dealing with. The people who pirate/steal their products are not making a choice between buying the product or stealing it, they are choosing between stealing it or not having it at all. DRM, specially of this invasive variety punishes the valid customers who pay good money for the product, while trying to combat the folks whose money the company will never see.

Groxx 17y ago

This will "probably work" just like MMORPG's "probably don't get pirated". But have you seen how many 3rd-party hosts there are for many MMORPGs, some built by hand to mimic the original servers? Requiring a server connection does not stop piracy, it just annoys people.

rmorrison 17y ago

This would be one example where the DRY coding principle would backfire on them, at least for their purposes. If all of the Game Saving code funnels to one function, then the hackers may be able to relatively easily find and break just that function, and consequently the entire DRM.

invisible 17y ago

What would probably work best is just allowing 200 installs per key (any more requires calling and pleading). Also, every 5 minutes the game sends something to the server and uses SSL to ensure it's communicating with the right server. This seems like an overly simple problem that isn't being approached right.

keefe 17y ago

Nice article overall, however... "2. Trick the Ubisoft servers into believing you have a legit copy, so that they will let you save your game." I haven't got a clue what exactly their mechanism is, but I believe that this is a solved problem in cryptography which should be intractably hard to solve if implemented properly.