It's also spreading to xbox, just look at the amounts of people playing the leaked CoD:MW2 a few months ago, yeah they'l ban those that get caught but its not unheard of for people to have 1 legit and 1 'offline' console for just that reason.
Ubisoft's new piracy countermeasure....
- Thread starter apatia77
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It's also spreading to xbox, just look at the amounts of people playing the leaked CoD:MW2 a few months ago, yeah they'l ban those that get caught but its not unheard of for people to have 1 legit and 1 'offline' console for just that reason.
It's more about the second hand market than piracy in my opinion.
My own personal theory is that the developers/publishers are losing far more money from the second hand market than they are from piracy.
The great majority of 'pirates' wouldn't have bought the games they downloaded anyway, whether it's because they have no money, don't like the game, download it for the thrill or just want to have what everyone else has pre-release.
Taking this into consideration, it's logical to assume that the actual revenue lost from piracy is not nearly as high as you might think. One download rarely equals one lost sale. Even if the downloader has disposable income, it is often already allocated to other things which leave them with little to spend on the game. For many, this would certainly be influenced by the fact that the game may be 'easy' to get for free, where as the other things they spend their money on are not so easy to get hold of.
Contrast this with the second hand market where the majority of purchases do actually equate to a 'lost sale' and therefore lost revenue for the developers/publishers.
If you walk into Game and want to buy a brand new £35 game but also spot it in the pre-owned rack for £20, which one do you buy? Which one do you think most people will buy?
Second hand sales hurt developers/publishers far more than piracy, because they take the money that was certainly earmarked for new games and it gets spent on a second hand product which the developers/publishers see no revenue from. This is far worse than piracy and I'm quite sure that most companies in the gaming sphere are well aware of this. It's just a whole lot easier to restrict the freedom of consumers in the name of piracy than it is in the name of stopping the second hand market.
Of course there is plenty of room for discussion on this subject and I'm sure some will disagree with me, but that's my very basic reasoning for believing that moves like this recent one from Ubisoft is more about killing second hand sales than it is about killing piracy.
My own personal theory is that the developers/publishers are losing far more money from the second hand market than they are from piracy.
The great majority of 'pirates' wouldn't have bought the games they downloaded anyway, whether it's because they have no money, don't like the game, download it for the thrill or just want to have what everyone else has pre-release.
Taking this into consideration, it's logical to assume that the actual revenue lost from piracy is not nearly as high as you might think. One download rarely equals one lost sale. Even if the downloader has disposable income, it is often already allocated to other things which leave them with little to spend on the game. For many, this would certainly be influenced by the fact that the game may be 'easy' to get for free, where as the other things they spend their money on are not so easy to get hold of.
Contrast this with the second hand market where the majority of purchases do actually equate to a 'lost sale' and therefore lost revenue for the developers/publishers.
If you walk into Game and want to buy a brand new £35 game but also spot it in the pre-owned rack for £20, which one do you buy? Which one do you think most people will buy?
Second hand sales hurt developers/publishers far more than piracy, because they take the money that was certainly earmarked for new games and it gets spent on a second hand product which the developers/publishers see no revenue from. This is far worse than piracy and I'm quite sure that most companies in the gaming sphere are well aware of this. It's just a whole lot easier to restrict the freedom of consumers in the name of piracy than it is in the name of stopping the second hand market.
Of course there is plenty of room for discussion on this subject and I'm sure some will disagree with me, but that's my very basic reasoning for believing that moves like this recent one from Ubisoft is more about killing second hand sales than it is about killing piracy.
It means your IP changes, usually whenever your router resets itself.
steam is DRM and they can close your account at any time without a reason.
which would mean all your bought games are useless even if you have boxes for them and they kill the second hand game market which is what most devs are trying to do.
all valve games have been pirated steam doesnt stop pirates.
It's difficult to simplify second hand sales this much though, as you have factor in the overall money flow.
For there to be a second hand game, someone had to trade that game in and what will they do with their trade in money? Most likely buy another game.
to this day quite a few starforce 3 protected games remain uncracked and don't try and bring up the old , oh they were too bad to bother to crack excuse when we all know that barbies horse adventures 25 or whatever gets cracked instantly
i will be watching this new DRM scheme with interest and i hope it works, if it doesn't i truly hope tages gets widely adopted because with a few modifications i can hopefully see an end (i know that's highly unlikely) or at least a big delay to the cracks being available
Of course, it's difficult to judge the impact of the both of them.
The smart (or ruthless) publishers are starting to see the digital age as the perfect way (and piracy as the perfect excuse) to control their content completely and finally rid themselves of the thorn in their side that is the second hand market.
I think routers = laptops which don't play games anyway because they aint powerful enough, so i think your comment of 95% of the population is ******........
STEAM is the way forward .... impossible to pirate!
.... ALSO we need Gorden Brown to impose a law of chopping off a limb to proven pirates.
.... This country and it's human rights are **** .... chop the limbs off pirates .... personally I'd chop their fingers off one by one week by week .... how frustrating would that be? Love it.
Such as?
Only people with laptops use routers? What?
I bet far more desktop users have routers than have standalone modems. Plus you don't need a router to have a static IP, I just used that as an example of how they most often end up getting changed. Dynamic IPs still change without routers.Steam isn't impossible to pirate either.
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one of the piracy groups made a loader that could buypass the starforce protection on any game but they never released it to the public and they never released old games that were uncrackable when they were released.
they did however release a string of starforce3 games that proved they werent lieing.
i dont think there has ever been anti piracy measures that werent cracked at some point.
even a lot of popular mmos have private servers (like wow)
Ubisoft Online Services Platform F.A.Q.
So you can continue playing if your internet goes down. What a surprise this bit was misquoted.
So you can continue playing if your internet goes down. What a surprise this bit was misquoted.
private servers are pathetic and not even comparable to the paid service
sure reloaded released a whole load of information on starforce and cracked a few games but they certainly never produced a loader privately or publically to circumvent every starforce game. the info they provided just showed that hey we know how this works but it takes an awful lot of time to make these cracks and we cant be bothered making them for every game, now imagine if EVERY single game used a similar protection, as i mentioned earlier tages games riddick and avatar have no cracked executables only crude work arounds which i hope could be easily patched for future releases
as for DRM that can't/hasn't been cracked, don't look at the gaming software industry look at the professional music software industry, cubase 4/5 remain uncracked for 2+ years now
Starforce3 was a very strong disk based DRM. The reason it took them so long to crack Splinter Cell3 was that SF3 encrypts all game files not just the .exe so in SC3 case that was something like 266 files encrypted. It took well over a year to crack then Ubisoft removed SF3 later in a patch after they dropped Starforce altogether.
Right now Starforce is actually looking like a better PC solution (even if it did mess up a few optical drive's) as at least you could always access the game as long as the DVD was in the drive.......
DRM really only serves one purpose & that's to slow down the illegal copies so after say a few months gamers would have moved onto the next game.
Ubisoft can do whatever they want as they have nothing I want to buy on PC anymore (yes even Splinter Cell5 which is looking very ropey as they have had several changes of gameplay & spent way too long on it plus refused to pay for Michael Ironside to voice Sam Fisher when his VO work was usually one of the highlights).
Right now Starforce is actually looking like a better PC solution (even if it did mess up a few optical drive's) as at least you could always access the game as long as the DVD was in the drive.......
DRM really only serves one purpose & that's to slow down the illegal copies so after say a few months gamers would have moved onto the next game.
Ubisoft can do whatever they want as they have nothing I want to buy on PC anymore (yes even Splinter Cell5 which is looking very ropey as they have had several changes of gameplay & spent way too long on it plus refused to pay for Michael Ironside to voice Sam Fisher when his VO work was usually one of the highlights).
Yep, agreed.
Some people wonder why they bother investing in all this copy protection if it will be cracked the next day. The truth is it does cut down on piracy (see casual piracy) to some extent, and when protecting something you've been working on for years it's the least you can do to protect your business.
I wonder what the figures would be like if big hyped up games (Call Of Duty, Crysis etc) were released with no protection at all.
Didn't Crytek kick up a big fuss over how much Crysis was pirated and vowed never to produce on the P.C. again? I can't source this but I definitely heard something from them.
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GAME don't sell pre owned PC games anymore.
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I have the opinion of try it and see, my Internet is on all the time anyways so I can't see this affecting me at all to be honest. I do think it's a bit daft to have the game pause if the Internet is dropped though, slightly overkill. I still reckon Steam has he best solution of the whole lot and, as has been stated, anything like this will be cracked days before release anyways so not really an issue for those who obtain games illegally.
For now, I'm going to take the try it and see approach as i doesn't sound like I'll have to change my gaming style to suit Ubi games and hence a bit of a non-issue.
Of course, expect me to change my tune the instant the Ubi servers are down for maintenance and I can't play my game
For now, I'm going to take the try it and see approach as i doesn't sound like I'll have to change my gaming style to suit Ubi games and hence a bit of a non-issue.
Of course, expect me to change my tune the instant the Ubi servers are down for maintenance and I can't play my game