Nintendo kicks off 'Crowdfarter' promo for Game & Wario
Narco Terror announced from Deep Silver
Call of Duty: Ghosts teaser gives tenuous look at next-gen COD
OZombie will be Spicy Horse's take on Oz
Deadpool listed for Wii U on Amazon Canada
CastleStorm assaulting XBLA next week
Leisure Suit Larry HD delayed until late June
Rhode Island looking to sell Amalur intellectual property
Resident Evil: Revelations DLC coming throughout June
Seeing Red: A History of the Xbox 360's Red Ring of Death
Ubisoft's New PC DRM Really Requires Net Access, Ends Game If Disconnected
by Chris Faylor, Feb 17, 2010 1:20pm PSTUbisoft wasn't kidding when it said that its new digital rights management technique mandates "an active Internet connection to play the game, for all game modes."
Advance copies of the first two games to embrace the new solution--Assassin's Creed II PC and The Settlers 7 PC--recently arrived at PC Gamer, leading to the discovery that the games automatically shut down if temporarily disconnected from the Internet.
In the case of Assassin's Creed II PC, a single-player game, players will lose any progress since the last checkpoint in the event that they briefly lose their connection to Ubisoft's master servers, be it because of client-side or server-side issues.
Other aspects of the new system include a lack of disc checks and installation limited, along with the ability for saved games to be stored in a server-side cloud. "Most upcoming Ubisoft PC games will make use of this system," according to the company, which has also promised to patch in offline support when or if the system shuts down.
Comments
Please have a look at torrents and usenet a week after you release any game with this DRM. You'll find that the game will already be there, without DRM, probably for about 6 days by then. Just do this to see that you are only screwing your honest customers, which is the exact reverse as what you planned.
When will they ever learn?
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 13 replies.
This! Anyone with any business knowledge will tell you this. And when you develop a business plan you look at existing customers and what you can do to entice new ones. If you can't forsee a profitable business looking at this then you should look at a new type of business.
And to be honest, as I mentioned in another thread, I don't think this is at all about piracy any more. They are in fact a business and likely know about business plans, and they are in fact looking at existing customers. They're looking at controlling these customers, and that's exactly what these schemes are doing: they're eliminating the used sales market, eliminating the ability to share/lend a game to your friend and even forcing you into a forced upgrade cycle (just look at EA shutting down some of their servers). And to take one of those examples, the used sales market, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot by eliminating it. I'm sure they will see short term gains by this but I think it will ultimately hurt sales. People only have a fixed amount of money they can spend on games and being able to sell them will encourage sales of more games.
You must be logged in to post.