The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
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The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
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Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#2Honestly, 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.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#3Does 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.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#4Honestly, 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.
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.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#5Somewhat 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.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#6Honestly, 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.
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.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#71. 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 clientserver 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.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#8I 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.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#9Or 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. =)
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#10Does 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.
People were running private WoW servers as early as beta, but it really took off after the game went live.