XD Awesome post,why didnt i find this sooner ^^ .
Hehe and ia gree with each and everyone of you guys,also we cant compare Noobisoft’s DRM with Steam,as steam arranged it alot better.
True that Steam’s prices are way off the charts,but yeah,take in fact that that if u buy the game,you pay 30$ game + 15$ Material(cd’s,manuals etc),but in steam they assure that you can download the game at full speeds(Well,more or less)whenever you want to without any restricions.

And yeah i agree with poster’s “8 situations you cant play AC 2” , but there is even one more basic situation : What if you DONT have a i-net connection?

I mean not everyone in this damn world with a computer has a i-net connection,for exemple,some students who’s parents dont want to give em i-net cause its bad for the studies (or so they think),but they do buy them games sometimes,what about them?
I mean ,by the looks of it instead of paying 50$ for a game,you pay those 50$ + I-net charges + Bad quality for servers go down,and a possible wipe of saved games etc + AC2 isnt THAT good ,to make it worth all the darn fuss you have to suffer for it.

Regards,Shadow

LOL! Good find Adrian!

Btw, check out the update link in the post guys. The Ubisoft DRM servers went down the other day and stayed down for over 10 hours.

I am curious how they are going to peg this failure on pirates – cause they will. I’m just curious as to what kind of circular logic they are going to use here. :)

http://torrentfreak.com/ubisofts-uber-drm-cracked-within-a-day-100304/

“You have probably seen rumors on the web that Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 have been cracked. Please know that this rumor is false and while a pirated version may seem to be complete at start up, any gamer who downloads and plays a cracked version will find that their version is not complete,” Ubisoft quickly responded.

While many downloaders report that the game works just fine, Ubisoft’s statement does hold some truth because in their view the game is obviously ‘not complete’ without the DRM. At this point it is not entirely clear what else could be “missing” in the cracked version, but that is beside the point.

Problem is that we can yell all the fuck we want about this kind of protection. The average user is just going to get pissed and mutter something about ‘my computer is broken’.

I saw it happening with the Games for Windows Live crap integrated in Fallout 3. People having issues with it (be it lag, not being able to move DLC’s, …) just thought it was “their computer acting up”, or Windows Vista being a pain in the ass. Not GFWL acting like a total dick.

In the end, practically none of the users hear the bad stuff about initiatives like this. Thus bad stuff doesn’t labelled as such and it continues to be deemed ‘ok’ to use..

@ Zel:

Yeah, and the orange box on pc is only £16 brand new, which is probably the best value game pack ever :P

But no, you should look at some of the big sales they have, I don’t have 100+ steam games because I buy overpriced digital only crap, it’s because they do /insane/ super sales. I bought 5 or 6 games for £1.68 each, and many more for £2-5, a few for £10 etc.

And then there is Stalker: Call of Pripyat, which only just came out, and if you had bought either of the previous two, got you the CoP for just £15, which for a brand new retail game is pretty damn good.

I think the end game is really, just pick and choose to get the good stuff and avoid the ripoffs – just like in brick and mortar stores. You just need to be extra careful with steam, but the rewards from the super sales is definitely worth the effort (note my 100+ games)

@ faemir: Fair enough, I didn’t known they had proper sales apart from their usual special offers. Other shops also have those but your point about availability rings especially true as with Steam, as there’s an endless supply of games to be sold.

Still, you mention TF2 for £2, but the whole orange box can be found for 10€ on Xbox 360 second-hand. It true it looks really cheap, but it doesn’t seem too far off what its second-hand price would be.

@ Zel:

I’m talking about the proper sales – like the January sale. Hell, Team Fortress 2 was on sale for ~£2 at one point!

I very much agree that retail games like the three you mentioned are overpriced – it irks me too, though that’s not Valves doing.

Which is why I again reiterate my opinion – get games on steam that are on sale. And by that I obviously mean when they are of decent price when on sale, not just blindly buying.

@ Luke Maciak: it’s still possible to sell PC games second-hand, although it got much harder. There has to be more trust between buyer and seller. Lately I’ve been using closed communities (gaming forums and such) instead of open sites like Ebay, and it works quite well. Prices aren’t very high but it’s better than having a box collecting dust.

@ faemir: Or are they ? Let’s compare their current special offers with the retail prices.

Virtua Tennis 2009 : 11,25€ – available for 17€
Serious Sam HD : 7,49€ – couldn’t find anywhere else
Football Manager 2010 : 24€ – available for 30€

Steam’s sales are actually close to new copy retail prices. Don’t trust their struck price tags, they’re only true for Steam. If there were a second-hand possibility for these games, I doubt they would be selling for more than retail. I’ll admit there are sometimes marketing operations run on Steam in which good and recent games have their prices drop for a while, but that remains an exception.

And when there’s no sales, it gets ridiculous :

Mass Effect 2 : Steam : 50€, Retail: 37€
Dragon Age Origins: Steam: 50€, Retail: 41€
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 : Steam 60€, Retail 50€

Importing from the UK, it’s even cheaper. I guess the markup is for Steam’s “benefits”. There is no comparison in prices, indeed.

@ Zel:

Sorry, but that’s crap. Steam sales are far, far better than second hand sales in terms of cost. There is no comparison in prices, as well as availability.

Thats horrible.

I really haven’t thinked steam as DRM. Yes it is DRM, but it makes everything just so easy. I can download my games whenever I want, steam cloud support is awesome and the community/friends system is good. And the achievements!

I think more publishers should use Steam as the DRM, not try to create their own systems that hurts paying customers.

And what pirates gets? They are not even going to see whole drm! They can do whatever they want with the damn game…