hahahaha
who said that ac2 will not be cracked.
silent hunter has been thoroughly been cracked.
in a months time ac2 will be cracked too!
dead sure mate!

Exactly, an average costumer with slow Internet would be very pissed off.
They would think “hey i didnt bought a mmorpg wtf i need Internet for”
its just easier to dowload a pirate copy

Agreed, it is clever but also stupid at the same time.

Clever, because it will take pirates quite a bit of time to map out all these missing bits, intercept them and roll them into a release. So that’s few extra days of tedious work – but a dedicated scene group could probably pull it off by just playing the game and monitoring the game download directory for the file dumps it downloads.

It is stupid because of what happened to the servers and because it is such an anti-customer practice. Some people still have metered connections. Other have crappy slow DLS lines. Is it fair to sell them an intentionally broken game and require them to patch it in real time each time they play?

Sigh… They should have simply released Assasin’s creed as a Massive Single Player Online game or something – just stream all the content from their servers and charge players a flat monthly fee. This way people know what they are buying.

@Zel:

Exactly – there is no indication of how much content appears to be hosted on their servers. I had heard of stories where people get to a certain section and then it drops them out. You are probably correct. Just enough “content” to foil pirates. It is an interesting approach to DRM. Though, they could have done without the CONSTANT internet connection.

Hmmm…maybe you could have a DRM in which some locales in the game are accessible only after a ping to the server is successful (and it downloads some small amount of content which is only stored temporarily on the PC). If you aren’t able to get online, it simply comes back with “Sorry, you cannot continue in this direction” but allows you to continue elsewhere. Interesting

So they left files out of the DVD that pirated copies can’t access ? I must say that’s pretty clever, especially if the first few minutes/hours of the game play fine. It’s an interesting approach.

I sincerely doubt the volume of these files is substantial, as bandwidth costs money, but if they’re numerous and scattered enough it might discourage or slow down crackers for a while. Of course, Ubisoft will maintain they won’t patch the DRM out because of it, but hey, some games have patches of over a gigabyte…

It does make things more complicated for the servers. I assumed the client was only maintaining an active session with regular pings. When you see than even plain and simple authentication servers usually go down in the first couple of days after the release of a big game, their failure was even more inevitable.

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Yep. Good point – every time a new game comes out, the Ubisoft customers will run a risk of loosing access to their games for unknown amount of time.

Oh, and yeah – I know what you mean about the patches. It’s a damn shame. Fortunately some services like gog.com try to rescue these old titles complete with patches and what not.

And if GoG does not have it, there are always abandonware sites.

@ Zel:

Good point. Still, to do what Ubisoft was trying to do you need almost an MMO grade setup without the steady monthly fee. It is still a financial burden – to support it they need to release things regularly. If they have a period in which they produce several duds that don’t sell well, the maintenance costs may start cutting into their budget for new games.

Also, straight up online activation servers are much more manageable. You can easily predict the traffic pattern. You will get a lot of hits in the first month or so and then it will drop off. You can easily use the same server cluster for many games because the pattern is so clear.

With an always on connection things are not so clear cut. You can’t re-purpose these as easily. If you have one mega-hit and few average games on this system, then you might be ok. If you have 10 mega hits that people want to play over and over again, you may run into scalability issues.

zel is right.. of course ubisoft will use the same servers for different games.
but still… If these servers go down (heck, even GMail goes down sometimes) then i won’t be able to play ANY of my Games, bought by Ubisoft.
Customers will start Game A, it won’t work, start Game B, it wont work and then.. they wont start Game D or E, because now they will bring theyer PC back to some Shop (or befriended Nerd) for fixing the PC.

Do you really think anyone out there really cares what DRM is included in his game while he buys it (at least besides some Nerds)? Do you think the Custumers will even know what a DRM is? What planet are you from again?

I don’t see any way around it.. this kind of DRM will come and we will see some years of pretty good Software that noone could possibly use if the original Publisher goes away.
Sadly enough.. i allready had this Problem with some Games that have allways been un-fucking-playable without some Patches. Once the Publisher was gone, only some fan-pages had those Patches.
Its sad.. but we will see this more and more in the future.

It’s even worse – from the hints they have been dropping, pirated versions of AC2 are missing content – because some of the game’s content is actually residing on these DRM Servers. Which means, when you bought or downloaded the game, you only got partial content. Ubisoft said they could patch the DRM out, but that would mean providing what could be a huge file or number of files (i.e. the rest of the missing content). So, Zel’s comment that these server farms can be used by more than one game is true, but by adding in more complexity (actual game content) you increase the space consumed and, as well, the actual bandwidth to play the game (since I would figure this had to be downloaded to the player’s PC in order to be played – I doubt the content is being played remotely)

You forget a DRM platform or server farm can be used for more than one game. What you invest now in a robust system will not go to waste as soon as your game doesn’t sell anymore, because you’ll have a stream of new games that uses it. That Ubisoft underestimated the network needs was predictable, even experienced MMO publishers fall prey to this.