Ubisoft's new DRM already hacked

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Originally Posted by shadowfox

I doubt this development will stop Ubisoft from investigating new DRM measures - but it does show a worrying lack of consideration for those in their customer-base who have to rely on less-than-stable connections and data caps. However, from their point of view, players in, for instance, South Africa are small beans when compared to the market in Europe and the US, which I assume is where most of their market lies.

What does worry me as that the price of R&D into DRM will eventually be added onto the prices of PC games - so the games will be more expensive, which will probably end up leading to more piracy - a never-ending bloody vicious circle, if you will.

I think everybody just has to face up to the fact that DRM is not the solution. It doesn't do anything more than bother legitimate buyers of the game - pirates don't have to deal with it. Some other solution needs to be found. And no, I don't know what - so don't bother asking me for ideas.

The USB dongle idea might seem like a nice one, but if any publisher executes it I'll give them 10/10 for stupidity, because it'll be cracked in no time. Maybe a little more difficult to implement, but it won't stop anyone.

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Exactly why I called it as it is, a waste of money and resources that could have been spent on other games, improving AC2 or even creating DLC similar to what Bioware is doing.

The reality is, until the lawmakers/governments get off their asses and get with the times (trying to chase down 20million pirates individually is freaking stupid as opposed to just shutting down places like thepiratebay and being able sue for billions in losses), it is practically out of the developers/publishers hands. Trying to protect a local piece of software with another piece of software is just never going to work.

Ubisoft have issued a statement claiming that their DRM has not been cracked.

Ubisoft says DRM is not cracked

Linky broken Tinny

http://www.mygaming.co.za/news/pc/55...t-cracked.html

Lol ... nvm - I see its working now.

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Originally Posted by Tinman

Ubisoft have issued a statement claiming that their DRM has not been cracked.

Ubisoft says DRM is not cracked

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Maybe they are just trying to cover their asses because think about it.... this becomes financial issue if it goes public and stocks in their company start to decrease drastically the minute their public share holders find out their money is going out the window due to piracy... :rolleyes:

the only way piracy will be stopped is if the cloud gaming scene kicks off. no local data means there is nothing to hack. OnLive and the rest of them might just have a future if companies see them as a type of DRM.

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Originally Posted by Tinman

Ubisoft have issued a statement claiming that their DRM has not been cracked.

Ubisoft says DRM is not cracked

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I was going to say they are flat out lying, but the "any gamer who downloads and plays a cracked version will find that their version is not complete." could be true. Lots of games behave strangely or crash at some or other random point when cracked. A second round of cracks doesn't take long to get out though, probably going to be faster for this since any security that attracts this much attention is being to be no. 1 priority for crackers worldwide.

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Originally Posted by oltman

the only way piracy will be stopped is if the cloud gaming scene kicks off. no local data means there is nothing to hack. OnLive and the rest of them might just have a future if companies see them as a type of DRM.

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And where does that leave people with dodgy - or non-existent - internet connections? If AC2 had been released 2 years ago when I didn't have a connection I wouldn't have been able to buy it at all. As a matter of fact, I still really can't - I rely on 3G, which is about as crap a connection as you can get - stability wise.

I also patently dislike the no local data idea. And I'm also certain there are work-arounds ... hackers will simply find a way to make the data save locally anyways.

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Originally Posted by oltman

the only way piracy will be stopped is if the cloud gaming scene kicks off. no local data means there is nothing to hack. OnLive and the rest of them might just have a future if companies see them as a type of DRM.

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Correct. If all you have access to is a video stream, you really can't steal or crack anything.

I think we are still a loooong way off from that though, I can't imagine everybody connecting to such a service and getting the equivalent of a full blown high end gaming PC dedicated to them at the datacenter. The hardware costs, maintenance costs, power costs and SPACE (not storage, but physical space) costs for even just 20 000 simultaneous players would be astronomical.

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Originally Posted by shadowfox

And where does that leave people with dodgy - or non-existent - internet connections? If AC2 had been released 2 years ago when I didn't have a connection I wouldn't have been able to buy it at all. As a matter of fact, I still really can't - I rely on 3G, which is about as crap a connection as you can get - stability wise.

I also patently dislike the no local data idea. And I'm also certain there are work-arounds ... hackers will simply find a way to make the data save locally anyways.

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The internet stability part of it is the least of their concerns in first world countries. The quality of their internet is already superb and improving all the time, heck, Google is starting to roll out fibre to home in the US.

Yes, if your living in the asshole of the planet its terrible, but you do realize we don't even come into the thought process when people think up these internet based services, we're too small, a non-factor. Thank god for that though, because if they did hold back taking us into account, we'd still be in the stone age.

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Originally Posted by Blackhand

Correct. If all you have access to is a video stream, you really can't steal or crack anything.

I think we are still a loooong way off from that though, I can't imagine everybody connecting to such a service and getting the equivalent of a full blown high end gaming PC dedicated to them at the datacenter. The hardware costs, maintenance costs, power costs and SPACE (not storage, but physical space) costs for even just 20 000 simultaneous players would be astronomical.

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But what happens if you capture that all the data then let the game think its still communicating with the cloud server but in fact just saving to the local computer. Encryption sure but then we all will need specific hardware, programs to decrypt that signal again.

Plus the worlds largest cooler would probably be to small to handle all that heat.

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Originally Posted by Crzwaco

But what happens if you capture that all the data then let the game think its still communicating with the cloud server but in fact just saving to the local computer. Encryption sure but then we all will need specific hardware, programs to decrypt that signal again.

Plus the worlds largest cooler would probably be to small to handle all that heat.

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All you'd be capturing is a video stream.

The game is running on their servers, they "record" whats happening in the game and send it to your OnLive client via a video stream. The OnLive client captures input on your end (mouse movement, key presses etc.) and sends it to their datacenter where the game client then processes it on their end. There really is nothing to "capture", so in terms of security, its very tight. You'd have to hack into their datacenter to really get hold of anything.