Ubisoft's "always-connected" DRM cracked in one day?

It cracks me up how confident UbiSoft is in this. I wonder how stupid they feel when their newly-DRM'd games are still downloaded by pirates by the millions.

Things like this make me turn to console games. PC games always have DRM problems which usually end up ruining the game all together.

Of course you can't blame companies like Ubisoft for trying to stop people from pirating their games, but it really is inevitable before everybody and their mom has a copy of the game cracked.

When I buy a game and play the single player mode, I prefer to have the game stay off the Internet thank you very much.

I miss those old gaming days when you could install games without serial numbers or online activation processes.

Hey ubi, your games are beyond mediocre, just terrible garbage, ( avtivision like trash) i don't even want to play them for FREE!!! Patrice Jade and all the other "creative minds" over there are the BEST copy protection scheme, just keep pushing the violence and focus on he console kids AND DONT WORRY. we dont want your garbage ! sign: superior pc master race.

This DRM by Ubisoft will hardly deter pirates. Their software won't be foiled today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually. And if history tells us anything, it will just be a matter of days.

Really not suprising to see it cracked so soon. And it's incomplete without DRM I would of thought it would be the other way around, it's incomplete if it DOES include DRM

Still not buying or pirating anything with this sort of DRM included, not that I am interested in any of the games announced to include this new DRM anyway.

By making the game harder to crack they are simply encouraging people to hack it just so they can have bragging rights. Everybody n\knows hackers love a challenge.

DRM sucks and only hurts the people who buy the products, pirates will always find a way to crack anything. Steam is the only way.

I gotta agree with the guy that said, get rid of DRM and just give cool Online stuff to legit players. I mean thats the best reason to buy games like Sacred 2, sure it's easy to crack and play offline, but really why bother when you buy it and play online. Sense only 2 copies of the key can be used for online play at a time although, I think it should be 4 copies at a time for a whole family, kind of sucks to have to buy 2 games for every body to play a 4 player game together.

i heard they updated their DRM to v1.1 after the crack and calming that user will be left with unfinished games with the crack.i think UBI is losing money with annoyed real customers deciding not to buy this DRM crap games than pirates who download the games(and i guess they won't buy it anyway,DRM or not).

I think this DRM is going to cause a lot of trouble with pc owners who have patchy wireless networks. I get them occationally, a 2-3 stage where the internet is unresponsive so every time im going to get somewhere in the game, internet goes out for a few seconds and Ive lost all my progress. utterly pointless

Gaming for a LONG time was as you describe, just recently did the harsh DRM show up. You're right pirates were a catalyst for it, but now that companies see the power and control they have I don't see them giving it up because it's the right thing to do and customers are asking them too. Look at EA a couple months ago who announced that they are shutting down some rather newer sports games (PC/360/PS3). Shutting down servers isn't anything new and has been around forever that's what happens when games fade away. Usually though communities have the ability to step up and keep it going. With DRM and the way control is being taken away from PC gamers I fear a dangerous precedent will be set where that's no longer possible. One that turns our PC's closer to a closed system like consoles where we lose control. To blame it all on pirates and say there isn't an ulterior motive is a bit naive.

Here is also an interesting blog from Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock [link] who sees a problem with blaming pirates and business angles other companies take.

I pirate movies (often) and games (rarely) because of convenience. Living in China it's hard to get anything real anyway, and sometimes hard to get games in English. I have, however, bought 20 PS3 games in the last couple of years since I can get real copies of those games (and hopefully the PS3 doesn't get cracked or those real copies will disappear and I'll either have to wait until my next trip to Canada or buy fakes which will probably be broken into several DVDs).

If I lived in Canada I might not pirate at all, since I could rent movies. Living here in China I pirate about 10 movies a month, plus a lot of TV shows that I can't otherwise watch.

Do you remember what had happend with all the copies of the Gears of War last year, when the company forgot to renew its certificate? They were not starting up properly. Lets now say the company goes bankrupt, doesn't have money to maintain its servers or decides to end the product life cycle and replace the product with a new version giving users 2 month period to switch to a new version? Isn't it open to abuse?

Here's the rub. Developers need to make money or their families go hungry. If you want to keep getting newer and better games, you need to pony up to the bar with your wallet out and help feed these guys and their families. If you never buy games, only play pirated stuff, you are nothing more than a welfare gamer and you are holding back better game development. Now, at $60 plus per game, I am careful where I spend my dollars. I am still working on Oblivion (and have been for over a year) and am getting my money's worth out of the game and having a lot of fun doing it. Isn't that the point? If your only intention is to have the latest, greatest game and rip through it as fast as you can, you are wasting your time and now worth the developers time to bring you some entertainment. If we all slow down our spending, but each of us still does it sometimes, the game prices will drop to where they are more reasonable and we can all have more fun.

No one can contest with your arguments here; but the key point is when companies implement such draconian DRM (or other such tech tactics), what they are implying is everyone out there is a pirate or some evil doer. This is absurdly stupid notion showing mangled thinking of such companies.

I will wholeheartedly agree with darkjeric and Mathew's excellent arguments at the top of this page. I deal with dozens of new people every day, and I believe, generally most of the people are good natured; who want to make choices by staying within legal frameworks available to them. Therefore, all what is needed is give them the trust and tools to do so.

You guys use the word "pirate" as a blanket term but it's not as generalized as you would like it to be. To form an analogy; it's like a large aquarium with tank handlers feeding the fishies every day. The "handlers" are very experienced, likely just as if not more than the developers themselves. They all probably have side jobs and access to good equipment, and like TomSEA they have been doing this for a very very long time. Even if they haven't been, they look up to those that do.
How long will it take to get the files off Ubisofts server? Not long. Many developers use the same tactic and when they do so, the customers themselves have become to combative that they buy the game solely to gain access and distribute the missing files.
But people aren't malicious naturally. I too believe it's a money thing, but it's also an internet thing. The internet is it's own little monster and it has it's own international culture. That culture is often outspoken and a lot of people may be using the internet as a replacement for other real-life entertainments, such as movie theaters and the like. That does make up a majority, but those people have no idea how to crack, they can't even read binary or use an hex editor program, even with things as much easier as they are today than they were in the past.
The other portion is people that have been continuously taunted over and over again in one way or another. There is a certain idealism to this group that is beyond negotiation at this point.
Now I think compromise is the answer and platforms like Steam do rake in quite a bit of cash. But the PirateBay did not agree with me. I emailed them once when the TVshows started being released on the internet legitimately on websites such as Hulu, and I more or less asked them what they felt about it. They did not like the idea, but that same group sold out to a swedish company that is now slicing the website up into pieces and selling them to the highest bidder for ad space and revenue in order to prevent it from the inevitable that will likely happen regardless.
It might not be much but at this point you are better off not making any more enemies than you already have. It might be worth it to pull in those 1 or 2 groups described by those here previously than it is to combat them even more than you already have.
TomSEA says it will get worse, but it already has. Starforce was really as bad as it gets and it was boycotted internationally. That created more pirates than you could ever imagine. And if they had allowed us to backup our VHS tapes back in the day, I am guessing that you might not have those expert crackers hounding you at every release.

The bottom line is; your pride will only get you so far. You may be corporate, but you are not God.

Not buying those DRM games. None of them. Assassin's Creed II, Silent Hunter 5 or any other that adopts this DRM concept.

Force the gamer to stay online is not something good, even if you have an ISP 100% up, which I doubt.

Online gaming is essentially for multiplayer mode, for instance, Team Fortress 2. A game like SH5 is so characterized as single player that it makes difficult to understand you have to stay online to play it.

Certainly, developer's will realize that this is not the way to avoid having their titles pirated, like everybody's already commented here.

Another good example is those games with StarForce (http://www.star-force.com) protection. I have the 10tacle Studios GT Legends racing game and I simply can't install it on Windows 7 because StarForce's version used in this titles isn't compatible with W7. Detail: I bought the original game!

One last thought is that not everybody has an internet connection available, whatever the reason. If I want to play the game and stay off line, I just can't? This is really a drawback, not an evolution in the game industry.

Cheers!

Those who actually buy games and not download cracked versions might say no to this one because of the need for a constant internet connection. And like always its going to be cracked anyways.