Faced with technical issues surrounding the DRM on the PC version of Rainbow Six Vegas 2, developer Ubisoft made a ‘fix’ available. Unfortunately, it became clear that far from being their own code, the patch was actually a ‘No-CD crack‘ created by warez group, Reloaded.

Getting caught pirating in an attempt fix broken anti-piracy measures was probably a step too far for Ubisoft, so it has taken the radical step of removing the DRM from the PC retail version of its latest ‘Prince of Persia‘ game.

Posting on the company’s forum, Ubisoft community development manager Chris Easton announced the move.

“You`re right when you say that when people want to pirate the game they will, but DRM is there to make it as difficult as possible for pirates to make copies of our games. A lot of people complain that DRM is what forces people to pirate games but as PoP [Prince of Persia] PC has no DRM we`ll see how truthful people actually are.”

But does Chris really expect that dropping the DRM will be a success? How ‘truthful’ will people be when it comes to not pirating the title?

“Not very, I imagine,” he adds.

One user of the forum responds, “Did anyone here mention how devs blame piracy for everything these days? If the game sucks to begin with, they blame piracy. If they don’t have money or are just lazy to make a decent PC port…they blame piracy.” He finishes up with a common statement – If you make a good game, people will buy it.

“Well this time we’ve got a good game with no DRM so there really is no reason to pirate it, right? We should expect good sales because there’s no reason to not buy a copy,” notes Chris, although he doesn’t seem that confident overall.

“I’m fairly skeptical as it’s an easy answer given by a lot of people why they pirate games but if you’re going to buy this game instead of pirating purely because of no DRM in the store version, then if I ever meet you in real life I’ll happily shake your hand and buy you a drink.”

Just recently, developer 2D Boy released their ‘World of Goo’ without DRM. It was heavily pirated, but sales were high enough to make the project worthwhile. At the time, TorrentFreak spoke with Kyle Gabler from 2D Boy who told us that he believed that their customers realized that the company was trying to do “the right thing” which they hoped would translate into a certain amount of goodwill.

If the backlash linked to the terrible DRM included with Spore is anything to go by, Kyle might be on to something and time will tell if Ubisoft’s experiment pays off too. In the end, games always will be pirated, with or without DRM, and there is no reason to believe that piracy increases when there is no ‘protection’. In fact, it only annoys legitimate customers who bought the game.

TorrentFreak will count the downloads and report back in a little while…..

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The situation revolves around that oddest of characters, Direct2Drive (D2D) – an online games store, owned by IGN, selling games over the Internet as protected downloads. Game code is modified to prevent the standard retail DRM from inhibiting game play (as there is no actual disc to check for) with Trymedia activation utilized instead. More importantly, since the code around the DRM has been modified and changed to a different system, regular patches from the game developers can’t be used. Instead, patches must be reworked by D2D to accommodate these changes. These changes are not always quick, a point D2D does try and defuse in its FAQ.

Thus we come to Rainbow Six: Vegas2 (R6V2) which, since its release in March, has had three patches released for it. The third, 1.03 provides a lot of changes, including new play modes, so legitimate purchasers of the game were eager to try it. The problem is, those that bought it via D2D can’t use it. This is the problem inherent in DRM. Those that buy the product are the ones affected, not those the DRM is designed to defeat.

After lots of complaining and attempts to fix things themselves, one Ubisoft employee found a solution. A zip file was uploaded to the help/support site, named “R6Vegas2_fix.zip”.

If D2D users patched to 1.02, then replaced the EXE with this one, they could then update to the new patch. However, someone ran a hex edit and it appears the fix was not Ubisoft code but actually a ‘no-cd’ crack released by the Scene group RELOADED, as shown here.

Since then, the zip file containing the fix has been pulled from the Ubisoft support site, so we’re unable to verify. The game’s community is as baffled by this as everyone else. Since the claimed origin of the fix, 10 days ago, there has been no word on it officially from Ubisoft, beyond a ‘Community Manager’ who states

We’re looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There’d be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable.

As soon as we find out more about this we’ll let you know.
_________________
Ubi.Vigil
Community Manager
Ubisoft UK

Although it is not unknown for a Scene release to be used to ‘fix’ a retail product, it’s certainly rare to have that fact promoted. That the ‘no-cd’ patch works, might have some relation to how brutal the Scene is when it comes to the quality of their work, especially in games. Whilst this is a validation that the Scene isn’t as bad as the lobby groups would have you believe (they fixed the game, and did it for free) you can bet that Ubisoft won’t be smiling at E3, and that they, and Direct2Drive, will continue to use DRM to annoy and inconvenience paying customers.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.