They design these DRM protocols thinking they have created the worlds best DRM, untill they get their lunch eaten for them.

Back to business school me thinks!….

Please make sure Ubisoft is aware that this customer is one that supports DRM-Free, and if it is an excellent title like PoP, then a sale has been made!

After all of the bullshit with securom, star force (which buried at least 2 of my disc drives), and the other “protection” that’s out there, it’s nice to see a company that I actually like stepping forward (although tentatively) with DRM-Free.

If you download it & like it. Please buy it.
There is no reason not to.
Let’s reward ubisoft if you like the game.

I think many people pirate games because the price of games is too much if they dropped the price of games by $10 or $20 more people would buy them.

Secondly a good game will always sell more and lets face it most the game coming out of late or just a clone of a clone of a clone there is very little orginal content. Pesonally I find a 10hr FPS to be a rip of in terms of cost and time ratio but usually a good RPG is worth the money spent.

At least I can say I helped in the whole Non-DRM movement. =P

I’ll still buy it though.

DRM doesnt stop pirates, all you really have to do if you are inexperienced is search for a crack for the game in question with google, and within a small period of time, the game is yours to do with as you please.

DRM only serves to stop peaple who actually bought the game/people who cant use google search

I was only able to pay for it thanks to my recent job (I’m 17), but only pirated before because I didn’t pay for any.

So I guess some people will pay for a good game. Offer PoP on Steam and you will make lots Ubisoft

Hence my course of action is to get a pirate copy to see if I like the game, then buy it if I do.

Means I show up in both columns of good games, and only in the “pirated” column for bad games… not sure what effect that would have on the analysis of the stats if the person doing the analysing hadn’t considered the “pirate then buy” contingent.

Anonymous: “what\’s on your heart directs your life. hope you find something that cannot be stolen. Merry Christmas.”

BAHAHAHA!!

The irony of calling sharing “stealing”, then wishing everybody a merry Christmas is just jawdropping.

If you were there when Jesus Christ was turning water into wine, you’re the kind of person who’d be standing on the sidelines calling him a thief for robbing all the poor winemakers.

WWJD? P2P, baby.

Uh… Chris? All it takes is one person cracking the DRM. It doesn’t matter if your copy protection makes a million pirates give up in frustration, as long as one pirate hangs in there and breaks it.

And there’s no such thing as unbreakable DRM, nor will there ever be.

Sigh… Well, kudos to Ubisoft anyway. Even though it’s basically just a test run, at least they’re giving it a shot. That’s more than anybody can say for the other big names in the business.

the cause of the annoyance to the real customers is the people who steal, not the security measure.

did the sellers agree that you can \”try\” their products before buying?
can\’t you decide if the product is good enough to buy with all the screen images, demos, trailers, forums, reviews available?

justification of piracy is based on selfishness.

what\’s on your heart directs your life. hope you find something that cannot be stolen. Merry Christmas.

EXACTLY. I have pirated tons of games that I played for an hour or less then deleted because I didn’t like it or it was crap or buggy etc. but pirating has also convinced me to go out and buy many many more games. I grabbed a torrent of PoP and played it for about 30 mintues before I went straight to the nearest Best Buy. Because there is no disc check or activation or authentication or even a cdkey all I did was tuck the game away in my desk drawer, the disc has never been out of the case and probably never will, installing from an iso on a seperate hard drive is WAY faster anyways and now I have a handy booklet that fills in some of the “wtf is going on?” moments from the beginning of the game. This has been, by far, the easiest and most seamless game purchase in years. Good job Ubisoft.

People who won’t pay for games, won’t pay for games – this doesn’t cost the manufacturers ‘real’ money as it’s usually either because they don’t have the money to have bought the game in the first place, or they just wanted to try the game but not enough to be worth the money to buy it.

Any form of DRM has to be able to be circumvented in order for the game to work, therefore that can be learned and used by pirates. Most pirates enjoy the challenge of doing so, and they will be the only ones to lose out if games drop DRM as they’ll lose their thrill and entertainment.

DRM always only impacts the loyal customers of the genuine software (or music etc) – people who obtain pirated versions don’t have to put up with it, so it actually acts as a positive pressure for more people obtain a pirate version rather than an original paid for versions.

The creators of the games can also then enjoy the extra proffit from not wasting money producing and supporting DRM products – so it’s a win win for everyone except the pirates!

Didn’t even know there wasn’t any DRM. But it was a great game from developers I highly respect and have supported for years…

I ALWAYS buy games I feel the developers put time and money into regardless of DRM status, ratings, etc. Even if I play through the entire game first.

I can’t tell you how many games I have played the extremely polished demo for, where I went out and bought the game and it was the biggest shit heap with the worst support I’ve ever gotten. Pisses me off to no end.

Thank you Ubisoft for a great game!

For example, I pre-ordered Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Now, that game was terrible. Crashed over 9,000 times during my single play through, and I say that with very little exageration. And the post-sale developer support was almost non existent. I think they did release a patch, which didn’t really help.
Now, if I had downloaded and played a pirate copy before I bought the game, I would NEVER have paid for it. The game was in such a poor state that it did not deserve a cent of my money. And that’s why publishers should be scared, because if they release shitty games people can find out before laying down cash for them.

Publishers: Give the developers the time they need to make, finish, and polish a good game before release.
Developers: Don’t make shitty games.
Make games worth paying for, and mmay you earn all the money you deserve.

jess
http://www.anonymity.pro.tc

As a person who actually buys games he likes, I find DRM just getting in the way. More than once have I bought the game only to then go and download a copy of it so I can get the crack and not deal with the DRM.

I for one applaud Ubisoft for their decision. Okay, so I won’t be buying their game, but that’s merely because I have no interest in that type of game. If I did and thought I’d enjoy it a lot, I’d surely buy it instead of pirating it, in large part due to a lack of DRM.

i don’t gain anything from buying it as against downloading so why would i buy it?

don’t give me any crap about it “making games more expensive in the future” or “games companies going out of business”, that’s bullshit. it’s not happened with music has it? in fact music’s got cheaper because of piracy so it can compete.

having said that i don’t think i’ll download it just yet: i can’t afford 7 gig of ratio on bitgamer :D

Wrong. Haven’t you heard of PS3?

Pirating has saved me countless dollars from buying shit games I cant return, but it only makes me feel that much better when I pirate a game worth buying.. and then I buy it.

You could tell by the tone given in the forum posting that they aren’t thrilled about removing DRM, but did it only because people demanded that it be done. When I read it, it felt like I was being accused of dishonesty just because I didn’t believe in DRM. That alone is going to turn some people away.

On a side note, many of the people that I know do download games and movies, but if it’s good, they almost immediately turn around and buy it. They think of it as a form of renting it.

If a company wants to put unobtrusive DRM on the disc to stop casual copying by verifying the disc or asking for a CD-key, I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem with DRM that phones home, that installs secret drivers on my system, or that prevents me from having certain types of software installed.

Not really. Everyone I knew with a C64 had huge collections of games that they could copy easily. There were at least 7-8 pirate BBSs in this area and they would all get something new almost every day.

“Getting decent cracks before the internet was actually semi-difficult.”

Companies used to make and sell “parameter” copiers that would copy the really tough disks. One thing I always found amusing was that EA used the exact same copy protection on almost all their titles for the C64, from Marble Madness on. I used to call the Marble Madness parameter, the “Universal EA parameter” since it works on virtually everything they released after MM.

Lots of people also had memory snapshot cartridges (Isepic, Super Snapshot, Final Cartridge) that could dump the contents of memory at the push of a button to an executable file.

“I still remember those retarded code wheels and passcodes to play games in the 80s. I still remember flipping through my photocopied x-wing manual.”

Me too. Back then, scanners were rare and printers didn’t have the resolution to accurately reproduce a codewheel, so I used to create printable code “rings”. Same idea as the wheel, but in ring form. Not only could my picture be distributed online, but you didn’t have to rip the original codewheel apart to make it. :)

This has got to be hard for them … go buy the game! :)

I would never buy spore, Las Vegas 2 or any game that limits the number of installations…