The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

<i>1. Make your own, free saved game server and alter the application code to use it.<p>This means a lot of work and expense, both to duplicate Ubisoft's game saving code and to set up and maintain the servers. Won't happen.</i><p>I'm not even a very good game hacker, and I've done much more dramatic things. It's really not a huge deal. People have reverse-engineered entire online game protocols in order to have their own unofficial servers before the games were even out of beta. The client&#60;-&#62;server model of protection is actually a good thing to cracking and the people who use cracks, since the original binary doesn't need to be modified in any way. You just run a little thing in your system tray that emulates whatever portion of the server protocol it needs to. And now you can also get the official updates from Ubisoft, re-activate with your own fake server any time, etc. It's not a "disable one line of code" type deal, but if you think that's even a simplification of how things have been for a while, that's pretty naive.

"Probably work"?<p>It was already cracked two weeks before release! From a few days ago on Buzz:<p><i>Just saw a post on the Steam Forum for Assassin's Creed 2 that the impossible to beat, always online, can't save your game or even play the stupid thing without being connected to the internet DRM for it has already been cracked 2 weeks before its release. sigh Did Ubisoft really expect this to work any better than previous attempts to crack down on piracy? Now what they're left with is a piece of software which is being pirated just as much as any other game, except that it treats its legitimate buyers like they're suddenly going to turn into pirates after they've already bought the game.</i>

Jeez guys, have none of you ever played a ROM on an emulator? You know how they save and resume? By taking a snapshot of the RAM and restoring it later on. Sure, its not great to have to take a snapshot of the 2gb+ of memory being used at runtime by a modern AAA game, but it wouldn't be hard to work out what is just content (textures, geometry, sound), and what are the variables (player location, progress, etc) and just save/load that. And that's only if its too much work to emulate the back-and-forth with the DRM server. And even that is only if its too hard to patch those functions out.<p>All these people talking about 'significant portions of the game running on the server'... are you serious? Do you realise how fast game engines run? People have enough trouble putting up with the lag on multiplayer games with relatively few actors/entities, running on dedicated servers. If this were truly the case, single player games would also be susceptible to lag, not to mention the amount of load of millions of players' AI routines running on Ubisoft's servers. Damn.<p>No, this will be cracked, patched or emulated, and the only people negatively effected will be legitimate customers. I'd say that would be the exact opposite of the system 'working'.

You missed Option 4, which is what will actually happen:<p>4. Make it easy to set up your own local game server and alter the hosts file on your machine to point to it.<p>That is dead easy to do. I actually did it for the game FantasticContraption, not to steal it (it's well worth ten bucks. go try it: <a href="http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/</a>), but because their server is so hopelessly overloaded at peak times that the game is unplayable.<p>Sniff network traffic with Fiddler or similar, construct a simple webapp to mimic what's needed (which for this game would only involve storing what you're given and handing it back when asked for it), and run it on localhost. Sorted.<p>It'll end up the same as every other copy-protection scheme: An annoyance for paying customers, no sweat for pirates. I suspect legitimate paying customers will be running their own servers too.

The solution to onerous DRM is: just don't buy any product using it. No-one needs to buy Assassin's Creed II; there are plenty of other computer games out there.

The premise is inaccurate - the game allows you to save games locally. You still have to be online but local storage of the save games is a selectable option.

Or you could just disable the save game feature and then run it inside a virtual windows machine where you just save the state of the machine. =)

I believe that the article is overestimating how hard it will be to reverse engineer the save game code and is fallaciously assuming that crackers will need to maintain a public facing internet server for people to use.<p>a) You don't need to maintain a public facing save game server -- you simply need to have a local server running at localhost:31337. A successful crack will have this running transparently as you run the game.<p>b) Many companies entire purpose is to provide "uncrackable" DRM. AFAIK, all of these companies' solutions have failed. Often before the games even publicly ship.<p>I mean, at the very least, a script kiddie will naively crack the protocol and manually generate save files from each of the levels, so that you can play the game one area at a time. I am confident that it will be properly cracked though. Or as someone else on HN mentioned: you could ship the crack with a light virtual machine and just save states of the entire VM.<p>There is a huge incentive to crack the game, both monetarily for pirates who will be reselling the game, as well as for the huge prestige for cracking groups. I am not aware of any high-profile game that has not been cracked within a week of release, if not days.

Here's a solution no one seems to consider: make video games cheaper. $50-$60 is an outrageously high price for a game, especially when most of them are of forgettable quality. The people over at Valve/Steam have been saying the same thing, and they would know, they see the sales numbers; cutting prices for their weekend deals greatly increase sales. If companies brought game prices down to a reasonable level, say $20-$30, I bet a significant amount of piraters would start buying games. The music industry is struggling to learn the same lesson, but iTunes and streaming services have shown that making content accessible and cheap means people stop pirating.

X3 Terran Conflict had an annoying, disruptive DRM that only allowed you to install the game 5 times <i>and</i> would count any significant change in hardware config as a new machine. When I got more memory and had to return them, plus reinstalled my OS, I used up 4/5 in the first two weeks.<p>Normally, I wouldn't touch this with a five-foot pole, given that it puts me at the mercy of them having their servers up to give me a new license just to play my own game. But they did something really reasonable:<p>After 9 months or so, they released a patch to remove the DRM.<p>That seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

From the comments on the article:<p><i>"Also, you don't hold onto your saved games anymore. They do."<p>I'm surprised at how many people are making this mistake. Straight from the FAQ: "Will all my saved games be stored online? Yes! They will be stored both online and on your PC." -- <a href="http://support.uk.ubi.com/online-services-platform/" rel="nofollow">http://support.uk.ubi.com/online-services-platform/</a><p>That, right there, is why the system will fail. The DRM will be cracked within a week of release.</i>

Everyone hates DRM but I feel like we're not giving the pirates enough blame here. My unscientific conclusion judging from BT sites is PC game piracy is really off the charts these days. A new PC game release often blows away popular TV shows and movies in seeders/leechers. I have some sympathy for the game makers here. If you're already facing declining PC sales and you're releasing a console port months after the initial console release the piracy factor could make a huge difference. I feel like anyone who doesn't like this DRM scheme needs to talk to their friends/family who pirate PC games and explain to them how much they're screwing up the industry for everyone. DRM isn't effective and just ends up punishing honest customers but those honest customers may have to face the reality that they just won't be getting nearly as many PC games in the future if this trend of massive piracy continues. DRM <i>and</i> PC pirates are the enemies here.

Somewhat informative article, but I disagree with the conclusion. Assassins Creed 2 isn't going to be the best game ever, it's not even an original game, just another sequel. So it's not like people are going to buy it no matter what kind of crazy DRM they must suffer through. I imagine that Ubisoft will loose a lot customers because of this decision.

What would probably work best is just allowing 200 installs per key (any more requires calling and pleading). Also, every 5 minutes the game sends something to the server and uses SSL to ensure it's communicating with the right server. This seems like an overly simple problem that isn't being approached right.

The author seems to assume that being hard to crack will be a discouragement. The people cracking games are <i>hackers</i>. For a significant chunk of them, the game being difficult gives the draw of being an interesting challenge, as well as a way of getting street cred in the cracking community.

Does anybody have any idea how long it took for pirate WOW servers to be running ?<p>IMO, most game will go towards becoming MMOG or be played online anyway, people will just get craftier at having pirate servers running.

In Assassin's 2 save games aren't exclusively online. They're synced to Ubisoft's servers but they're not exclusively online. You can even opt out of syncing them so that they're always local to your PC. The net connection is still required though.<p>However Jeff vogel's conclusion is still valid:<p>"But they are engaged in a grand experiment. They are seeing if an adequately pirate-proof game can make money. Will keeping cracked copies off the Torrents for a month make extra sales? And enough extra sales to make writing PC games worthwhile?"

The people behind DRM don't seem to get what they are dealing with. The people who pirate/steal their products are not making a choice between buying the product or stealing it, they are choosing between stealing it or not having it at all. DRM, specially of this invasive variety punishes the valid customers who pay good money for the product, while trying to combat the folks whose money the company will never see.

Nice article overall, however... "2. Trick the Ubisoft servers into believing you have a legit copy, so that they will let you save your game." I haven't got a clue what exactly their mechanism is, but I believe that this is a solved problem in cryptography which should be intractably hard to solve if implemented properly.

This would be one example where the DRY coding principle would backfire on them, at least for their purposes. If all of the Game Saving code funnels to one function, then the hackers may be able to relatively easily find and break just that function, and consequently the entire DRM.

<p><pre><code> 1. Make your own, free saved game server and alter the application code to use it. This means a lot of work and expense, both to duplicate Ubisoft's game saving code and to set up and maintain the servers. Won't happen. </code></pre> Ragnarok Online private servers anyone?

This will "probably work" just like MMORPG's "probably don't get pirated".<p>But have you <i>seen</i> how many 3rd-party hosts there are for many MMORPGs, some built by hand to mimic the original servers? Requiring a server connection does not stop piracy, it just annoys people.

Honestly, I believe people shouldn't be pirating videogames at all. And most gamers actually don't. So nobody's going to hate them. On the other hand, I think no one's planning to do the same thing for MS Office in the nearest future, that would be insane.

I wonder if they turn off, or downgrade to the point of unusable, the servers the day that Assasin's Creed III is launched?<p>They wouldn't do that would they?

You want an anti-pirate system that will work? That's easy, we've had a working system for centuries!<p>You hang 'em from the yardarm as a warning to others, and then you burn their ships to the water line.<p>Pardon? Oh, you mean the OTHER kind of piracy.