The Future Is AWESOME!

Like everyone else on the planet, this is what I currently get when I try to get a little hot single-player Diablo 3 action in.

The reason that this bothers me so much is that this sort of thing is bad for PC/Mac gaming. It's not bad for Blizzard. They'll still make a mint. But this sort of thing tarnishes the entire platform. Every gamer who gets hit with this sort of thing has a chance of being pushed away from the PC (and with good reason!) and toward consoles and iOS, platforms that don't have these hassles.

My business will, in a small way, get tarred with this brush, and it hurts my bottom line. Which makes me sad.

Oh well. I guess I'll spend time with my family instead. Sigh. If I wanted to spend more time with my family, you think I would have bought Diablo III?

Yet Even More About Evil DRM From Hell.

The story so far: Piracy drives PC games makers mad with rage. Ubisoft responds by releasing its games (most notably Assassin's Creed 2) with DRM that requires a constant internet connection. Your connection goes? So does your game. Everyone not a PC games maker gets justifiably enraged. Games ship with this DRM, and entirely predictable disasters occur.

So I stepped into this crapstorm and wrote an article which got quite a bit of attention. In it, I said that, entirely apart from the practical considerations of this DRM (which I think is a terrible idea), it would work. Which is to say that it could stay unbroken for the first 1-2 months of the game's release, when the title will get most of its sales. The Internet responded by calling me a moron, as it is an issue of religious faith that DRM can be broken instantly.

So let's look back in and see what's been going on. I think it is interesting in several ways.

The DRM has, apparently, 6 weeks after release, been released in a cracked form that is easy for the average laymen to install. Six weeks. In other words, long enough. I've read two articles to this effect.

(Some people on forums have claimed that a tricky-to-install crack was kicked out 4 weeks after release, but who trusts random people on forums? I have seen nothing in the Gaming Press on the topic. Which says a lot about the Gaming Press. But more on that in a second.)

So, and this point is very significant, I was right and everyone who criticized me was wrong! It's official! I win teh Internet!

(Happy dance.)

Ahem. Anyway.

Also, while crackers will get better at beating this DRM in its current form, it will only get better. I and others have suggested ways to make it stronger. It's only a matter of time. And that means that this DRM, loathsome as it is, is here to stay. If the game company executives were crazed enough by piracy to implement it, they're crazy enough to keep using it. Insert dire predictions about the future of PC gaming here.

But I want to chip in one more comment here, about the lamentable state of the gaming press. I honestly think that this new DRM is one of the biggest stories on PC Gaming in years. How Ubisoft's system works will determine if PC Gaming has a future, and how much that future will suck. It's an interesting story. So why hasn't anyone at the gaming sites actually investigated, like actual reporters, whether the DRM was cracked or not?

Look at the articles I linked to. One by the Escapist, long one of the best and most thoughtful sites writing on gaming, and one by cnet, a company with actual reporters and resources. They say that crackers have claimed they've broken this DRM (something others have claimed, only to be proven wrong). Why don't they check? If it's worth reporting on the claim, isn't it worth reporting on what reality actually is? I think this quote from the Escapist article (whose sole source is the cnet article) is very interesting.

I don't know if the claim is legit and I have neither Assassin's Creed 2 nor the patience necessary to dick around with warez sites and cracks in order to find out.

Now, I'm an Indie gaming developer, so calling out members of the gaming press is a very stupid thing to do. So I'm simply going to say to Andy Chalk, the author of the Escapist piece, that this is a great opportunity to do some investigative reporting and scoop everyone else in the world on a story of some interest. Go get 'em! I'd link to you!

But anyway. Since this sort of DRM seems to work well enough, the people who can make the decisions about whether to use it will feel that their decision was justified. Remember, they see piracy as an existential threat. This is important. They believe that unless they reduce piracy, the PC gaming biz is not worth it. When someone sees something as a life or death decision, they won't care how angry people get on the forums.

So I suspect you'll be seeing a lot more of it in the future. And, when enough of the titles people really want come out with it, most PC gamers will either grit their teeth and put up with it or abandon the platform.

And, as for me? I blame the pirates. Ubisoft's system is obnoxious, but it is legal, and they are in their right to do it. In a democracy, we all get what the worst of us deserve.

God, if I try to write about this again, please strike me down with holy, peace-bringing fire.

More Thoughts On the Anti-Pirate Measures That Will (?) Work

Well, the storm of commentary and attention directed at my Assassin's Creed 2 DRM article has died down a little bit. I suspect that that little blog post is one of the most read pieces of text I've ever written. At this point, 90% of the Internet has posted on Slashdot, The Escapist, or somewhere else to say I'm an idiot. The intensity of the reaction was quite interesting to me, and the various responses left me with a lot of what, for me, passes for thoughts.

I think a lot of the intensity of the reaction was because, simply, many people hadn't heard about this new DRM system. Or, if they had, they were still heated up over it. Add in the constant need among pirates to come up with increasingly overwrought justifications for their obviously illegal and immoral actions, and you have the expected traveling firestorm.

It is now rumored that crackers are making short work of this new DRM software. Believe me, I hope this is the case. As I said in the previous article, I think these measures are overall bad for the PC games industry (of which I am a part). However, this alleged victory will, I think, be short-lived. Once these games are being coded to constantly contact the developer's servers, developers have a lot of new weapons in their anti-pirate arsenal. More about this in point #2, below.

But, in the mess, interesting things were said. Here is what I have learned (or still believe):

1. To "work", anti-piracy measures only need to stay unbroken for the peak sales period of the game. That is, the first three months or so. If it stays uncracked for that long, the developers win. I never said that there was uncrackable DRM, because that is not true. It does not need to be uncrackable.

2. UbiSoft's "Have the game maintain a constant Internet connection and move a lot of the processing onto the server" solution will slow down cracking. If not now, then in the future. Developers can move more and more processing onto the server. Right now, it's just saved games. Later, they can move more and more code off of your machine and onto theirs.

You want your very-difficult-to-crack DRM system? Here it is! Take all the statistics (and maybe scripts) for creatures and items and weapons and put them on the server. The game only downloads them when it needs them. This is ten thousand little chunks, only a handful of KB, of vital and irreplaceable data, and it will take a long time for a cracker to get the game to download all of the bits so he can isolate and read them all and put them in his fake server/cracked game. And God help you if he missed an item. Don't just wave your hands and go, "Oh, someone could break that easy." This system is already routinely used by MMOs, and it would work.

(And I suspect Assassin's Creed 2 has some of this and they just haven't told us yet. Remember, it has to be using that constant net connection for something.)

Once the game is developed with a constant net connection in mind, the developer can heap an arbitrary amount of work on hackers. I've read a lot of "easy solutions" to the problem over the last few days. All assume they know everything that's going on on the server side. Not a good assumption.

3. Oh, and by the way, the constant server thing is temporary. UbiSoft has already said that, when they don't want to maintain the servers anymore, they will release a patch removing the need for the game to talk to them. I give it about six months until this happens. Maintaining that many servers is expensive, and once that period of time has passed they won't need the DRM there anymore. Then Assassin's Creed 2 is free to appear on ten buck shovelware DVD compilations, coming to a Best Buy near you.

4. People have an almost religious need to believe in the power of the cracker to overcome any obstacle in his (or her?) way. I think that part of the ideological structure pirates build to justify their actions must include believing that, "Hey, it'll always be cracked anyway." Either that, or people just don't wanna believe that the river of cool free stuff they believe they are entitled to might dry up.

5. If you use the terms "hacker" and "cracker" interchangeably, you will make a small number of people very angry at you.

6. Suppose, for the sake of argument, they did develop pirate-proof DRM on the PC. Lots of people seem to assume that, when people can't pirate the game, they just won't buy it. Hogwash. People LOVE games. If they have to pay money to get games, they will. Just look at the XBox, Wii, and PS3. It's possible to pirate games there, but it is not easy. Thus, people pay tons of cash for them. It's easy to talk big about how you will never pay money for games with restrictive DRM, but everyone has a price. If games as sexy as Diablo 3 ever start coming with the mean DRM, a lot of people are going to sigh, grit their teeth, and accept it.

So, as repellent as the new system is, they aren't insane for trying. The rewards for success are considerable.

So thank you for all the attention. And, if you don't think I'm an entire idiot, my newest fantasy RPG for Windows and Mac doesn't have any scary DRM at all. And the demo is huge and free. Please excuse this blatant self-promotion. Thank you, and good night.

The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work

So, when I read that Assassin's Creed 2 for the PC would fight piracy by requiring a live internet connection all the time when you were playing, I thought it was a joke. Sort of a dry, post-modern satire of the whole idea of DRM. Then I learned that, if your internet connection broke while playing it, the game would freeze. What's more, if the connection didn't return soon enough, the game would quit and your progress would be unsaved. This convinced me that the whole thing was a joke.

Then I learned, as explicitly confirmed by Ubisoft representatives, no. Not a joke. Not at all.

Of course, this is pretty harsh medicine, and the many reasons this set-up is hostile have been ably discussed. What if you have an inconsistent internet connection? What if servers ever go down? (Due to malfunction, bankruptcy, or no longer wanting to pay to maintain them.)

Also, you don't hold onto your saved games anymore. They do. This part is really significant. That's why the game needs the net connection all the time. It's not just for their amusement. The constant contact is necessary because your game is saved on their machine. Not yours. They are claiming that this is for your convenience, because then you can get at your saved games from any computer anywhere, but nobody is fooled.

But, in all the writing and bitching on the topic, everyone seems to be missing the most significant detail of this new system. Everyone always assumes that all DRM will be broken immediately and pirated versions will appear instantly and anti-hacker measures never work. But this system (and I know saying this will immediately get me written off as an idiot, but bear with me) is the one that will finally do a good enough job of holding off pirates. It won't hold them off forever (I think) but it will hold them long enough for the game to get its sales.

Here's why ... This is how hacking usually works. A game (or word processor, or operating system) is programmed to, say, check in at launch with the home server to make sure it's a legal copy. The hacker goes through the code and looks for that line of software and disables it. Snip. And the program is cracked and ready to be sent to the Torrents. This is a bit of a simplification, but it gets at the heart of the thing. Most hacking require disabling a small chunk of the program, and that is not hard.

But Assassin's Creed 2 is different. Remember, all of the code for saving and loading games (a significant feature, I'm sure you would agree) is tied into logging into a distant server and sending data back and forth. This vital and complex bit of code has been written from the ground up to require having the saved games live on a machine far away, with said machine being programmed to accept, save, and return the game data. This is a far more difficult problem for a hacker to circumvent. What are the options?

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.

2. Trick the Ubisoft servers into believing you have a legit copy, so that they will let you save your game.

OK, the hackers will probably eventually come up with a keygen program. This is tricky, because the software that generates the keys will be in Ubisoft's hands, far from prying eyes. But they could possible do it, given a bit of time. But if they ever figure out you have a fake or duplicate key (and I bet they have their ways), poof. Your account and saved games disappear. I don't think this will work.

3. Hack the game to not need to save games on a remote server.

This means a hacker has to figure out the saved game format, somehow jam into the application new code to write the saved data and new code to read it, TEST IT, and get it to work. Doable. But it will take time, and I bet you'd get some bugs in the process.

So this will be a tough nut to crack.

Remember what it takes to get DRM to work. It doesn't have to be uncrackable. Nothing is. All it has to do is delay the hackers long enough for the game to get a couple months worth of sales. And by turning a key part of their game into a MMO ("We, like WoW, control the saved game, not you."), they have come up with a clever and brutal way to do just that.

But this will make everyone hate them.

Perhaps. Make no mistake. Ubisoft will lose customers and earn much nerdrage over this. 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? Because the current system, where 90% of the copies out there are pirated and only megahits that could turn a profit on that 10%, doesn't seem to be working.

But it's an amazingly harsh system. As much as I hope for someone to come up with an anti-hacker measure that can reliably hold off the thieves for a few months without ticking the entire planet off (so that I can start using it), well, I wouldn't buy a game with the system Ubisoft is using. I really sympathize with what they're trying to do, and I can't join in with the (almost) unanimous chorus of rage. But this doesn't feel like the answer.

People might buy more copies of Assassin's Creed 2, but this is the sort of measure that can sour people on PC gaming as a whole. And that hurts everyone. Including me.

Edit: Thanks everyone for the comments! A couple responses.

Yes, of course there are solutions for making your own authentication server. But for the DRM to work, all it has to do is 1. delay the cracking, and 2. make it difficult/unreliable for the bulk of non-super-technically-apt gamers. Making people set up their own servers (on their own machines or not) is enough of a barrier to entry to get the job done.

Remember, I didn't say it was uncrackable, only that it was difficult/slow enough to give a profitable first few months.

As for the game making local copies of the saved games. IF this turns out to be the case, and IF the game also has easily accessible features in place for loading those saves (as opposed to only caching them there and only being able to load from the distant server), then yes, it's a dumb and easily crackable system. But even if this is the case, that doesn't change the fact that the next game to use this system will be slow to crack for the reasons given above, and all of the factors and consequences given above still apply.

Edit 2: One quick question for the "Anything can be cracked right away." crowd. Where do I get my cracked copy of World of Warcraft that can play the real game (not some cobbled together emulation server) without paying. Answer: You can't.

Once you accept the need for a constant internet connection, the developer can just load more and more of the game logic onto the servers. Right now, they're just trying it with saved games. (And who knows what else? Do any of us really know what the game is using that constant internet connection for?) But they can put more and more of the game onto their end until cracking the game will involve rewriting the damn thing.

Oh, and by the way, people accept their game needing a constant internet connection all the time. WoW. CounterStrike. Team Fortress. So saying people won't accept it for single player games is a bit of a stretch. They'll get used to it soon enough.

Edit 3: Wow. Main page Slashdot. The Escapist. All the hate is making my face burn. I've written a follow-up article, but I'm posting a squib from it now because I want to address the most common and fallacious point, that any system can easily be cracked:

"You want your very-difficult-to-crack DRM system? Here it is! Take all the statistics and scripts for creatures and items and weapons and put them on the server. The game only downloads them when it needs them. This is ten thousand scripts and bits of data, and it will take a long time for a cracker to get the game to download them so he can isolate and read them all and put them in his fake server/cracked game. And God help you if he missed an item. Don't just wave your hands and go, "Oh, someone could break that easy." This. Would. Work.

(And I bet Assassin's Creed 2 has some of this and they just haven't told us yet. Remember, it has to be using that constant net connection for something.)"

Penny Arcade Calls It.

I normally have a hard time reading the main page text of Penny Arcade. Tycho's proclivity for plethoric verbiage can make reading his writing onerous. My eyes tend to just slide off of it.

But sometimes he just calls it completely perfectly:

It is not a mischaracterization to say that conversations with the hardcore PC community about software theft follow these tenets:

- There is no piracy.
- To the extent that piracy exists, which it doesn't, it's your fault.
- If you try to protect your game, we'll steal it as a matter of principle.

It's like, who wouldn't want to bend over backward in their service?

I would also add: "Trying to protect your game never keeps anyone from stealing it no matter what ever."

I've harped on DRM a lot in this space, and I imagine I will continue to do so. There's a good reason for that. It is THE issue now for music and software and (as eBooks become more popular) publishing. Intellectual property gets easier to steal pretty much daily. Coincidentally, profits at game developers, music publishers, and (soon) book publishers decrease on a pretty much daily basis.

It's a process, and we have not seen where it will end. No matter what your views on copy protection are, this should make the topic of great interest to anyone who likes music, books, or video games.

Some Kind Words About DRM. For Once.

Over the years, a lot of criticism has been thrown at DRM. (Which means Digital Rights Management. Which means tinkering with music and video games to try to make people actually pay for them.) A lot of that abuse has come from me. But I think this all this shouting at Electronic Arts and the RIAA might be starting to be a bit much, since DRM, at the heart of it, has a noble goal: To keep thieves from stealing things.

But I recently noticed one little place when where I think making games pirate-proof is resulting in a better world for everyone. In the interest of fairness, I feel obligated to point it out.

(Edit: When I say "pirate-proof," I mean "So difficult to pirate that nobody bothers," not "Impossible to pirate.")

Let Me Sell My Stupid Used Games! (Or not.)

When Half-Life 2 came out, around eight hundred years ago, I vented to everyone who would listen about how angry its new rights management scheme made me. You had to sign in through a Steam account (which, at the time, did scary things to my computer). And, to me far worse, your game was attached to your account, keeping you from loaning or selling it. This new game future seemed to strip too many rights away from users, and I wanted no part of it.

Lately, though, I've been finding that this is exactly the future I am living in, and I've been extremely happy. I'm having a great time, buying fun games for fair prices. I'm just doing it on the XBox.

The rights management in PC games is still generally hostile, punitive, and self-defeating. Requiring an internet connection to play a single player game or limiting the number of installations does nothing to prevent piracy (as hacked copies are always easily available from BitTorrent) but plenty to hurt legitimate customers. And piracy is rampant, no matter what. So the PC world is still screwed. (And there is increasing evidence that these problems are spreading to the iPhone.)

All I Want Is Fun, On the Cheap

But on XBox live, over the last month, I'm played Shadow Complex ($15), Defense Grid: The Awakening ($10), and I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 (a ludicrously low $1). These games are all seriously fun. They also have impenetrable DRM. I don't have to be online to play, but I can't sell or give away my copy. There's no piracy on XBox Live.

When the inability to share (or pirate) a product comes with a low price, I don't mind anymore. Defense Grid is ten bucks, and it's giving me more than ten bucks worth of fun. Sure, I'm at Microsoft's mercy, and I don't "own" the product, but hey. Ten bucks. And the manufactures can still make a nice profit at that low price (though probably not much lower) because ninety percent of its users aren't stealing it.

No DRM. But Plenty Of Injustice.

Compare that to the games I sell. I charge $28 for a new game. I would LOVE to charge ten bucks. But, to stay in business, I'd have to triple my sales, and that won't happen. Would sales go up? Sure. Would they TRIPLE? Almost impossible.

I have minimal DRM. People can transfer their registration to someone else if they want. I even have a one year money back guarantee if someone is unhappy. I've tried to be ethical in all the ways I want as a consumer. The result? My games get pirated like crazy, and I have to charge a lot to stay in business. I have a situation where honest people have to pay lots of money to subsidize the people who rip me off. The good people pay to buy games for the bad.

This, of course, infuriates me.

What I Wish I Could Do

I'm not going to be writing games for the XBox, sadly enough. My sort of games just work better on PC and Macs. But if I could snap my fingers and give myself the same absolute control over my games XBox Live has over theirs (in return for lower prices), I would. The freedom of the current system is nice, but it comes at too high a cost. The unfairness is just this side of intolerable, and it's only getting worse.

DRM is fair if, for what the corporations take, we get something in return. One of the problems with eBooks is they take away the ability to loan or sell the books you buy online, not to mention the lack of a satisfying physical object, and they still charge the same price for the book. What nonsense! Make the price of the books low enough to make people not mind what they are costing and I promise you the eBook business will improve.

DRM Has Its Points

DRM has developed a terrible reputation. Heck, it's earned it. But remember, the purpose of DRM is to prevent free riders (aka self-justifying weasels and morally damaged scumbags). None of us like being told that we don't deserve free things, but it's still true. If DRM enables products to be sold for a price that is cheap to users and fair to developers, it is something we should all grab with both hands.

A New Article on IGN RPG Vault.

My latest View From the Bottom article, the first in a long time, is now up on IGN RPG Vault. It's called "We're All Charity Cases Now," and it's about how we makers of single-player games should be adjusting to a world where people only pay for our games if they want to.

Adjusting needs to be done, and, little by little, people are getting there.