The Failure of Videogame Companies to Understand Piracy - An Ubisoft Case Study

Internet piracy is rampant for many forms of electronic media, including movies, music, and videogames. One common method for companies to try and prevent piracy is to put something called Digital Rights Management, or DRM, on their products. As time went on, pirates continued to get more resourceful at getting around DRM restrictions - in the context of videogames, this is often referred to as "cracking" a game. As pirates got better at cracking, videogame companies developed more and more complex systems to keep them out. An important point to keep in mind is that the pirates have always won. To date DRM has never fully prevented the cracking of a game, just delayed it (caveat lector though, I haven't researched this in depth). This brings us to today's topic - Ubisoft's DRM system in Assassin's Creed 2 (or AC2), a recent port of a popular Xbox 360/Playstation 3 game to the PC.



Essentially, Ubisoft developed a DRM system for AC2 which required the user to be connected to the internet 24/7 in order to play the game, even if they weren't playing it online. The way they did this was by having the game continuously try to contact their servers and verify that the copy of the game being played was legitimate. The idea is that if you've pirated AC2, you're stuck - if you play while connected to the internet, the game will contact Ubisoft, establish that you're playing an illegal copy, and lock you out. If you disconnect from the internet, then the game, unable to contact Ubisoft, will lock you out, assuming that you're a crook. This already poses some issues - what if you bought the game legitimately, but your internet goes out? What if you're playing in an airport while waiting for your plane, or somewhere else you can't have Internet? This is already pretty outrageous - imagine if you had to be connected to the internet to listen to a CD you bought, or use Microsoft Word.

However, the story doesn't end there. There's a very important subtlety - AC2 doesn't lock you out when it senses that you're disconnected from the internet, it locks you out whenever it can't contact Ubi's servers. Now, what are the situations where that could happen? Well, the problem's either on your end or their end, i.e. either your internet is down or their servers are down. Want to guess what happened yesterday? Yup. Ubisoft's authentication servers went down yesterday, and seem to still be down, meaning thousands of people are unable to play their legitimately purchased copies of AC2, while the pirates are enjoying it happily. Oh, didn't I mention? It was cracked the day after it came out. Ubisoft has claimed that the cracked version is incomplete, but it seems the only incompleteness is the loss of their UPlay system, which tracks gamers' achievement in the game and lets them compare among friends. Not much of a loss, in my opinion.

In the end, this whole debacle boils down to a simple fact: by purchasing the game legitimately from Ubisoft, customers got an inferior, crippled version of the game. This same pattern is repeated over and over with virtually every case of DRM. For an example from the world of movies, take a look at this funny but quite serious image:

I think most people pirate for convenience, and convenience is not just defined as paying less money (though I'm sure that's a factor). There's also the fact that more and more, buying the legitimate version of any product means that you have to jump through more and more hoops - you have to be connected to the internet to use it, or you have to sit through countless unskippable trailers, or you have to have the game CD in your drive to play, or you can't copy your movies/music to your computer to back them up, and so on and so forth.

What media companies ought to be focusing on is adding value to legitimate copies of their work, rather than simply adding penalties for piracy. History has shown that when you try and add restrictions to your media, dedicated pirates will simply find a way to remove the restrictions, and then the only people being restricted are your legitimate customers. A great example of the right way to do things is Valve's free content-delivery system Steam (which I'm happy to say is COMING TO THE MAC! Woohoo!). Steam is used by Valve to distribute over 1000 different games (developed by themselves and by other companies), the idea being that in order to buy any of Valve's incredibly popular games, you have to buy it through Steam, ensuring legitimacy. Of course, the dedicated pirate community has made cracked version of the games available without having to go through Steam. However, Valve's approach is different, in that they offer incentives for purchasing, rather than (avoidable) disincentives for pirating. Steam often has pretty significant sales on games and free try-before-you-buy periods, it makes it really easy to download updates and user-developed modifications, and in general is a very good user experience. Granted, this is just what I've heard, I've never used it myself (but I will in April! Woo!).

The question of whether piracy is moral or legal, or just how immoral or illegal it is, is a huge can of worms, and I'm not trying to open it up at all. I'm just looking at a much-needed change in vision from the game (and other media) companies attempting to use DRM now. Listen up guys, it all boils down to this: don't penalize the people who are trying to support you. It's that simple.



EDIT: just read about another great incentive for using Steam rather than pirating here:

"If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they’ll get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam Play.

By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online, then call up those saved games no matter which version they’re playing. If you’re playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your game-in-progress."

This is exactly what I'm talking about. This would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for a pirate to reverse-engineer and make available for free without getting caught. On the other hand, if you buy your game legitimately from Valve, you get this great and convenient feature. High five, Valve.