Ubisoft Breaks Steam's TOS With From Dust DRM; Valve Offers Refunds
"Ubisoft Breaks Steam's ToS With From Dust DRM; Valve Offers Refunds"
Author: William Usher
published: 2011-08-18 18:27:44
Big publishers never cease to amaze me how far they will go to screw gamers over for a quick buck, even at the expense of business integrity and consumer trust. Well, Ubisoft proves they’re no less evil than Activision or EA by breaking Steam’s terms of service agreement and forcing DRM into the PC version of From Dust after they said they wouldn’t.
It seems like lately publishers have been proving time and time over again that maybe Valve and the Steam powered digital distribution service really are the champions of the people.
In an article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Ubisoft has changed their tuned about only requiring gamers to log-in once via a standard issue DRM security measure for their recent god-game, From Dust. Supposedly, after the one-time log-in gamers would be free to use the game from then on without requiring to be online to play the single-player game. Unfortunately, that’s not true anymore. Ubisoft has changed their tune and you will now always be required to be online each and every time you plan to log-in and play the game.
According to Lo-Ping, Valve is offering refunds to anyone who purchased the game. You’ll have to hop through a few loops and sign a ticket but I think the hassle would be well worth it in this case.
Take note that Ubisoft recently announced that they would be scaling back on the DRM for Driver San Francisco, which is a little scary because the same thing they said that wouldn't be included in From Dust WAS in fact included in From Dust in a backdoor manner. Does this mean that gamers can potentially expect the same fate from Driver San Francisco when it launches for PC in late September? If Ubisoft lied once about their inclusion of DRM I don't see why they wouldn't lie about it again.
Without a shadow of a doubt I’m now convinced that Valve removing those EA games from the Steam service and preventing the likes of Battlefield 3 from appearing on the service due to a breach in terms of service was actually for the betterment of the PC gaming community.
Time and time over it looks like one of the few e-tailers out there with consumers' interest in mind is Steam, and despite some people not being entirely fond of the service, you at least have to tip your hat off to them for not screwing gamers over and for looking out for gamer interests when it comes to software purchases.
Sadly, I doubt Activision, EA or Ubisoft will alter their ways to become more consumer friendly and it probably means we won’t be seeing a lot of PC ports appear on Steam in the future for the same reasons listed above.
You can get the full low-down on Ubisoft’s underhanded tactics over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. And I’ll go ahead and say it for the readers…Ubisoft, that was a real douche-bag move right there.
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Ubisoft-Breaks-Steam-ToS-With-From-Dust-DRM-Valve-Offers-Refunds-34397.html
EDIT: Apparently people on reddit are saying that they are NOT offering refunds, but that Ubisoft is asking customers to go directly to them instead.
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/jnefp/valve_is_not_honoring_refund_requests_for_the/
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Comments
Normally, I avoid game managers like Steam because I like to launch games via desktop or start menu, rather than some huge launcher app that hogs system resources and makes the games lose their independent, developer-given feel.
However, if it takes giants like Valve to keep DRM-mad companies like Ubisoft down, I think I'll have to go with them, just to have some kind of consumer protection.
If there's one thing I think that's frustrating and pointless, it's DRM. Even though I agree with companies wanting to crack down on unauthorised uses of their software (I believe if it's good and you want it, you should reward the maker for their efforts), but common DRM methods (eg. needing to be online for every single play, which some people might not be able/financially willing to do) really suck for the end users. Not only that but within a day or two of any DRM-touched game coming out, there will be a crack somewhere on the Internet. All pirates have to do is torrent the original software in CD/DVD iso form, get the crack and install it. All the companies succeed in doing is hacking off their customers.
Rant over.
But seriously that's a dirty trick on ubi's part. Afterall, wouldn't the game be available to pirate now anyway, without the ott drm?
Not really. Clicking one of those shortcuts still launches Steam, it just opens in the taskbar and immediately launches the game.
That said...
It doesn't stop pirates, it annoys their customers, and all the resources they use to maintain it could be put to much better use...
It just seems retarded to me...
Couldn't have put it better myself. Well done, that man!
Especially considering that people are actively avoiding buying products with this online DRM, and the fact that with most of the games they've tried to implement this in, they actually GIVE IN to the complaints and roll-it back, making the whole endeavor pointless.
Look Ubisoft, you're not Sean Connery.
EDIT:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08/18/ubisoft-edits-forum-keeps-from-dust-drm/#more-70067
Seriously, WHAT THE HECK ARE UBISOFT DOING??!?!
Everything they are doing now goes against any sort of business, common, and possibly even legal sense.
I used to feel this way... back when I only had 1 or 2 games from Steam. Now that I have many, I find the Steam UI isn't bothersome at all. Heck, I never bother to use instant messaging software but I don't mind at all having people pm me on my Steam account.
The truth is that Steam's model really is first rate.
Some good points. Unfortunately I live in a household where the head of house turns off the router for EVERYBODY if someone pisses him off (even though technically my board cotributes to the always-on broadband) and if I moved out semi-permanently, I might not have a connection anymore, so playing games that require going online every time I launch a game would not be a good move until I had a permanent place where I controlled the connection.
Not everyone who games had constant access to the net. What if I wanted to Play on a long airplane ride, in an area with spotty service, or when the power goes out? Not cool, Ubi.
Sometimes you still end up with a featureless console port, I personally thinkl they're doing it to combat piracy in the first few weeks so people'll grab the game on consoles if they badly want it. Their biggest franchise Assassins Creed had something like a six month delay last time.
Doesn't Ubi publish those CSI games for Telltale?
You don't have to be online to play Steam games. You only have to be online to access the Steam community. If you set Steam to "offline," it won't require you to be online to play games.
I dont even think he knows what DRM is, but he is always online for steam anyway, so I dont think this affects him, unless he uses this refund to get himself a free playthrough of the game.
Best DRM ever.
Fixed for you, Amy.
Used in tandem with Dial-A-Pirate, you can't lose!
On the other hand, you'll have a bunch of Telltale fans pirating the game just so that they could meet the staff, head trauma or no.
On the third (superfluous and mildly deformed) hand, you could yell "BANANG!!" as you swing the board, which would be extremely fun.
With a good, sturdy peice of headware, and maybe some light body armour, you could probably take a few hits from a board with only a mild discomfort.
Plus knowing some fans, this could all end in "Misery"
I dunno, I like Amy's version better. Except instead of a board, make it a bat with rusty nails sticking out of it. Or better yet, a morning star!
Grue flails are supposedly the best kind if the DnD tags are to be believed.
You do have to login once a month or all your games wont load.
I used to like STEAM, but now I'm not so fond of it. The new STEAM UI sucks. It eats up massive ammounts of resources for a bunch of useless and flashy features. On my old desktop I went from running most of my games at 45 FPS to 10 FPS simply because of the new STEAM UI. Now I try to avoid getting games on steam simply because it eats up a lot of resources.
If that were the case for me, I would buy games from Steam and then crack the executable so the UI didn't load when the game starts. Morally grey that may be, but having bought the game legitimately, I would feel justified in getting the game to work properly.
That is to say that if I ever do buy a Ubisoft game that requires persistent internet (like From Dust or Assassin's Creed 2), I would crack it right away. This, of course, is on principle really. I mean really--what would a person do if they lived out in the sticks like my in-laws do and couldn't get good bandwidth to save their lives even if they had internet (which my in-laws currently do not)?
The Steam UI, however, doesn't bother me.
Do you run games on a toaster? Steam certainly is not a resource hog, and this is from someone who despises Firefox because of it's huge resource hogness.
The STEAM UI looks ugly to me, personally. Also doing such modifications, if caught, would be enough to get me kicked out of my school as I had to sign an outrageously strict contract to be a CSE major. So not an option.
@Ribs - Origin uses less resources then STEAM. STEAM uses about 256MB(sometimes more) RAM when being idle and then when you load game you have to have all the game overlay UI and all those extra annoying crap running in the background further increasing the RAM usage. Randomly for me aswell STEAM will eat up upwards to 512 MB RAM when idling. Which when running a game that needs 3-4 GB RAM to it's self adds up. Then add in MP aswell it gets super annoying and to be a resource hog.
Hell for my fiance when she runs STEAM it'll crash her comp after being on for 45 minutes. So much that it crashes her computer due to so much memory being used. This is without her even running a game. She has a decent laptop. It's able to run BadCompany 2 at about 20-30 FPS. But to run STEAM at all for 45 minutes with it idling it crashes her comp.
Steam overlay's worth every megabyte it uses up if you ask me.
I know where some of it's going. When you browse anything int he steam s hop and when it's loaded it seems to store it constantly. Since I browse around on STEAM's shop frequently apparently STEAM seems tohog up massive ammounts of resources for me. Watching it now, and then playing the waiting game, after browsing 4 games I managed to get it up quite a bit. When I went to go view my steam community it shot up about the times of viewing 2 to 3 game pages. So played the waiting game and steam seemed to never let go of the resources. Ofcourse this is all cleared out when you close all of your steam windows. Why when I idle it shoots up to 256 MB I don't know.
With my fiance's comp I've no idea why it does nothing but murder her comp. Infact it even overheats her comp running STEAM. She's so happy with Origin because her comp doesn'tdie by Origin running and she can atleast play a few games.
@Corrupt I actually didn't know about that and I just turne dit off. Going to see if it helps out with some loading issues I've had with a few games that I've played through disc and through Steam. Crysis, most notably, took a dip when running in Steam.
Honestly if I could buy games from Steam like D2D I'd personallly be happy. Or be able to go back to the old Steam system I'd be even more happy. I know this'll never happen, so I'm slowly shifting away from Steam(which isn't much really since I've always liked hard copies over digital more so). I'd also like a damn 64bit version.
People have a tendency not to pay attention to the amount of crap running in the background. It would be my suggestion that you should check your services and startup programs with MSCONFIG and turn a bunch of it off. Seriously, who needs Adobe to run stuff in the background for the sole purpose of loading Acrobat four seconds faster?
You don't need to tell me that. I make sure only processes I'm actually using are running at all times. I watch my resources carefully. This is how I know for some odd reason STEAM will randomly climb up in resources. Like when I found out that the Win 7 64bit version of the media center for some reason would eat up all your RAM even if nothing was using your computer for streaming, so I disabled it. Same for when it was known that nVidia's auto updater would randmonly eat 2 GB of RAM for Win7 64bit. I tend to stay top notch on that because I'm the type of person who likes my computer to be always within safe limitations.
With my fiance's computer with steam constantly crashing her laptop we can't find any reason. All her drivers are upto date. Her laptop can obviously handle steam, her OS is uptodate, and all her parts are in healthy condition. For some reason when she loads STEAM 45 minutes later it blue screens with a memory(RAM) error.
You see! They do it every time.
Ubisoft: Oh lets put in always online DRM.
Gamers: WE HATE YOUR DRM! WE WILL NOT BUY THIS GAME!
After a week or two of no-one buying
Ubisoft: Alright you win! But next time Gamers! NEXT TIIIIMMMMEEEE!!!!
All this does is give them a reason to stop doing PC versions of their games. So thanks for boycotting the game. It just makes things harder for people like me, that have no console but still would like to play their games and that don't care about the DRM since they are online all the time anyways. Just like >90% of the people that are actually complaining just because it's cool and hip at the moment.