If you own one of the old fatPS3's, or just like poking fun at them, then chances are good that you are familiar with the ApocalyPS3. That's the catchy phrase that the internets have given to the worldwide PSN foiling bug formally known as Error Code 8001050F. In short it was an internal time clock error having to do with leap years and some other stuff that doesn't really matter. What does matter is that a lot of people lost save data, trophies (it just makes me queasy), and because there was no PSN connection, some games were unplayable. Then in a little over a day everything just worked itself out (well the slim models had no problem: stupid athletic cool kids) and people went back to playing games and ignoring giant earthquakes in foreign countries.
But the whole debacle brings up a good point regarding Ubisoft's recently announced DRM that will be in effect with the PC version of Assassin's Creed II. In another vane attempt to stop software pirating you must at all times be connected to the Ubisoft servers. Any disconnect either on your end or on the servers' end will immediately stop your game. The idea of such a precaution against piracy is insane, especially considering the adolescent state of the country's broadband infrastructure. When players were unable to connect to PSN games like Heavy Rain were completely inaccessible, which was kind of a timely reminder why such a DRM cannot work. When there are a lot of people playing at once the servers will experience hiccups and people will get disconnected, effectively stopping you from playing a game that you purchased.
Now a strong counter argument is that most PC gamers already live with a similar type of DRM in the form of Valve's Steam service, which requires roughly half of the bigger name games to be signed in to their servers to play. To which I reply: Steam has been perfecting this for a long time and in the beginning it sucked eggs. Valve has greatly improved the service over the years by making Steam a gaming platform and blunting the feeling of intrusion, but it still irks me that I have to be connected to the internet to play a single player game. The ApocalyPS3 was a large scale lesson about overestimating conectivity. Ubisoft's new DRM will fail, and it's going to be spectacular.
2 comments:
Can't you play steam games in offline mode? I know you still need to get online at least once to "activate" the games but I thought once that went you could be offline for most games.
Course, I mostly play online games on steam so i'm not too sure.
But yes, their DRM scheme will fail miserably.
i have the perfect solution to piracy but no one wants to listen to me. Basically it involves finding out who pirated the game and cutting their hands off. JUST LIKE IN THE OLD DAYS.
I love it. All you need are dedicated task forces for the hand cuttings. But yeah I think about half of the offline games on Steam need to be connected as part of the achievements thing.
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