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Comment by DarkShikari | Hacker News Reader

"Probably work"?

It was already cracked two weeks before release! From a few days ago on Buzz:

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.

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precisely, the only people stuff like this hurts are the legit users who pay the money.

The hackers will rewrite the whole game if they have to, to make it free. It might take a little longer for them to release it...but can you honestly name a single game that hasn't been cracked?

From the article:

  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.

of course you can't play on Blizzard's servers...but you can still play on emulation servers.

And WoW is a web only game. Non-web games don't suffer from that.

A lot of things are said on the Steam forum.

That's a good point, and it does refute the post, but there are content protection schemes in major titles that haven't been broken; I imagine you pay more attention to games than I do, and I can't name anything I'm thinking of.

(I'm not sure I can name a title that is unplayable cracked because of content protection; I'd broaden my definition to other security objectives besides piracy).

other security objectives besides piracy

How about identifying someone who plays a cracked game, not immediately but a week or so later? There's all sorts of stuff you could do with that to discourage piracy. It would also be more easily hidden in code. Not sure if any of these strategies are really new, or if they've ever really worked.

Interesting then that I can't find the release anywhere.

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