Judging by the responses, it seems that not a damn thing has changed in terms of how people view it.

Well you still have to be connected to the internet - but if you lose connection the checkpoints are a bit more light.

It isn't really a step backwards on the DRM, just Ubi realizing how obnoxious that is.

I forget who it was that said it, but I remember reading this prediction. Ubisoft will just make it slightly less horrible to give people the impression that they are being reasonable.

Sounds like a Shamus Young quote to me...

Especially about the kick in the balls vs a kick in the gut.

must have been it, and yea he called it. More importantly its true. It isn't as bad as what they had, but its still the worst system yet created

how much revenue is actually "lost" due to hacking anyways?

I don't really see people that buy games going for the pirated version simply because its free. Nor do I see people who don't buy games only not buying them because they're not free.

Most consumers pay money for the things they wish to own. People who pirate shit are just cheap or broke. In either case, they weren't going to buy your game anyways.

There's actually a few levels to piracy.

First, you have the head honchos or release groups. Their entire thing is to break the newest DRM. I doubt they care about the game itself, merely accolades for being the first to crack the newest form.

Then you have the sites that host the file. They are paid an incentive for getting the newest stuff. Then you have the couriers. They're the ones that get it to spread like wildfire. Then the sites get the leftovers. Then you have the leechers (us).

So, in all of that a file could be copied, downloaded, and reissued thousands of times. It'd be asinine to believe that every last one of those files is a lost sale. More than likely, there's a lot of people that wouldn't have paid for this in the first place. If you treat every last one as a lost sale, then we could be talking trillions of dollars. Books, media, whathaveyou...

Now, some of it could be a few other options as mentioned before. "Try before you buy" "Not gonna even try" "Wouldn't have gotten it anyway"... There's so many different ways it could go, I doubt you could tally a download as a lost sale.

If your game didn't suck you could count it as free advertising to draw people into buying your future works.

Yeah, they like to talk about reduction of potential profit as if every single person who doesn't buy their product is taking money directly from their hands. Well, RIAA does but it applies to piracy in general. If you can sue people for that, I don't see why I can't sue Stephen King for selling so many books, tapping out the market and reducing the potential number of books I might sell. If I published a book sometime.

Yeah that's why the whole thing is bullcrap - companies in charge make up imaginary numbers to blame the lack of sales on piracy rather than on making a shitty product. The bigger the company gets, the more money they can dump into it, and the more they start to believe their own need to wring every single purchase dry, getting to the point where they now believe piracy counts for millions of dollars in losses, regardless of how many people would have bought it anyway.

So yeah. Those who pirate usually do it without the idea of ever buying to begin with.