Pirates exist just because people download their ill-gotten goods. Even if their junk is "free", their sites get advertising revenue when you use them; that's a significant amount of income for them right there.

Every time you download from a pirate, that is a sale of no benefit to the copyright holder. It cheapens and shortens the market for the legitimate game. It takes money out of the pockets of everybody who could have profited from that sale, or the subsequent sales that your freeloading off of pirates cheapened.

Thanks, but this only seems to remove the drivers from the computer, not the DRM from the game itself :(

The part of this story where freeloading occurred is when someone sold a non-working copy of a game to the OP. Seriously, in what world do you live where people get payed jack shit for anything but clickthroughs on ads? Impressions count for shit (and generally pay nothing, or so close to nothing that a 10,000 of em wouldn't even get you a shiny dime), it's laughable to say the OP would be contributing anything financially to them (as if the crackers do it for financial gain, they aren't the ones running the trackers, hint hint).

The sale was as beneficial to the copyright holder as any other sale, they got the exact amount asked for said product (and failed to deliver a working product I might add), if some how your version of events is true, well who do the copyright holders have to blame but themselves?

Crackers exist because it's a challenge they don't see a dime from anyone who hosts their stuff, sites that aggregate free media do it for various reasons some financial and some for philosophical reasons. Regardless, getting a working copy of the game from them costs the copyright holders far less than support (supposing they're even willing to provide it) to fix the OP's problem, by orders of magnitude, in fact.

MM would be taking net nothing from the developers and frankly at this point it's more than they deserve.

I don't consider cracking to be piracy. If you bought the game and its crippled than if anything you are simply repairing a damaged product. True, going to their website does provide revenue, but on the other hand if the product actually worked than the user wouldn't have to resort to this in the first place. If the company is selling an unusable product than they themselves are "cheapening" their own product and damaging their own reputations.

Granted, the best thing to do is to work with customer support to see what can be done first before resorting to cracking.

But in this case he did buy it legally yet cannot access it because of stupid DRM. There probably sites where he could legitametly buy it again without DRM, however most consumers prefer not spending more money than they have to so getting a cracked version in this case would be kind of make sense and understandable.

Besides at least he paid for his version unlike people who just get the crack version and do not pay. And it is Ubisoft so cut him some slack.

NOTE: Sorry for any typos. It is midnight when I wrote this so kind of sleepy.

Cracking isn't piracy if you are doing it because you have no alternative to get the software you bought a license for to work right for you. The key is "for you". Not for anybody else.

Distributing a crack in any way is always piracy.

Now I don't even know whether I should bother trying to download the rest of the games from that pack. The only one I really wanted was End War, and I think it comes with the same DRM. The others were just supposed to help me get over my fps sickness thing. 8 out of the 10 games I got yesterday say "other DRM", so they are all potentially in the same boat.

1. I think pirates would exist regardless if people "advertised" them by using their works or not. People will always want to crack DRM/etc out of games for the thrill of the hunt or to get noticed.

Also many underground cracker groups don't have publicly viewable sites so they can't get any ad revenue from such sites as they don't advertise them to the public for the most part.

2. The "lost sale" propaganda is bullshit for the most part and you know it....those that couldn't pay for the game anyways aren't depriving the stores or game makers of any money.

For your IP situation, i would just stick to GOG or GG that says specifically DRM-free and stick to games that are less than 2Gb, otherwise its too expensive for you.

If people didn't distribute said cracks I doubt the average layman could make one themselves. It's either learn how to code and make one or download one from someone who has. If you have paid for the game I don't see what the problem is with doing either one.

Many pirate sites are not "underground" at all but in full public view. I know and work with people whose business it is to identify such sites and determine the advertising revenue they generate. It is substantial, and I do not believe claims that piracy is not in the main a business conducted for (illegal) profit.

Claims that lost sales are no loss are self-serving bullshit put out by pirates and repeated by persons who should know better. Of course they are a loss. Games have a limited lifetime, during which the maker has to recover costs and pay licensors. Every sale evaded by piracy cheapens the game by reducing the time before the game is cheapened and has to be sold at discount.

No they aren't a loss, at least financially.....antis just claim they are to support it's ends. If a game is good people will buy it and the makers will profit, if it isn't then they won't profit. PIracy or no there's no helping a shitty game, or one with shitty DRM.

Also if the game is so crap that people have to pirate it to get it to work then maybe they cheapened it a bit themselves to begin with.
The main cracking sites are not publicly viewable for the most part....tracking sites are but those aren't where most of the cracks and pirated games come from to begin with.

If you go to http://www.tagesprotection.com/main.htm and manage to navigate through their shitty flash menu which make my computer overheat, you should be able to find somewhere some update to the tages driver. Maybe that would help?

Also, tages used to be the worst drm (before uplay & origin, that is) Quite the opposite actually. Anything that makes the Scene more public is bad for the Scene, and unwanted by them sceners.

Nope. I don't know how in US, but in Poland you may take any actions to make your software work. If because of the DRM software is not working, you are free to crack it, 100% legit.

Thanks for this, but it would rule out a whole bunch of games that I really want to play. I'll certainly be sure not to buy anything with this specific DRM again though :)