I’ve been visiting Guru3D for years now — even before I started working at Atomic. Usually, I’m there to see what the latest NVIDIA beta drivers are, but very recently the site, which conducts hardware reviews, declared it was axing Ubisoft titles from its benchmarking suite due to the company’s DRM on Anno 2070. In a rare move, Ubi not only responded to Guru3D, but lessened the grip of its DRM.
Of course, Guru3D didn’t make the decision on a whim. A part of testing PC hardware involves swapping components in and out; the site discovered that while Anno 2070 can be activated on three systems, changing the graphics card on any of these systems would deactivate the game. Permanently.
See, the DRM creates a “hash”, a unique signature made up of any number of variables, to identify your machine. In the case of Ubi’s DRM for Anno 2070, one such variable is determined by your graphics card so, naturally, changing it all the time means you’re going to hit the activation limit in no time.
Soon after Guru3D reported its findings and decision, Ubisoft got in touch with the site’s owner, Hilbert Hagedoorn, to let him know it’d dropped the graphics card from the hashing function:
…we now remove the graphics hardware from the hash used to identify the PC. That means everyone should now be able to switch the GFX as many times as he/she wants.
So Ubisoft does listen, you know, when a prominent site is not afraid to roast it.
Ubisoft changes Anno 2070 DRM after Guru3D critique [Guru3D, via Blue’s News]
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