UbiSoft worried about PS3 piracy

UbiSoft is seriously concerned with the rootkey hack uncovered by George “Geohot” Hotz, so much so that they believe that PlayStation 3 piracy will outpace that of the handheld hackbox PlayStation Portable.

Ubisoft co-founder Martin Walfisz, who is partially responsible for the super-unpopular “always on” DRM scheme, worried, ”If that hack works as reported, I don’t believe that Sony can regain any control. They could try to employ a similar system to Xbox Live, so that people running hacked systems won’t have access to PSN. But Sony won’t be able to stop people from running pirated game copies as long as the machines are not hooked up online. And given that it seems that users won’t even need a hardware mod-chip to play pirated games, I don’t believe that Sony can even detect which users to lock out from PSN.”

Walfisz claims that the only solution is to release the PlayStation 4: ”I don’t think that they can do much. Once a console is hacked this completely, the hardware manufacturer can’t really do anything. They could maybe update their hardware for new console sales, which would be a long and expensive process, but that won’t stop users from running pirated copies on the current hardware. And updating the hardware needs to be done in a way that doesn’t prevent users from running already-released games. I doubt that can be done.”

Walfisz then tried to sell his original “always on” DRM scheme as the ‘only solution’: ”I believe that future-generation consoles will require a constant online connection. If they have that in place, they can run a much more powerful DRM scheme, where parts of the game logic will only be executed on secure servers - in effect partially mimicking a client-server scheme such as MMO’s use. Then it doesn’t matter if the console is hacked, since users won’t be able to play the games without being online with a valid and unique registration key.”

Of course, the technology required for “always on” DRM to be non-invasive and feasible is simply not there, as anyone who placed the PC version of Assassin’s Creed and Command & Conquer 4 can attest to, so Walfisz can keep shopping that turkey if he wants - Microsoft and Valve have found their own DRM solutions (Xbox Live and Steam) that gamers actually like.