Slashdot Mirror
Ubisoft Blames Piracy For Non-Release of PC Game
New submitter Azmodan sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak:
"Ubisoft is known for laying the blame for many problems on the unauthorized downloading of its games. Stanislas Mettra, creative director of the upcoming game I Am Alive, confirms this once again by saying that the decision not to release a PC version is a direct result of widespread game piracy. However, those who look beyond the propaganda will see that there appears to be more to the story than that."
Another Ubisoft employee made similar comments about upcoming Ghost Recon games. Regarding Ghost Recon Online being free-to-play: "We are giving away most of the content for free because there’s no barrier to entry. To the users that are traditionally playing the game by getting it through Pirate Bay, we said, 'Okay, go ahead guys. This is what you’re asking for. We’ve listened to you – we’re giving you this experience. It’s easy to download, there’s no DRM that will pollute your experience.'" Regarding Future Soldier having no PC version: "When we started Ghost Recon Online we were thinking about Ghost Recon: Future Solider; having something ported in the classical way without any deep development, because we know that 95% of our consumers will pirate the game. So we said okay, we have to change our mind."
All this means is that Ubisoft makes me proud to never have pirated or bought any of their games. Apparently they are of so low quality that they themselves does not belive in them.
DIE a SLOW and PAINFUL bleeding death ubisoft.
Ubisoft has gotten itself into such a complete knicker-twist over the PC games market via its groteseque DRM efforts that it wishes to give up on the whole affair as a bad job. But, like the classic stroppy teenager, it wishes to make clear to all and sundry that it's not being sent home in disgrace, it's making its own decision, for its own reasons, to take its ball and go home.
I am not an anti-DRM fundamentalist. I'm fine with the DRM requirements imposed by the base Steam DRM package, by Xbox Live, and with the exception of a few games (like Bionic Commando), by PSN. That's not to say I am in love with the idea of DRM or even accept it as inevitable. I like the concept behind GoG - particularly of extending it to newer games - and support them where I can. But I'm not going to boycott games over DRM on the basis of an abstract principle. I'm only going to do so where the DRM inconveniences me personally. And Ubisoft's always-on DRM system is the only one (leaving aside a few small EA experiments such as C&C4) to have passed that barrier. My connection tends to blip and reset itself every couple of days - losing 20 minutes of play-time because of it is not acceptable.
And because it's so offensive, I didn't limit the boycott to not just buying the games on the PC. I skipped the games across all platforms. No Assassin's Creed for me? It's a bit of a pity, but I'll live. I mean, really, I'm not the kind of gamer it's a fantastic idea to be upsetting. I buy 30+ games per year (as you can see from the end-of-year roundups I do in my journal). The last game I pirated was the original Crimson Skies, back in 2000 (and I went on to buy that a month or two later). I always buy new, not second hand, except on the odd occasion when I hear about an old game that I "missed" at release which really appeals to me, and which I can't find new). I'm not sat there moaning about the lack of Linux ports and boycotting anything that has even a sniff of a CD-key. I want to be reasonable.
The Mettra comments appear to be based on faulty data on PC game sales. They're going only on boxed-copy sales, which have been declining on PC for a decade or more now. What isn't declining are download sales, primarily through Steam but also through a variety of other sources. Even going off simultaneous players-online stats (which will substantially under-estimate actual copies sold), the PC version of Skyrim shifted some pretty epic numbers via Steam.
It's a slight pity in this case. I Am Alive looks fairly interesting and it's pitched at a price point that tends to fare reasonably well on the PC. But can I live without it? Sure...
Besides, as we drift to the end of this console cycle, the PC is not the only platform with a piracy problem. Ok, the PS3 has always remained difficult from a piracy perspective. And the 360, while easily hackable, does carry a very high risk of getting an XBL ban. But the Wii, DS, 3DS(?) and PSP are all pretty much wide open these days (and have been for a while in some cases).
PS. This story has been carried across multiple mainstream gaming media outlets over the last few days - Kotaku, Eurogamer, IGN, 1up etc. Could we try to get a link in TFA that is to a site that won't be blocked by most common workplace filters (ie. not TorrentFreak)?
Any chance for statistics backing the 95% number? How many of those pirates actually played the game for more than an hour?
Just be honest and say that the console players will put up with worse games and more expensive games.
For delaying the cracks for better games.
How's a guy supposed to pirate and play the latest GoodPCGame_X if all of the crackers and scene releases are busy spending their time mocking Ubisoft with pre-release cracks?
Easily the most terrifying and effective of anti-piracy measures: Flooding the pros with entertaining shit to do.
Yet somehow in this environment full of pirates, Call of Duty manages to make a billion dollars, Skyrim manages to make over 450 million dollars, etc. Ubisoft is full of shit and their games stopped being good a long time ago. Come to think of it no, SSI was good. But who the hell is Ubisoft? Ahh yes, they wanted to become another EA studio-devouring machine. Well the experiment has failed.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe you could give people an incentive to actually buy a PC game? First step would be to stop releasing broken-ass console ports to the PC market, I bet that would help sales a lot. Also, get rid of any additional software to run, i.e., Steam and the other ridiculous spyware crap that is bundled with so many PC games today.
The fact that many games (including this one) does not sell well among PC gamers is no secret. I don't like Ubisoft because they do lots of bad ports and put very aggressive DRM on some of their games, but right now I can't blame them for being realistic. This is no WoW, no StarCraft, no Minecraft, its one of those games that can sell tons on consoles but almost nothing on PCs. It's not like this is something new, the data is there, it's not an opinion. They know it isn't going to sell well in the PC platform and I don't think you can blame them for not throwing money at a risky move right away.
"They've broken everything else, so we've moved to the scorched earth policy. Let's see them pirate a game that doesn't exist!"
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
The real reason is that a game dumbed down for console players won't sell well on PC.
Um, no. This seems to be a common meme on slashdot, but it has very little to do with reality. While the increased number of possible graphics cards/hardware configs of PCs are a problem, the cost of supporting them is dwarfed by the license costs for consoles. Anyone can release a game on Windows/OS X and not pay Microsoft or Apple a dime, but you cannot release a game on a console without giving Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo a cut of your revenue. Long story short companies that don't release games for the PC aren't doing so because they simply don't think it will sell for whatever reasons. If companies thought they could sell as many copies of a game released only on the PC as they could console games you bet they would release more for the PC even if it requires spending a little bit more on doing QA.
Monstar L
They should take a leaf out of the Valve Software marketing handbook.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/25/gabe-newell-on-piracy-and-steams-success-in-russia/
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
so Ubi calls the vast majorty of us pc gamers THIEVES and then they expect us (the non pirate ones) to support them? wow! now that's the most weird customer loyalty tactic I have ever seen. reverse psychology perhaps?
I guess BF3 should have sold 100 million copies and MW should have sold 200 million copies? Oh, those are multiplayer games you say? Skyrim should have sold 68 million copies then?
( Note: these are launch day sales )
How about you make a great game, price is appropriately and it will sell itself.
Besides, looking at myself, I've stopped pirating when I grew older and started earning some real money. I still won't buy Skyrim for €50, but I've grown so old I don't care anymore that I don't get to play the latest and greatest. I'll buy it once it reaches the price I want to pay for it. You are complaining that your cash strapped audience isn't spending it's money on you, fine, having them spend it in smaller amounts might work it might not. It still doesn't disqualify the old (and my preferred) way of selling a game.
See ya Ubi, won't be missing you. Your games are really nothing special anymore and your insistence on requiring your own DRM service ON TOP OF STEAM is just ridiculous. I won't log in twice and maintain separate accounts for you anymore. Likewise, I won't have to lose access to my games when not online (something that Steam is frequently accused of, but MOST games can be played offline on Steam after the initial download and activation).
You look at a PC market where other companies are making millions in SALES and blame piracy for your woes. I haven't bought an Ubi game since the last Splinter Cell, I must be pirating your crap now right? Wrong, I'm just spending my money on games from other publishers. Take your ball and go home, I didn't even know you had a ball anymore.
You're not actually wrong as such, but there's a bit more complexity here than your post acknowledges.
There are indeed licensing costs associated with the consoles. However, these are habitually passed directly on to the consumer. In the UK, for example, the console-manufacturer's slice on a newly released game tends to be £10. This is why a new PC game in the UK will retail for £30, while the same game, released for the consoles in the same week, will be on sale at £40.
The additional development/testing costs associated with the development of a PC version, however, tend to be borne by the developer directly.
Ubisoft is a terrible company, most of their games are bugged mess with monstruous DRM that no one on their right minds would ever pay for them: do you really think you're losing money because people pirate your games? Do you even think these people would even buy them if they couldn't pirate them? Take the last HOMM game, for example: a terrible, dumbed down version of a once great series: frankly, the only way peple are going to play that is pirating them. How come Skyrim, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Crysis and other AAA titles on the PC still manage to sell? Because they are *good* games. Stop trying to make yourself look good: The Wii must be the most pirated platform of all time, yet it's by far the most succesfull one in terms of money. You're just being thick now.
Oblivion Awaits
After that, maybe we'll get better clarity on why companies seem to be walking away from the PC more and more these days.
The fact that they can milk the fuck out of console players with DLC probably doesn't hurt, either.
This is why developers love the shit out of consoles.
Wasn't Ubi's absurd DRM supposed to fix this piracy thing? I guess it didn't work, and rather then admit that it drove all the paying customers away instead they want to say that somehow it failed and everybody pirated everything.
News flash - Your DRM sucks. I still haven't bought Settlers 7 because of it, and I likely never will. Another game got that money instead.
But I guess there's too many MBAs working there to figure out something so simple.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
http://gamingbolt.com/gabe-newell-piracy-is-a-non-issue-to-valve-providing-better-services-will-result-in-more-sales
The thing is... pirates are not your customers, are a pool of people that may or may not buy your stuff, but your market is the people that buy games. This is obvious for a lot of people now, and for some of then, is a way to make a lot of money. Valve is swimming of money because understand this. Ubisoft is full of retards that can't understand this.
-Woof woof woof!
Yep. If the Humble Indie Bundle can make a million and Ubisoft can not, that says something about them!
Well in the US the price of the games are usually the same, but there is a difference that your post helped me to realize, the costs with licensing are based on how many copies you sell, however the extra costs associated with PCs are sunk by the time the game is released, whether it sells well or not.
Monstar L
It's all the pirates fault, and has nothing to do with buggy games and utterly obnoxious DRM.
I refuse to buy Ubisoft stuff because I refuse to jump through their nonsensical hoops. Meanwhile, I've spent more money on Steam than I have my entire life before. The prices are far more reasonable, they back up my game data, and if I switch platforms I don't have to re-buy the game again. The value I get out of steam is absolutely immense.
Now say it with me:
You give me value, I give you money.
If you give me what only you perceive to be value, along with a ginormous stick to whack me over the head with, I give you my middle finger.
See how this works?
Steam's been around since... what... 2004? Its DRM requirements have not gotten any more restrictive over that span. In fact, the "play offline" feature works much better and more consistently than it used to, so if anything it's become less restrictive.
if that's the case, the question I have is why? 95% of computer users do not have the skills needed to pirate a video game. You have to download and install bit torrent, go to one of the sites, wade though the viruses and dead files, download & burn the game, install the game, open and read the install how to (which often has to be opened manually in a text editor), and follow the instructions.
Someone who can do all that is a very advanced computer users (don't laugh, I'm talking about the aggregate whole of all users). Assuming that Ubisoft's figures are correct, the only people left playing PC games are highly advanced users. If we assume this is true, then I want to ask why. Two possibilities are:
1. The technical barrier to entry for PC gaming is too high. If we assume that to play PC games you need to install a new graphics card (not an unreasonable assumption: most games come with an Intel Graphics adapter that can barely run WoW) then this could be true.
2. All non-Technical PC gamers have jumped ship to consoles or MMORPGs (the WoW effect).
Regarding # 1, there are still millions of PCs being sold with entry level ATI & nVidia graphics, which is more than enough to play games. That wasn't true 10 years ago, but the state of PC graphics has been stalled by console porting. Regarding # 2, well, there's something to that. But I would argue it's the job of Ubisoft's PC marketing team to make these people want to play games, and they're not doing a very good job. Note that I'm not talking about the game studios themselves, but the marketers. The key to marketing is to make people want to do something they didn't want to do before. Not necessarily something they'd never do, but something they would be disposed to doing given the proper message / incentives.
I guess what it sounds like to me is this: Ubisoft is just throwing up their hands and giving up.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Agree 100%. When the pirated experience is 100 times better than the legitimate one, who's fault is that?
Back in the day, before the PC developers got greedy and wanted to milk every possible revenue stream, they used to encourage modders to add content to their games. Many bugs were fixed with patches developed for free by fans in the gaming community. Then they realized that allowing people to create their own new content was cutting off their revenue stream to create their own new content, but even that wasn't so bad.
It was when they locked out the community and started racing to the bottom that shit got really ridiculous. Official expansions started adding less and less content for the same price, and then, once internet connectivity became a standard in consoles, DLC became the norm and the race to the bottom got even lower. Now they don't even have to release a proper full game at launch, they can release 2/3's of one and then sell you the rest for another ten or twenty bucks a few months down the road. And God Forbid it's a multiplayer game like CoD, they can milk the map pack bullshit for at least a year or two, and if you don't want to buy them, that's cool, they'll just degrade your online experience until you either stop playing (and thus get your poor ass off their servers) or you give in and buy the fucking add-ons.
Ubisoft can suck a dick.
Have you seen Morrowind 2011? Here, have a look.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why do they need more than 2 years copyright, then?
And that's a million on choose your own price.
After I bought the bundle, I sat and watched the sales counter, and the total raised counter, tick past for a while. I couldn't get over the number of assholes who were literally paying a single lousy US cent for the bundle. I think they were in the majority. Heavens knows how they got the average price figures they did - there must be a lot of people who pay way over the odds.
I would even believe that processing transactions like that costs more than the money you take in.
I mean, WTF? This is for a children's charity.
Story has already changed by the time it was posted to slashdot.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/25/i-am-alive-might-yet-be-alive-on-pc
When they truly become unprofitable, not the pseudo-unprofitable the industries are trying to claim right now. if they're losing money at every turn according their FUD, and have been for years, how exactly are they still around? Oh that's right, they are in fact quite profitable, and will remain so, but the CE* types raking in millions might have to take a pay cut, or worse just not exist in some companies (Indys go go good team) And that my friends is what this is really all about. Fat cats making gobs of cash for doing nothing have their racket threatened, because more and more devs, the creativity behind these awesome games, have realized they can go make a game, distribute it through steam and make a small fortune instead of a 80,000 a year salary and watching all their creativity fill the pockets of useless managers and retail level publishers.
I for one welcome the death of the retail software industry, long live the digital age.
The big one is something another posted pointed out: Those are retail only sales. A lot of people on PC buy their games via digital download these days. Just ask Gabe Newell about that, he has gotten exceedingly rich off of that, and Steam isn't the only DD service. In particular, Skyrim probably sold a ton digital since it is a Steamworks game (meaning it needs Steam to play). Might as well get it on Steam, since that's what the retail copy uses anyhow. Skyrim peaked at more than 300,000 people playing it AT ONE TIME on Steam, so I'm going to guess more than 500k copies for the PC sold.
The other is that total numbers don't matter, it only matters that you make enough to justify the cost. After all if we went by your metric of "total numbers after 1 week of sales" then there should be no Skyrim for PS3. The 260 sold twice as many copies, so that should be the only platform right?
Nope, all that matters is you make enough to make it worth your while. So, presume PCs only did sell 500k copies. A standard retail markup is about 100%. It might be less for software, I don't know, but we'll assume 100% markup. That means Bethesda made $15 million on Skyrim for the PC so far. So long as their porting costs were a non-trivial amount below that amount, it was worth doing. If they spent $5 million on the PC version (which is unlikely it was most likely much less) then that is $10 million they walked away with already.
Then there's the fact that, no, PC are NOT more expensive to develop for. One big reason is licensing fees. Consoles take a cut, a non-trivial one, of every game you sell for licensing fees. It is how the companies make money. So $5-10 of every single copy sold goes to MS or Sony for the console versions. No such issue on the PC. You keep 100% of the profits.
Also porting from the PC to the 360 is quite easy. MS has seen to that. It isn't quite as simple as clicking "cross compile" but close. MS wants games on both platforms, and they make the tools to do it. The tools are also the same (Visual Studio) in both cases.
A more minor fact, but still one that matters too, is that digital distributors charge less than retail stores. Their markup is more like 25-30%. So for all the copies you sell there, you get even more money per sale.
This idea that the PC just isn't worth it is silly, and not backed up by reality. If it weren't, the why the hell are there so many PC games? Go to Metacritic and ask it for a list of releases for the PC. Have a look at the massive list in recent months. You think companies would keep doing it if there was no profit in it?
This is Ubisoft whining. Even they still do not just PC releases, but PC exclusives. They just released Anno 2070, a PC only strategy game. There is no console version, nor is there one planned (not the kind of game that would play well with a controller). Again, you think they'd do that if there was no money?
I skipped Assassin's Creed 2 because of the DRM. I didn't pirate it, just didn't play it. I don't lack for good games to play (I have a backlog of games, damn Steam sales) and I wasn't going to put up with always on DRM so I gave it a miss.
Looking to be the same thing for Anno 2070. Sounds like it is really well done and I like the Anno series but it uses a TAGES 3 machine activation deal. Well I'm not ok with that. Not that I want it on more than 3 computers, but that it only gives you 3 installs total, with no revocation. I'd eat that up easy, as I reinstall my system a minimum of each new Windows version, and usually more often because of new hardware.
So I'll probably have to give it a miss too. Too bad, I would have liked to play it but if they want to be dicks there is no lack of other companies that aren't who are waiting to take my money. Never mind the games I have a backlog of now (meaning I own but haven't yet played) I have a list of 10 other games I'd really like to get, but haven't because I have this backlog to play.