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Ubisoft Claims PC Piracy Rate of 93-95%
silentbrad sends this quote from GamesIndustry:
"Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has told GamesIndustry International that the percentage of paying players is the same for free to play as it is for PC boxed product: around five to seven per cent. ... 'On PC it's only around five to seven per cent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it's only about five to seven per cent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated. It's around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage. The revenue we get from the people who play is more long term, so we can continue to bring content.' ... 'We must be careful because the consoles are coming. People are saying that the traditional market is declining and that F2P is everything — I'm not saying that. We're waiting for the new consoles — I think that the new consoles will give a huge boost to the industry, just like they do every time that they come. This time, they took too long so the market is waiting.'"
...lest we forget aftermarket sales. It's a physical disc that can be sold & resold. These people are not pirates, but their purchases are not going directly to the game production company as attributable to that particular game, either.
DRM is so old school my friend. Diablo 3 showed us that people will pay for a single-player game where only the art is on the client and the code runs on the server. Fast forward ten years: computing and bandwidth will be much cheaper and more powerful and the whole thing will be transparent to nearly everyone.
Diablo 3 will be the model for making people buy games.
Yup, their DRM makes their games unplayable on my computer. Standard Windows PC with the only optical drive being a DVD burner. You know, one of the standard choices available on most PCs. Their customer support people got angry that I kept pressing the issue and told me to read the box more carefully next time I buy a game... Guess what, I will do that: I will skip anything that says Ubisoft on the box. It didn't say anything about not working if a burner was present.
Prince of Persia (whole series), Assassin's Creed 2 & Brotherhood, Rayman Origins & Legends, From Dust, ... and that's just the ones I liked the most. IMO, Ubisoft is, at the moment, the best game publisher.
I think the main claim against Blizzard now is the Diablo 3 single player game, which requires a constant internet connection to function at all, which is functionally a form of DRM.
LegendMUD
Your math is off. It would be 20-30 million. Still unlikely, I admit.
But the thing that's missing from the headline is that Guillemot is claiming 95-97% pirated copies for all games, not just Ubisoft's. And the only reason he even cares is that it helps justify him switching to a Free to Play model, where the percentages of users who pay is also about 5% and costs are much lower.
So, even though his facts are very dubious, he's using them to justify moving away from DRM. So, who cares?
As I said in my other comment, he specifically mentions "countries" where their games were "played but not bought" before stating the 93-95% piracy rate. Assuming he's talking about those developing countries with rampant bootlegs and counterfeits, that would fall under the 0.10m "Rest of the World" sales. Using that number, you're talking about 1.4-2.0m pirated copies. That's still a huge number compared to only 1.03m actual sales, but it's much more reasonable than 15-20m. That would result in a total of about 3m copies, which is more in line with your Bioshock number (which was released nearly 5 years ago, so there should be more consoles worldwide now).
I just wanted to play Raving Rabbids. Yeah, imagine my embarrassment when I had to tell my girlfriend's family, who gave not-financially-well-off me the gift card for Christmas, that I'd bought a game I couldn't play and basically their money was wasted. Telling her was bad enough. I couldn't even return the game since it was already open. Ubisoft wouldn't help, the store wouldn't help. So they don't get any more of my money and I'm happy to tell the story.
I haven't bought any Ubisucks since the always online DRM debacle but since Ubisuck can pull numbers out of their ass how about I pull a few of my own?
I USED to see plenty of pirated games on the PCs that came through my doors, now I don't, why? Steam made it easy and cheap to buy, no different than how many of the music lovers go to iTunes and/or Amazon now instead of wasting time looking through badly labeled P2P files. Funny part is the only games I DO see more often pirated? Those with really nasty system breaking DRM like....drumroll...Ubisuck!
What Ubisuck needs to do is take a lesson from Valve, make it easy, make it simple, make it cheap. I bet if someone at /. would get a hold of Valve and ask them (without naming names) to compare the sales of the bundles with nasty DRM VS those that only used Steam you'd find shock! Gasp! That people don't want to mess with all that hoop jumping, online pass, always on broken down bullshit and so simply walk away or go talk to Mr Pirate that has a functional copy. I know I had my CC in my hand to buy the AC and Splinter Cell bundles...until I saw the always on DRM crap, then I just went down the line and bought other bundles instead.
But this guy says it better than I ever could (warning: Language NSFW but who can blame 'em?) and gives a perfect example of how nasty DRM doesn't do anything but bite the consumer in the ass. Watch as he has to crack his brand new retail boxed game just to get the damned thing to run.
So please Ubisoft, feel free to make console only (which just FYI but CL is full of cracked X360s for as little as $100 with games preloaded) if all you are gonna do is take a steaming dump on your games with always online shit. I USED to buy a lot of your games Ubisoft, hell I'm looking at the Far Cry box sitting on the shelf in front of me where I broke it out to run it during slow periods in the shop, but no more. I don't pirate your games either, I just give my money to companies like Valve that give me working games in return. No Sale.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
this is a quote from TFA where it is quoted from Yves Guillemot