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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.'"
So remind us Ubisoft, why exactly did you create that horrible DRM?
The catch is they were measuring the number of people who pirate Ubisoft games to get away from their shitty DRM. Somehow, I feel over 90% of people willing to do that is accurate.
over a million copies of Ass Creed 2 on the pc? Are they straight faced saying that almost a hundred million people played Ass Creed 2 on pc?
So what's the point of all that DRM if 90% of your potential customers are breaking it? Wouldn't it be better to go DRM free so that people could actually play the game as shipped instead of downloading a crack and getting counted as a pirate?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If there's one thing I learned, it's that companies will do whatever the hell they want and as customers we can suck it up or do something about it. Unfortunately, like spam, they make enough money from people that they see no reason to change.
I refuse to buy Ubisoft products anymore. Same with Blizzard and Sony. And when other people complain about how they got screwed as if it was some new revelation, I just sit back and enjoy the schadenfreude.
...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.
This isn't nearly as impressive as their shit game rate, which last I checked was holding steady at 100%.
So if we had 0% piracy, should their games cost $3.00?
The traditional lifespan between consoles is 5 years, going all the way back to the Atari 2600 days. This time, MS is now at 6 years old with no new console in sight, and Sony is at 5 years, also with no new console in sight. A lot of developers are getting nervous, and a lot of franchises are growing stale.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
1 - ((Number of sales title actually got) / (Number of sales title the studio wanted to get)) = Piracy Rate.
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.
Exactly. And what did you learn from that experience?
Lets do some math....
The last ghost recon has sold 1.03 million units so far world wide. Which assuming the 95% piracy rate means 20.6 million units would have been sold or 14.7million units at the 93% piracy rate.
The original Bioshock on xbox360 only moved 2.53 million units worldwide, and we can assume a very low piracy rate as it was on Xbox 360 only. That game was a huge hit, the Last Ghost Recon did well not amazing.... So you are saying that between 5-9 time more people played Ghost recon vs Bioshock? Yes the lat Ghost recon has cross platform but even if you take that into account...
Anyone else see the math issue?
Data pulled from here. http://www.vgchartz.com/game/43311/tom-clancys-ghost-recon-future-soldier/
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
So I'm pretty sure what Ubisoft is telling me is that if I buy one of their titles, I'll not only be paying for the game, but the price reflects that they believe I'm also paying for up to 19 other people who play it but don't buy it! No wonder the price is so high for just a piece of game software! I don't want to pay for up to 20 users of the software (myself included), and I don't like having to deal with DRM that those other 19 player apparently can avoid. Thanks for the info Ubisoft, it will affect my decision next time that I want to play a game.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It sounds like he's referring to the typical countries where counterfeit and pirated products of all types are sold on every corner (as opposed to the dirty thieves in the US who are just too cheap to pay for it). I'm sure there are many US pirates that they are now getting more revenue from as well, but it sounds like this is specifically targeting the locations where bootlegs are the norm over legitimate products.
So what you're really saying is that it is just like we've always been saying. Only people with money to pay for games will pay for games. I would have never guessed that the pre-teen and early adolescent crowd couldn't afford to buy your games at the store or make online micro-payments with their personal credit cards. I mean really I'd be quite happy to store my credit card on my kid's Xbox live account and give them carte blanche to buy whatever swag they like. You mean parents don't really do that?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Actually, a piracy rate of around 95% sounds about right for PC gaming going all the way back to the 5150, and the 8-bit home computers that came before it. PC gaming has survived for 30 years with piracy rates of 90% or more, it should survive for another 30.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Because a simple game like Minecraft has several, millions of paying customers. And most of them came in when the game was at full price, as opposed to the cheaper prereleases.
So... how come people are willing to pay for Minecraft and not for Ubisoft's games?
Unfortunately for your position, you are completely unable to put your money where your mouth is.
I'm willing to bet they're actually counting a whole lot of us in a percentage that high as pirates, who actually just aren't playing their games at all. Once they started down their horrible DRM path I just stopped playing their games in any fashion. After all, they're just games, not a one of them will kill me if I don't play it.
Valve has indicated, in their public statements on the issue, that piracy has has a negligible impact on their bottom line in any market they make their product available in. Notably, they indicated that when they made their products available on day 1 in the Russian market, Russian piracy dried up.
Any bets on whether Ubisoft checks the IPs and ignores 'piracy' in areas they are not making the game available in? No takers? Didn't think so.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
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).
Simple facts. Nasty company. Nasty DRM.
I don't tend to pirate games now, because of two core reasons:
1. Steam, and steam value - I feel in most cases I can buy games for a fair price, usually in the sales. The sales are probably at a level that I am willing to pay. Companies are *going to have to accept low price, high volume. Not the reverse.
2. The virus and malware landscape simply means I am generally unwilling to allow unknown/untrusted exe or similar files on my systems. Thats fundamentally a deeper threat to me than evil gamesellers DRM, but both are a threat.
But Ubisoft, frankly, you are a foul, nasty company. Your DRM antics mean you don't deserve to survive. Either learn the lessons or go die. Seriously.
We`re all equal
And the chain-link fence blocks your view of the movies.
Or maybe Ubisoft just make games people don't want?
According to some random web site Skyrim has sold 2.36 million copies on the PC. So by their 93% number 31.4 million pirates must have "stolen" it - three times the total sales on PS3 and xbox. Even for a purely single player game with a readily available warez copy hat doesn't pass the smell test.
TF2 and Dota 2 are free to play. Because of that I'm not going to bother with Dota 2 because tbh, I think TF2 has been ruined by going free to play. Man vs Machine is a good sign of that. It's crap and playing on certain servers means buying gold tickets.
But forgetting mvm, before that all those stupid hats an accessories (that cost more than the game half the time) lead to the growth of beggars and scammers trying to get items from people. I paid for the game and I want to enjoy a nice game online and not have children begging for crap that their can't afford.
I'd argue that Quake Live's f2p isn't that bad but even then they're slowly trying to make paying look more lucrative because actually most people don't want to pay anything or they can't. As much as we claim gaming is big with adults, these "mature" games are mostly played by children who don't even have credit cards so the idea of free to play is a bit hopeless anyway. As an adult I don't think I should have to subsidise gaming for children so they can annoy me.
Killed the Might and Magic series (especially the RPGs, but Heroes is just a shadow of its former self as well).
Killed Beyond Good and Evil.
Killed Settlers.
(Personal opinion) Splinter Cell is just a Metal Gear solid clone, and Assassin's Creed is a medieval GTA.
Used all forms of shitty DRM across the years. Everyone is complaining about UPlay, but I remember getting a free Splinter Cell disc with a video card and not installing it because of StarForce.
The result?
I don't even read news or reviews about Ubisoft games. How can I pirate them when I don't know what they have out?
And of course the Assasin's Creed lovers will pirate the game because the piratebay version actually works.
Note 1: I have 120ish purchased games on Steam.
Note 2: I own a PS3, I have a stack of about 10 unopened PS3 games waiting for me to have time to play them, plus a stack of 30+ games that i've at least ran once.
Note 3: I still wouldn't buy Ubisoft games for the PS3 for fear of what they might do to my console.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
maybe you should shrug *insert more ayn rand themed jokes that are both offensive and not funny like her books*
Contrary to what you think, the post you replied to did not have any Ayn Rand reference. This guy is not a reference to Ayn Rand any more than Zarathustra is a reference to Stanley Kubrick or Richard Strauss -- it's the other way around.
I think they are probably more interested in the number assigned to you by your ISP.
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