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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
People are playing the game without paying money to Ubisoft. Even worse, there are these "first-hand" owners who are profiting from Ubisoft's hard work and intellectual property. If that's not piracy, what is?
Don't you know that every time someone plays the game and the publisher receives less than the full retail price, it's stealing? If you buy last year's $60 game new-in-box off the $10 bargain shelf, then 5/6ths of the game's cost is lost to piracy. It's plain old mathematics. Why is this so hard for you people to understand?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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).