PC has Piracy Rate of 93-95%

Reekwind wrote: »

That's what I'd call an excuse rather than a cause

Ubisoft aren't doing this for the laughs. They've clearly been very spooked by piracy and that's fair enough. Where they have massively failed is in formulating an adequate response to this. Instead of taking the Steam or indie approach (ie, making DRM functional and useful, or forging closer relations with the customers, respectively) they've slapped on draconian DRM that doesn't affect pirates and harms paying customers. Now that, unsurprisingly, seems to be failing

I'd be very surprised if Ubisoft wasn't, relatively, by far and away the most pirated PC publisher

Well the reason I'd steer away from calling it an excuse is that I can't imagine they really wanted to do what they did. Or, to look at it more analytically, I can't imagine they wanted to invest so much money in a set of services for something that won't see a large effect on piracy, will probably reduce legitimate sales and will generate a metric ****ton of negative press.

As for taking the Steam approach, you're forgetting the fact that no other publisher is allowed have their own service, at least according to a rather vocal section of the gaming community. They just need to stfu, put it on Steam and let them take their cut of sales in the same manner retailers have been doing since the dawn of retail.

Reekwind wrote: »

I think we're spoiled by Steam and, yes, pirating. I remember a time when people would buy 3-4 games a year, tops. Now the norm is to have half a dozen unplayed games on the HD

And that often gets lost in the arguments: PC gaming has expanded massively over the past two decades and continues to do so. People are playing more games than ever before. This is despite, or arguably because of, the spectre of piracy. It's pretty silly to talk of the crippling effects of the latter when we're in the middle of a PC gaming boom

If we were in the middle of a PC gaming boom then the "greedy" publishers who folk often talk about would be all over it. The problem is, they're not. What we are experiencing is the same thing that's happened at the tail end of the last few console generations. Console development begins to focus on the next gen so the number of new IPs/releases is reduced, PC gaming continues going at the same pace and with the hardware advancing as it always does, people go "hey, look PCs are awesome again" when it actual fact they've always been awesome.

What makes the next generation so interesting however is that we're beginning to see a convergence of these platforms so hopefully a year or two after their release we won't be subjected to the usual "PC gaming is dying" nonsense.

Reekwind wrote: »

So yeah, people are playing more games than ever before. There's no grounds for talking of 95% piracy rates as if sales would double if not for 'the pirates'

According to most devs, sales would double if only a fraction of the pirates bought the game. Football Manager, as I linked above, would have doubled their worldwide sales if 25% of pirates had bought the game. That to me, isn't an unrealistic number with some reasonable DRM i.e. Steam availability with a one time activation. But even the latter point was too much for people it seems.

Reekwind wrote: »

(Which is not to say that some people don't pirate big releases that they would have bought otherwise. I'm sure that happens to a degree. But generally I've seen that if people like a franchise or a developer then they're happy to support it financially)

Unfortunately from what I've seen this hasn't proven to be the case. The most pirated games are always the most popular series and then you have the likes of The Witcher figures above which really grind my gears given CD Projeckt's stance on the whole DRM issue and their efforts to avoid it using gamer friendly methods.

folan wrote: »

if its not theft when you take someones work for free when theyre asking for you to pay them for it, what is it?

If you call a plumber or locksmith or some other tradesman for a job, they do it and you don't pay, what's that called? If you are brought to court and made to pay, what are you guilty of? Fraud?

Reekwind wrote: »

Unless of course you consider theft to be taking something from someone else and thus depriving them of its use. If someone downloads a game then the developer has lost not one cent from this action

That is a very childish viewpoint.

hooradiation wrote: »

This fucking attitude needs to die in a fire.

If you want something, pay for it.
Otherwise back to the kids table with you and maybe next year you can come hang out with the adults.

Yup.

I don't play on the PC but I have downloaded TV shows, movies etc in the past so I can't claim innocence but at least I am not delusional about it.

I actually dont understand the statement

Does he mean to say that
-Every PC user pirates 95% of their games ?
-95% "have" pirated at one time or another ?

A quick sample test could be easily taken here, and totally disprove the figure.
I would imagine everyone here has pirated at least 1 game in their lives.
But I doubt anyone here has a library that consists of more than 50% pirated games even.

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

It is fairly easy to compare data on downloads vs sales.

For example, compare VGChartz to torrent charts (public, excluding that fact there's likely to be more on private sites). Call of Duty MW3 PC sales are 1.47 million. Tracked torrents are 3.65 million. That's not 93-95%, but it is a hugely significant 70%. The Xbox figures for the same title are 14.39 million (bought) vs 830,000 (downloaded). Don't want to turn this into a console vs PC argument (the only thing more infuriating than piracy debates ), but you can easily see why publishers are uncertain and critical of the PC market. And these aren't all titles with restrictive DRM - always a bit disappointed when I hear the World of Goo figures when 2D Boy went to so much effort to be as user friendly as reasonably possible (short of including instructions of how to upload and seed on P2P networks).

Ubisoft may be using a bit of creative hyperbole, but it - if we're using figures easily available - isn't a huge exaggeration by any stretch.

COD would not be a good game to compare Ubisoft's figures to, as most COD players are into the multiplayer more so than the single player which many of Ubisoft's games are more focused on.

More developers are adding multiplayer to their games and it's not hard to think why, yes they prevent people trading games in early on but it also is something that the pirated copy can't do ( properly).

Azza wrote: »

If DRM wasn't in some way effective in reducing piracy or was actually counter productive and increased piracy, surely Ubisoft and other companies would not use it. Developers/publishers are often accussed of using DRM because they are greedy so surely they would not use DRM if it increased piracy..

Yes and no. In the case of Ubisoft, they've actually built an infrastructure to support their DRM which would be far from cheap. They have said since then that they've noticed a drop in piracy figures but since they haven't released actual before and after figures of either these figures or their sales for the PC versions (to the best of my knowledge) it's hard to know if they're being entirely truthful.

However, DRM can also be seen as a way to placate investors so, as with what happened in the case of Bioshock, if they can prevent the game being released in the two weeks after release, they'll see it as a victory.

When I look back over Ubisoft's last published releases I can see why they claim piracy has been such a major problem for them.

Ghost Recon Future Soldier
Rayman Origins
Adventures of Tintin the game
Anno 2070
Assasins Creed: Revelations
NCIS: The Tv Series Game
Might and Magic Heroes VI
Driver San Francisco
Call of Juarez The Cartel
Trackmania Canyon
From Dust
IL-2 - Cliffs of Dover.

• Ultra-intrusive DRM which effects legitimate buyers over those who pirate the game (From Dust).
• Poorly coded, poorly tested games which require extensive patching and day-1 patches. (IL2 Cliffs of Dover for example)
• Substandard Movie/TV cash-in games (Tintin/NCIS)
• Console Franchise Extensions which do nothing but reskin or reboot previous franchises but bring nothing dramatically new to the table (whilst omitting vital tools for PC such as dedicated servers/modtools) - Assassins' Creed/Ghost Recon)
• None of these games feature a "must-play" multiplayer experience (some try but on PC, simply never get there)

Reading a thread on any of the above on the first day of release would turn most PC gamers off purchasing the game. We are generally more well informed then the average xbox/ps3/wii buyer.

It doesn't take advanced thinking to realise PC gamers have very different buying behaviors - they are much less likely to walk into gamestop and drop €60 on a game without knowing more about it - Because we find out the truth about the games before we buy them, we avoid them or at most procure pirate copies of the game - not condoning it, just saying its easy and appears victimless on the outset.

IMO Ubisoft have made it their business to exploit the ill-informed buyer with hasty game design churning out passable games - The products they are associated with on PC have almost never represented the highest of quality to me and to me their attempt to claim piracy has made there business suffer may seem like a nice diversion, but it simply draws attention to the fact that as a publishing house they simply aren't involved in any games that the majority of PC gamers feel are worth buying.

marco_polo wrote: »

Fair enough I stand corrected I would still be fairly sceptical that any boost in sales due to the draconian DRM (and there is no doubt that it worked as pirated version for Assassins Creed took a a long time to appear), were more than outweighed by sales lost over the negative publicity it generated.

There was plenty of "negative publicity" over the inclusion of IWNet in Modern Warfare 2 a couple of years ago and we all saw how that affected sales, even when it came to the most "vocal" of protesters.