Piracy has long been a thorn in the side of developers and publishers, mainly due to their long held belief that every copy pirated is a lost sale. This belief is false, but still they continue to insist, fingers in ears, that extensive measures must be taken to fix the “problem”.
The piracy estimates publishers put out can be pretty big at times. Sometimes the number of pirated copies can even seem to surpass the number of legitimate sales. Ubisoft, despite their infamous reliance on clumsy and intrusive DRM, claims that their piracy numbers have now reached around 93-95%. Would you believe for a moment that this is true? CEO Yves Guillemot would certainly like you to.
In response to this catastrophic loss of imaginary revenue, Guillemot has announced that Ubisoft intends to switch to the Free-to-Play model for the majority of their future PC releases.
“We want to develop the PC market quite a lot and F2P is really the way to do it. The advantage of F2P is that we can get revenue from countries where we couldn’t previously – places where our products were played but not bought. Now with F2P we gain revenue, which helps brands last longer.
It’s a way to get closer to your customers, to make sure you have a revenue. 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 to 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.”
Examples of upcoming releases that fall into the initiative include Silent Hunter Online, Anno Online, The Settlers Online, Heroes of Might and Magic Online, Shootmania Storm and Ghost Recon Online, all announced last week at Gamescom.
So called “companion gaming” is also part of the strategy, integrating mobile devices and social networks into games to discourage piracy. Because we all know Facebook is gonna last forever, right? If Guillemot was disappointed with sales before, it should be amusing to see the effects of further DRM and tacked-on social integration on Ubisoft’s games from here on out.
I don’t even bother pirating their games.
I know a lot of people that will specifically pirate their games not to deal with the idiotic DRM. The only Ubisoft titles I actually paid for in the last few years was the AssCreed/HoMM5 bundle on GoG. Without the fucking DRM. Surprise, maybe the guys at CDProjekt are at least understanding that.
I didn’t know that a total of 21 million people played Anno 2070.
I think I’ll set up a store that sells, I don’t know, shoes.
I’ll set up cameras covering everywhere at every angle, and hire a person to follow every potential customer around. If the customer leaves without buying anything, I’ll claim that they stole some of my shoes. These goddamned customers keep stealing all my shoes, how am I supposed to make a profit?
I’m pretty sure it’s not the first time Ubisoft spawns such numbers in regard to piracy and how it hurt them.
@ “maybe the guys at CDProjekt are at least understanding that” (Urlu)
Let me remind you that CDPR guys were sending letters to alleged pirates in Germany with demands to return the money lost on pirating their game (did it via big law firm, a few thousands sent IIRC). They halted the operation only after a large outcry from gaming community that, as they realised, could hurt their sales more. CDPR knows now, but they weren’t knowing always.
Hey, assholes, how about this:
Stop milking your IPs and make actually good games.
Remove DRM. Remove multiplayer paid DLC. Remove yearly multipler iterations.
And stop being so fucking obviously evil. Then people will stop downloading your games OUT OF PROTEST.
I wouldn’t be surprised if their current PC games really did have 90% piracy rates. There’s a shitton of people that download these games illegally to get the moral high ground.
It’s kind of ironic, how that concept is interpreted in entirely the wrong way by these idiots.
i’d love to see their study that backs up those numbers that he pulled straight out of his ass
While it is true that not every pirated copy represents a lost sale, certainly some of them do. It’s still wrong and you shouldn’t do it; except for abandonware software piracy is effectively stealing. Still, as crimes go it is pretty mild, and the industry response has often been untempered by consideration of unintended consequences. Part of the problem is it’s almost impossible to quantify – a viable torrent represents potentially unlimited installed copies but not everyone who can download them will, and some fraction who do will buy the game.
There are interesting parallels that can be drawn between anti-DRM backlash and the interaction of people with government- Government decides to pursue tax evaders more aggressively but the new policies they implement to drive down tax evasion are so onerous that most people start shifting their income off-book so they won’t have to report it. Tax revenue falls, so government tightens down more, which causes increasing resentment and so on. Similar parallels can probably be drawn with anti-gang efforts in big cities – in theory it’s not a bad idea, but when handled badly the attitude in some neighborhoods shifts towards treating the police force as an occupying army.
I recall reading about CD Projekt’s dual release of the Witcher 2 on Steam and GOG, though I forget exactly where. The latter they released with some hesitation because of the strict no-DRM policy. They started watching the pirated software networks and discovered that the GOG version never turned up despite being theoretically redistributable without modificiation. The Steam version had its copy-protection stripped and started floating around almost immediately. The lesson is that the people who actually strip the copy protection and put hacked games up for free seem to be doing it as an act of defiance, just to show that they can defeat the copy-protection. Remove the copy protection and they lose interest, and the people who buy games with no copy protection respect the developers more and are less likely to pass the game around illicitly.
Aen faile men hiria tendedda. “Conquer with courage, not with strength.”
Putting aside the absolute absurdity of those numbers, where did he even get them? Besides deep from inside his own ass, I mean. What sort of methodology would you even use to get people to self-report an illegal act?
Sure, blame piracy for the shitty sales of AssRev on the PC. Or maybe it was the fact that it came out a month after the 360 version and everyone who would have bought it for the PC got it for the 360 instead. Or that it was just AssBro in a new city and maybe people are tired of Ezio.
People will buy a product when it is quality made and convenient to acquire. If it’s too shitty to justify the cost, or too much of a hassle to get or play legally, they either won’t buy it or they will pirate it. Piracy is a crime of convenience. A person who would totally buy the game as-is does not suddenly not buy it because a pirated version is available instead.
I’d be insulted if I cared enough to pirate their games. As it is, the ancient copy of ghost recon sitting on my desk is likely to stay lonely for a while yet.
Free to play LULZ. It’s the new stupid shitty business model fad.
They were at 70% a few years ago, good to see they improved!
I envy Yves Guillemot, honestly. I wish I had my ass connected to the “All Statistics Ever Assembled” database, too.
I’m now picturing Guillemot as a late Howard Huges after reading this.
“Now with F2P we gain revenue, which helps brands last longer.”
What, Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed aren’t long enough? How long do they have to be?
Ubisoft does the right thing for the wrong reasons.
I really hope f2p will increase their games little, more inspiration, originality, creativity and color, less linear gameplay and less forced storytelling.
Probably won’t happen, and the standard goals are, to make more cinematic scenes you can’t cut off, more and bigger weapons you must unlock, and a long gaming experience with controls as complicated and frustrating as possible.
I guess I won’t play Ubi’s f2pees, although it’s a nice idea for a change.
To the torrents: a fantastic game, a game you really like, you’ll buy. Everyone does. With me, it’s the Hitman and Thief series (I like the stealth).
That’s a goal: to create a fantastic game someone would pay for, even when it’s free to get. As long as the big industry makes one crappy copy of an ego-shooter after an other there will be no stable fanbase and for that no reason to pay a cent for the games. To me there’s also no reason to download the games.