PC gaming has "around a 93-95% piracy rate" claims Ubisoft CEO (PCGamer) [View all]

Source: PCGamer

Tom Senior at 05:34pm August 22 2012

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has been speaking to GamesIndustry International about Ubi’s reasons for embracing the free to play model. He says free to play games are more cost effective to create because typical PC releases are so heavily pirated. He claims that "only about five to seven per cent" of players pay for PC games, "the rest is pirated."

Guillemot doesn’t provide any evidence for this, but insists that the rate of paying customers for a traditional release is equal to that of a free to play game. He says that the free to play model lets Ubisoft "take content which we’ve developed in the past, graphics etc," to make "cheaper games and improve them over time."

(snip)

"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 93-95 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."

It would be very interesting to learn where Guillemot has taken the "93-95 per cent" figure from, but a belief in that high a rate of piracy would explain the aggressive DRM strategy that Ubisoft have been pursuing for the past few years. Ubisoft recently announced that they’ll be charging into the free to play market with three new games, Anno Online, Silent Hunter Online and Heroes of Might and Magic Online.

Atricle: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/22/pc-gaming-has-around-a-93-95-per-cent-piracy-rate-claims-ubisoft-ceo/

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As one of the commenters on the PCGamer site said "around 100% of Ubisoft CEOs are fucking morons". This follows from exactly the same data that the Ubisoft CEO cites (none at all).

It is not the first time that Ubisoft has made this sort of claim, and I don't remember ever seeing any shred of evidence for it. Every time the claim was made in defense of Ubisoft's always on-line DRM. Could it be maybe that people stopped buying Ubisoft games, because of that DRM?

I haven't bought an Ubisoft game in ages, and I have very poor impulse control during Steam sales! I don't pirate either, so I haven't played any of their recent titles at all. In this and other cases players who pirate games have much less hassles compared to legitimate buyers, who have to jump through endless hoops, and from what I've heard Ubisoft's UPlay system isn't bug free.

If what the CEO says is true, why is Ubisoft releasing PC Games at all? Ironically (again if what he says is true), if Ubisoft were to release their games completely without DRM their revenue would probably go up, since more people would be willing to buy their games... But they seem to go out of their way to discourage people from wanting to buy their games.

Piracy is only one of PC gaming's problems. A huge one is games being released as lazy console ports; I'm not referring so much to graphics as to terrible performance issues, checkpoint-only saving systems, no mod support, key bindings that can't be remapped (or only partially with a bunch of tasks being assigned a single key), or control responses optimized solely for gamepads and no other input method (driving in Saint's Row 2 on PC is a nightmare). If these things were addressed properly I think it would help sales a lot more than all the DRM in the world.

And if they think they're gonna make it in the free-to-play MMO market with cheap old assets, I doubt they'll get very far. That sector seems pretty unforgiving.

And, although I sometimes sound like a huge Steam fanboy, it took me a long time to warm up to it, and I'm still not comfortable with the control it has over a large portion of my games library. But in the end the sales are good, and it's mostly hassle free, so it's a compromise.

Ok, rant over.

Discuss.