News - Ubisoft says PC games piracy rate is about 95 per cent

[ScoTTisH-GingeR]

that 90% might be just ubisoft games as i find most of them lack luster and well crap i never play games tied to movies, AC series bores me, spliter cell im not a stealthy person so no, far cry 3 and the anno series of games are the only games they produce that i actually find worth while. Most of there releases over the years most people wouldnt buy in the steam christmas sale hell the installing of alot of ubisofts back catalog is more enjoyable than playing the games they release. From Dust, The Expendables 2 Video Game, Driver: San Francisco, The Adventures of Tintin, Call of Juarez are just some of the mince they have released in recent years look at there back catalog and find a game you would want to play u will be lucky to find a handful out of 153 games on there website

[KeyboardDemon]

Ubisoft know how many copies of games they have sold through physical copies, digital distribution on Steam and other third party vendors and through their own UbiPlay shop, they also know how many activations they have had, all this is data that would be collected through the relevant channels. If for every single sale/activation of a title they were getting 20 people playing the game(s) then surely they would have done more by now then wait until Gamescon to complain about it, or am I just not seeing the full picture?

As a fan of the Assassin's Creed series of games, and having recently bought one of the Prince of Persia games which make up the 10 or so UbiSoft titles I've BOUGHT (not pirated) for my collection I feel that the announcement or at least the way in which it was delivered is just plain insulting to all of UbiSoft's loyal customers. I can live with the DRM, at least through Steam it has not proved to be too much of an obstacle for me, I usually buy through Steam, download and install and of course Steam deals with the rest like patches and updates etc... so I have had no reason to complain.

I think UbiSoft owes it to their paying customers to demonstrate exactly how they arrived at this conclusion.

[Irishgamer01]

OK. My ghost recon UPLAY stopped logging in.
Contacted customer care. Asking why and what to do. (Yeah I knew its thier DRM)
(What I did was install it on my second PC, which usually isn't aproblem as long as you don't do more than 3 installs)

To fix the problem they wanted Photo's of box, CD, activation Code, and Receipt of game even though I bought it off amazon. WTF.
Now I had to do all this, and I still haven't heard back from them, and still cannot play the game (online).

So they want to know why people Pirate games, when the Pirate version are better than the Real thing

[Lee H]

Rather than whinge about the problem, why not go back to the 'demo' days where people could install the demo of the game to try it out before they bought it?

Surely if people were able to do this they wouldn't pirate the title as they will have a way of 'testing' the game as we all know games now from ubisoft are nothing more than a short 12 hour visualfest with hardly any decent gameplay at all.

[shaithis]

Which DRM are you thinking of? More recently they've dropped the always on stuff from the games I bought (AC series) which made it pretty OK-ish. Not that i'm defending them I hate invasive DRM as much as the next man..

Last UBI game I bought was Settlers 7.....needed always on...1 little internet blip and *BAM* Stutter, stop and sometimes even quit
The AC games I am not fond of personally so haven't really tried any of them since the first one which came free with a video card years ago.


My guess for the 90%+ figure they are comparing console sales with PC....

[shaithis]

Rather than whinge about the problem, why not go back to the 'demo' days where people could install the demo of the game to try it out before they bought it?

Surely if people were able to do this they wouldn't pirate the title as they will have a way of 'testing' the game as we all know games now from ubisoft are nothing more than a short 12 hour visualfest with hardly any decent gameplay at all.

Same as most companies now.......they are shovelling crap as quickly as possible.....and everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon.

After COD announced the elite service I had a whinge, friends told me DICE would never do such a thing, nor crank map packs out mere months apart.....Hello BF3 Premium and 3 map packs in a handful of months!

Just look at steam......titles twice the price they are sold for in stores and then DLC which adds up to double the price of the base game......just about everyone is trying to sell you a £60-120 game these days....disguising the extra cost in various ways.

[davesom555]

Ubisoft have a tendency to keep their game prices high - look at Anno 2070 still 30 quid plus after quite a few months. It's not so much their DRM, rather it's their pricing policy.

[Numenor]

Sadly demos don't seem to have any effect, and as often as not they end up turning people off buying the game.

You say that like it's a bad thing. If playing a demo convinces someone that the game is crap, or otherwise not worth shelling out for, then that person will not buy the game, not feel aggrieved at wasting their money, and therefore not be inclined to avoid (or pirate) the company's next release.

If a company lost out on actual sales because people played the demo and didn't like it, then maybe they'd learn to make their games better to begin with.

[kalniel]

Rather than whinge about the problem, why not go back to the 'demo' days where people could install the demo of the game to try it out before they bought it?

Because it doesn't make any difference to piracy rates, it takes development time away from finishing the game, and people tend to judge demos worse than the whole game.

End result: same piracy, most costs, less sales. Not something easy to justify to people who have invested in you.

Post release demos are significantly better, but still cost, and still have little effect on piracy.

[tickleonthetum]

What planet is he living on?! Only 5% of people pay for their games?!?!

Companies want to go to the Free-To-Play and always online systems so that they can charge micro payments in game as people end up paying them a lot more in the long run, and they just want an excuse!

Any once who's seen the John Riccitiello EA video knows how it works. He said that once you've got someone playing and they're in a fight to the death and their clip runs out, they're more likely to hit a reload at x cents button than just stop playing!

Game companies know full well that piracy is not what's hurting game sales. It's the DRM, always connected, enforced social networking, micro-payments that is doing it, but they just can't see past the bottom line of their accounts ledger!

They are who is killing gaming slowly, not the pirates!

I haven't bought a game for years because of the above things and no I don't pirate them either... I've just slowely given up gaming because of it so it's their loss...

[kalniel]

You say that like it's a bad thing. If playing a demo convinces someone that the game is crap, or otherwise not worth shelling out for, then that person will not buy the game, not feel aggrieved at wasting their money, and therefore not be inclined to avoid (or pirate) the company's next release.

If a company lost out on actual sales because people played the demo and didn't like it, then maybe they'd learn to make their games better to begin with.

The point is that a demo can't represent a game very well in a lot of cases. For some games it works fine, but others it gives a significantly worse impression, either because you need the full game to get the enjoyment, or because you can't afford the same polishing costs on a demo as you could a final game.

You can't simply cut out a chunk of code and say 'here's your demo' - they involve a huge amount of additional work that players of your full game are effectively paying for without getting the benefit from.

Most recent example I can think of is Kingoms of Amalur: Reckoning. The full game is really fantastic. But they put out a demo because it was a new IP and they wanted people to try it first. Unfortunately the demo had to be partly outsources because they didn't have the spare team capacity to build it and the quality of the demo was rubbish. Lots of people therefore thought the game would be as well, and didn't buy it. Studio is now dead.

What planet is he living on?! Only 5% of people pay for their games?!?!

Sorry to say, but that figure is entirely normal and what most of the industry believes is accurate (but would never say so). It doesn't surprise me in the slightest, and even makes some kind of sense when you compare hardware sales and server numbers or other hidden means of assessing these things.

But it's also a meaningless figure - there's nothing to link the people pirating the game to those who would buy the game, but nor does Ubi or anyone else in the industry make that link.

So it's a shocking, and almost certainly true figure. But that's just in and of itself really, so you get an idea of the numbers involved. (And these players usually incurr a cost for the studios in terms of support etc.)

[SciFi]

You just need to look at things like world of goo to know that people will pay for what they like!

That's why that was pirated at such a high rate despite only costing 1p or whatever?

Now, if we could have a return to the good old days where the first few levels of a game were released as a 'DEMO' or 'Shareware' as it was called and you pay for the full game....

That would drop pirate rates by tonnes!

Sadly demos don't seem to have any effect, and as often as not they end up turning people off buying the game.

First point: Evidence please? WOG went to pay-what-you-like because of the pirates...then went on to make MORE than it did from retail...

Second Point: My point exactly, tricking people into paying £40 for a **** game / game they don't like once playing it does not constitute a moral way of doing business. If you want you customers to play fair you need to do so also..

[kalniel]

First point: Evidence please? WOG went to pay-what-you-like because of the pirates...then went on to make MORE than it did from retail...

And it was still heavily pirated even at pay what you want! Crazy, but that's pirates for you.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/1...-rate-near-90/

There has been some research I pointed to in one of the last piracy topics, it suggests that price has nothing to do with why most people pirate. Which I can believe - sure it might make a difference for a few, but once something is easy to get with a click for free, even paying 1p is much more hassle.

[aidanjt]

Yet another guestimate plucked out of thin air.

[kalniel]

Yet another guestimate plucked out of thin air.

What would you guestimate the piracy rate to be then?

I'd guestimate between 1 in a 10 and 1 in 100 copies played are legitimately bought. It's fun to do, but other than throw a spotlight on just how stupid and short-sighted the majority of PC gamers are, there's not a lot of point. You can't argue with stupid really. Just move to where the money is, which is casual, f2p or consoles.

It's frustrating in one sense, because PC gaming could rock the world.

[SciFi]

First point: Evidence please? WOG went to pay-what-you-like because of the pirates...then went on to make MORE than it did from retail...

And it was still heavily pirated even at pay what you want! Crazy, but that's pirates for you.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/1...-rate-near-90/

There has been some research I pointed to in one of the last piracy topics, it suggests that price has nothing to do with why most people pirate. Which I can believe - sure it might make a difference for a few, but once something is easy to get with a click for free, even paying 1p is much more hassle.

A fair cop guv :-) I still say that 'Piracy rate %' is a stupid concept. If you can prove that 100% of downloaders would have paid then fair enough but you can't.

Personally I think that real cancer in gaming is the constant lazy console > PC ports, the games that need as much brain power to do as a 2 year old. "Smash space until something happens" or "press t within the 500 ms window to kill the guy, repeat until you get though because you have it memorised"

I want games that test my brain, make me think and last linger than 8 hours. Funny thing is I would pay twice the box price for that... Hell I have spent over £300 on EVE On-line and consider it a bargain at the price!