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

[kalniel]

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!

Absolutely agreed, which is why people like us need to buy the games so the developers listen to our dollars. If we don't, developers can only make games that people want to buy - which is casual games or console games etc. Then if we're lucky the bulk of the development cost is paid for by that market and they can cheaply port it to PC, otherwise there's just no incentive ('for the love of it' is fine if you are being paid by someone else like a govt. but the rest of the devs need to get food and/or attract investors to pay for their food).

[aidanjt]

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.

I wouldn't care to speculate. I could say it's 0.01-0.1%, but I have nothing more to substantiate that than Ubisoft's claim of 95%, or the 90-99% guestimate of yours. Ultimately it doesn't matter. Pirates will pirate, regardless of how much effort you exert to stop them, and wasting time/money/effort on non-customers is to the detriment to your actual paying customers, who'll probably give up having to deal with your draconian crap and either go with a competitor's product, or in the case of games, just lead a hassle-free pirate life instead.

DRM is an inherently flawed, self-defeating, self-prophecising failure.

[kalniel]

I wouldn't care to speculate. I could say it's 0.01-0.1%, but I have nothing more to substantiate that than Ubisoft's claim of 95%, or the 99.9-99.99% guestimate of yours.

Maths dear boy. 1 in 10 is 90% piracy rate, 1 in 100 is 99%.

[aidanjt]

Maths dear boy. 1 in 10 is 90% piracy rate, 1 in 100 is 99%.

Sorry about that, fixed.

[crossy]

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.

I don't agree with that last part - sure I'm not the quickest player, but I've had some extended play out of the last couple of Assassin's Creed games (not multiplayer) and Driver:SanFrancisco.

As to demo's - I agree. In fact, given EA's love for the digital distribution, (and I'm sure they're not alone), why not take a trick from consoles and have your "demo" as nothing more than a feature limited version of the full game. Then if you like the (free!) demo, you go onto uPlay, Steam, Origin, etc and buy a code to unlock the rest of the game. I've done this with a couple of XBox titles and it seems a pretty fair way to do things for all concerned.

Reason I'm suggesting that this way of doing demos is best is that I've had one or two games where the demo's been excellent and the resulting game hasn't lived up to it. And in that case, it's obvious that the demo had been "tuned" to be very good, tuning that the resulting game sorely lacked.

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!

Yes, I went with Elit3 as well - although given my lack of need to do MP it was money wasted and I definitely won't be renewing. As for the BF3 Premium, I took one look at it and decided it was a "me too" play and therefore not worth spending hard earned on.

But you're right - the expectation now seems to be that you turn out the base game with the intention that everyone will be forced to pony up more money to get it beyond the basic playable level. I've seen suggestions of a CoD/MoH type game where you get rifle, pistol and grenade and nothing else - anything "fancier" than that is in DLC'd "feature packs". If true then this is a lame idea that we definitely need to push back from.

On thing about the F2P with the DLC'd "revenue stream" - how long before the same pirates that are "ripping off" the games do the same with the DLC? So rather than pay EA/Ubi $5 for a weapon or map pack, you hit the torrents and get it for a fraction of that cost, or even free?

Keep thinking like that and surely the only possible ending is that the major publishers forgo the PC altogether and concentrate on consoles instead. On the upside, that means the PC's left with publishers who don't feel the need to slap in DRM up the wazzoo.

[shaithis]

Absolutely agreed, which is why people like us need to buy the games so the developers listen to our dollars. If we don't, developers can only make games that people want to buy - which is casual games or console games etc. Then if we're lucky the bulk of the development cost is paid for by that market and they can cheaply port it to PC, otherwise there's just no incentive ('for the love of it' is fine if you are being paid by someone else like a govt. but the rest of the devs need to get food and/or attract investors to pay for their food).

You must have forgotten the PC glory days....

Devs made a LOT of money, then the console push started and they started making more money from the "higher priced with less development time" console games.

It is greed plain and simple that is killing the PC gaming market...a simple case of diminishing returns on PC development vs consoles.....which is now being further exaggerated by people who are getting sick of poor console ports, which in some cases have been such a strait port that they have still been locked to the crappy 30FPS so many devs use on the Xbox.

Then look at ultimatum, g2play cdj etc (or even the recent BF3 Premium debarkle). Funny how the developers can make money selling their game for £10-20 in Russia, China etc yet it costs twice (or 3x, 4x) as much over here....and they seem to be one of the only industries that are allowed to divide up the world in this way. If I want to import almost anything else cheaply from abroad I can but the games industry and started clamping down on it.......Guess it's another wedge of "money for nothing" that they cannot stop themselves from exploiting.

The companies are not the ones having a hard time.....it is us. Consumers. Being paid less overall these days, with the constant cost of everything around us rising.

How much did EA, Valve, Activision, Blizzard etc make last year again?

[kalniel]

How much did EA, Valve, Activision, Blizzard etc make last year again?

EA lost $276m
Activision-Blizzard made $1085m
Valve is a private company so doesn't publish them.

Ubisoft have less clear reports.. I think they lost €53m

[j.o.s.h.1408]

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!

Play Arma 2/Witcher 1 and 2

[dangel]

Oddly enough Ubi's AC ports have been very good for me - aside from the very first one which had popup problems (which I can't honestly remember whether short distance was required because of hardware of the time). I've even played them all with the keyboard and enjoyed them throughly (although earlier incarnations needed a keyboard map to work out what the obscure hand symbol was versus the key you actually pressed). No issues of performance, game stopping bugs etc.

It's only really their DRM of earlier era that caused me concern.

[Gallarian]

90% pirate rate?

**** right off.

[Gallarian]

If Ubsioft put some time and effort into their PC games before trying to take money off us maybe people wouldnt pirate.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is the WORST console port game I have ever had the misfortune of playing and I had to part with £35 to do so.

It makes me physically sick to be called a thief by a company that wont even give the PC community the time of day.

[dangel]

If Ubsioft put some time and effort into their PC games before trying to take money off us maybe people wouldnt pirate.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is the WORST console port game I have ever had the misfortune of playing and I had to part with £35 to do so.

Actually I agree there - FS is a complete POS having seen it running. Good point..

In other news have you seen that Ubisoft is releasing this on the PC?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012...c/#more-121280


...despite the massive risks?

[sula]

Screw him, I played few "free" to play games and I hate this model. No UBI for me then.
It has no 'ceiling' on how much you spend, it is on going spending instead of one-time box buy and you're feeling like you're in mall shopping not just playing.

Much worse for me as consumer.

[sula]

One more thing. Many people pirate game AND buy after.

Why? Cause they check game before they buiy it. Simple.

But of course statistics are counting each pirated copy as wasted sale even if that person actually bought game and thus sale was not 'lost'.

[ScoTTisH-GingeR]

Another reason why pirating a game DLC... Some games have done DLC right like borderlands is worth the money for the extras, but many of the companys now seem to make the game and then strip parts out just to sell on bit by bit case in point mafia2, why pay for that game after content is missing instead pirate it and wait for all the content to come out and then buy it in a bundle for a usual street price or hold out longer just to be stuborn n stick it to the man!

[funke_munke]

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.

Highly debatable on the quality front. Check out various reviews around the net to get a general consensus. ALSO do you know the full story behind the creation of this game? It made gaming news headlines. I'm pretty sure there's some kind of fraud investigation going in to the amount of money borrowed to create it. It's not even as if it got great reviews. Plus, despite this, didn't it sell more than a million copies?

Oh I'm reading an article where the devs are quoted as saying it needed to sell 3m just to break even... On a new IP... Not the best example there dude.