Ubisoft: 'Vast majority of PC gamers are PIRATES'
Ubisoft reckons just one in ten PC gamers legitimately source games, using the figure as justification for a move towards more free-to-play and web browser-based titles. The French software publisher has eyes set on growing its PC market share - but insists the only way forward is to offer games completely free, dangling the …
This topic is closed for new posts.
Re: Pft.
"But you're not just reading. You're POSTING. And last I checked, that REQUIRES an account with credentials like an e-mail address. Guess what else requires a few credentials and an e-mail address. I recommend you actually TRY to start a Steam account and walk a virtual mile in my shoes before sneering at Steam's success."
No thanks. Anyway, noticed how I don't need to do anything to use The Reg? It also doesn't cost anything to post, doesn't come with an insidious DRM mechanism, and the Reg doesn't demand I log into them in order to check Slashdot or Techcrunch. I suggest you actually try huffing jenkem before sneering at it, or does that argument not work when I use it?
"Warranties, newsletters, other useful stuff"
So.. something I get by law anyway, and spam. Well that's useful.
"Exactly. These days, the DRM's on the DISC, too! Ever heard of activation limits? The Spore controversy? This whole Ubisoft business? These all involved PHYSICAL COPIES."
Physical copies that I have not bought because they are just as retarded as Steam.
"two words: OFFLINE MODE."
Two words: ONLINE ACTIVATION.
Two more words: CAPS FRENZY.
Plus...
It's obviously still making enough money to produce PC versions as well as XBOX/PS varieties, else you'd assume they'd move to console-only for new releases if there was no money in PC.
They just don't get it, do they.
I'm an honest PC gamer of twenty years ... and if anything would ahve made me dishonest, it is the interfearence that their ludicrous protection systems have had on my gaming experience.
If they really think that paying to receive items in a game is going to make a difference, then they're right ... it will mean the difference between my picking another game ... because it is useless to go up against those who have an unfair advantage ... ie. a better weapon because they've paid for it. Ergo the only way to really compete is to buy a decent weapon yourself. Skill? Practice? Not rewarded in scenarios such as these.
Personally, the last games I've bought have been from the Humble Indie Bundle ... I've played Darwinia through a good number of times ... and they come on Linux as well! Woot! I've also paid for Minecraft and even though I'm hosting my own server, I'm really getting solid value for money out of that game. Now THAT has resulted in a rich Notch (just doing rough calculations of "games" sold) ... and Ubisoft haven't seen any of my hard earned for years.
And I'm a happy, honest, gamer thank you very much.
(I'd really like to dust off my collectors edition of Black and White ... but the only way to get that running on a Linux machine will probably require .. um ... hacking, presumably. Too much effort for a game, IMHO.)
Re: They just don't get it, do they.
WINE can run a surprising amount of stuff these days in linux, might be worth 20 mins trying it ?
Re: They just don't get it, do they.
And as for this always connected crap ... it's a case of ... oh, the Internet is down. That means I can't troll people on the interwebs. I know! I'll play a ga... oh. :-(
After Microsoft Live and Sony took a one month bath each, I've witnessed more and more talk of people who are more wary of buying on-line titles; and if that is all Ubisoft are willing to offer the market, then I'm just glad I haven't got any shares in their company.
Nuff said.
Re: They just don't get it, do they.
@ge Nah, not really. The protection on that game was quite high for its day. Mind you, I remember trying to decode "Nightshade" in my younger days; now that was a night-mare :-) Even now it would take a serious effort to unpick all the memory encoding that went on ... they actually seeded it using one of the BBC's own timing chips. No chip, or another interfearing piece of software in the background, and forget about it.
B&W is one of those that requires the disk to be in the drive all the time and I can't make a copy of it, and ... you know, all this protection junk just turned me off. Once I had a copy of Tomb Raider, I think it was 3 (I've got all the earlier ones) and one of their protections was so incompatible with some CD drives that Eidos had to ship me a patch that bypassed their own security!!!
I'm just so turned off by battling the protection systems (after forking over my wonga) that I just won't buy the games any more. It always infuriated me that I had so many problems while the pirates had none of the crap that I was suffering.
Re: They just don't get it, do they.
Maybe you are honest but most people aren't It's not like this is some new thing because of their evil DRM. Tribes had more pirates and legit gamers. What's the excuse there? It's a good game, no drm and everyone apparently liked the developer and yet most people opted to steal it.
The truth hurts but everyone's perpetuated this idea that if you weren't gonna pay for it anyway then it's perfectly fine to download it. Now everyone believes they wouldn't have paid for it anyway.
DRM. Isn't cheap. It's an expensive addition to a game so they're not doing it to be dicks. It's because it works well enough to warrant the cost.
Freetards are ruining PC gaming.
Re: They just don't get it, do they.
DRM is ruining PC gaming.
There I fixed it for you.
@Michelle
You say you're an honest PC gamer but isn't that a contradiction in terms?
Re: They just don't get it, do they.
"DRM. Isn't cheap. It's an expensive addition to a game so they're not doing it to be dicks."
Right. They are doing it to be c*nts.
Blah
What a crock of bullshit from Ubisoft. 7% of people will spend £30 on a game and 7% will also spend 20p on an outfit so we might as well focus on the 20ps. I find the 7% figure quite unlikely in the first-place, Ubisoft flog themselves very heavily on Steam and I imagine would do well as a consequence.
I can't understand this logic
The PC game market, which is bigger than any one console,and, for many classes of game that receive both console and PC releases, frequently bigger than all the consoles put together. I can't understand why you'd want to pass up that money just because you imagine (doubtless based on very dodgy statistics) that for every quid you take, another 19 could have been taken from people who pirated your game instead of paying.
How does it make any sense at all to forego all revenue because you're now foregoing some revenue? How does free to play help you make revenue from those people who now pay nothing? Aren't there people (like me) who would pay full cover price for your game, but would never use in game stores for vanity items and have a distaste for anything that smacks of pay to win?
It's just such a strange accounting that makes real these imaginary losses from piracy and using them to wipe out the real profits you're making from real sales.
Re: I can't understand this logic
-----
The PC game market, which is bigger than any one console
-----
Ummm no - no it isn't, the PC gaming market is quite niche now; less even than the PS3:
DRM fault's
Eliminate DRM, Reduce the price of game to that of movies et voila Piracy reduce to mere anoyance. Plus, piracy on the Xboxe 360 and wii (and now PS3) is also very hight. Ubi make greate game, reduce the price by 75% et you will get people to buy them again. it is as simple as that. sute the game is worth 50 or 60, but selling 20$ will result in so much more sale that it will result in more profit and a lot less piracy.
There is a lot of game that i tryied (and event finished) before i buy...... but there is a huge pile that i try before i buy and never finished and never buy....who want to pay for a flop
Re: DRM fault's
Not true. Games like world of goo are exceptionally cheap and DRM free and still had piracy rates above 80%.
Re: DRM fault's
Piracy rates above 80%? Says who? How can anyone know?
Re: DRM fault's
Says the devs themselves, and they can check by inspecting leaderboard IPs. Barring some dynIP churn as well as NATting, if you have a ton more IPs posting to your leaderboard then you have receipts of sale, what does that tell you?
Re: DRM fault's
"if you have a ton more IPs posting to your leaderboard then you have receipts of sale, what does that tell you?"
It tells you people have laptops, tablets and mobile phones that don't stay in the same place. So it tells you nothing!
Re: DRM fault's
At the time that article was posted (November 2008), tablets and mobes didnt run World of Goo (that came three years later). As for laptops, you still need a decently-specced machine to run it as well as the inclination to run it enough to post a high score. That narrows the field. Now look at this way: they claimed to have basically had TEN TIMES as many locations post scores as they had purchases. Given that most of the scores had to have come from mostly-static desktop machines (since laptop gaming is a niche and the game wasn't mobile then), what does that tell you NOW?
Re: DRM fault's
"what does that tell you NOW?"
It tells me that most ISPs use dynamic IP addresses.
They'll have to try harder...
Most games are built around the multiplayer side these days and well, why pay for a game that gonna be hacked in a couple of days anyway.. Why pay £29.99 for an 18+ rated FPS only for a 13yr old to scream and swear at you?
(Disgruntled 35yr old gamer of 20+ years..........)
Give me a decent story and 10+hrs of decent game-play any day....
>Ubisoft: 'Vast majority of PC gamers are PIRATES'
PC Gamers: "Vast majority of Ubisoft games are not worth buying."
Here here! But...
There's one great thing about Ubisoft, rather ..
Stargate - Ubisoft - Circle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJjJY5YpKRI&feature=fvwrel
No I have nowt to do with him, but my kids and I just love those videos.
For the record, PC games worth buying (according to self centred me).. Dragon Age (all of 1, 1.5 and even 2), Starcraft 2 (Wings of Liberty), Skyrim. Can I even remember a Ubisoft game? Oh yes, Assassins Creed 1, that's it. If it was their franchise back then.
What about all the people who pirate and then go and buy the full game?
Also, part of the problem is that Ubisoft predominantly pushes franchise-reaping games, though I have seen them invest in smaller studio titles of late, maybe they're learning not to concentrate solely on the big names year on year on year.
I'm confident those four people won't skew the statistics.
"What about all the people who pirate and then go and buy the full game?"
Bollocks.
However... what about all the people that bought the full game then installed a pirated copy to avoid the DRM? I have a large pile of games behind me and a matching folder of cracks for most of them. 1st thing I do after installing is apply a crack, before even running the games. Sometimes before installing ;)
Wonder how they count those installs. Pirate or paid? (Hint: it's piracy;)
"What about all the people who pirate and then go and buy the full game?"
These are the same people who use P2P networks to only download Linux distro's
Yeah Right
Essentially Ubisoft have screwed their own sales by their inability to realize their DRM policy and bad recent games are the problem, not rampant piracy.
Their PC platform sales have dropped by 90% in the last couple of years (Source: PC Gamer) , inconveniently in the same time period they introduced always on DRM, long outages when people couldn't play games due to DRM server administration etc.
Rather than admit , yeah, hugely restrictive DRM was a mistake and doesn't make people buy more games, they have instead gone "Well, clearly no-one buys any games any more, thats why our sales dropped 90%, so we are going to give stuff away for free instead and hope to addict people to micropayments like some kind of drug dealers"
I pay for all of my games (mostly via steam) , but I haven't bought an Ubisoft game (apart from really old ones) for a while due to the dual facts that:
1) They didnt look any good
2) Always on DRM puts me off. Steam has an offline mode that works fine.
Idiot Ubisoft Trolls: not content with wrecking their games with DRM they are now inventing piracy figures, probably in the hope of making us feel sorry for them or to hide profits.
I've still not played AC2 since the DRM measured wiped my first hours of (dull) progress, I swore off their entire catalogue at this point excepting when I can get them for pennies via Steam :)
I am surprised that nobody ...
used the pirate icon for comments yet.
International Talk Like A Pirate Day is just weeks away!
ARRH!!
Idiots.
I use steam, 100% legal games and fully supported by the nice devs at steam (most of the time anyway)
That is a DRM process and it works nicely.
DRM kills games if done badly because it saps resources and you have to be online, which means you can't stick on a laptop and play on the train / plane / holiday. So people pirate just to get a game to work half the time. And because EA especially make such poor sequels that people want to try before they buy.
And Ubisoft haven't made a good game for ages, so no wonder they don't sell.
Most gamers are pirates? Err no, most gamers use steam these days.
I'm with Jason if a game is worth paying for I buy if its not I dont bother paying for it or I rent it on a console. Maybe if companies like ubisoft actually produced quality games which were released without the need to download a 500mb+ patch on release day to make the game playable people might actually be more inclined to buy. They dont treat there customers with respect and the compound that by calling us a bunch of thieving pirates, thats another publisher I shall avoid unless the game is too good to miss.
Not going there.
I own several hundred games, mostly in physical form but some on Steam and GamersGate, and quite a few indie bundles. I have, realistically, enough games to last me the rest of my life. The whole gaming industry could move, en masse, to this free model with the in-game purchasing option but my gaming life will continue as before.
Now here's the thing: assuming for the sake of argument that their figures are correct, roughly the same percentage of people who pay for games now will buy in-game content for free games. But one would think that the average selling price of a game now is far, far higher than the average selling price of in-game items. So while the number of purchasers will increase several fold, the average income per purchaser will decrease several fold; one would have to wonder if this will work out to an overall increase in revenue.
Of course there is also the question of whether free-to-play games will wind up decreasing the cost of making and "distributing" games. About this I know nothing.
I suppose that these "free-to-play" games could eventually be released in a stand-alone non-browser format for anyone who wants to purchase it whole; will they be released in such a form, I wonder?
Then there's the problem of what these in-game items are going to be. Either the items are unnecessary to playing and enjoying the game, which will not encourage purchases, or they *are* necessary to playing and enjoying the game, in which case how many people are going to enjoy the basic "free" game enough to purchase the items - or be so resentful that they will stop playing the game rather than purchase the item? (And then there's the obvious case of purchasing weapons that completely unbalance the game which would be especially problematical in multi-player games.)
There are plenty of unanswered questions and I expect that Ubisoft, Crytek et al will base their answers on their observations of how the "free-games"-market develops.
Re: Not going there.
It's just the classic problem of what makes more: a penny from a huge crowd or a pound from a select few. No easy answer as it depends on the payment amounts and group sizes. There's also the "nickel-and-diming" principle that can occur with Microtransactions.
Crap titles
I'm fed up buying games at full price which end up being played for an hour or so and then shelved. Many of the latest mmorpgs have been assigned to the wastebin after a month of play. I welcome free to play, I honestly do, it will give the developers and publishers a kick up the rectum to provide decent games because you wont be paying for it if it's crap, and if it's worth playing then you pay........
Old gamer here
Don't think I've played a Ubisoft game since the Amiga days.
Play Rayman Origins
Watched someone play it at a local game shop and thought it looked like fun, thinking of buying until I noticed it was Ubisoft. That's the closest I've come to buying a Ubisoft game in a log time.
I installed the free Babel Rising 3D game on my Nexus 7. Looks nice, game play is stupid, and they sell that as a PC game?
Ummm nope
Don't own a single hooky game. But then I'm not buying anything unless it's 3 for £10 etc.
What I DO often do is look for a no-CD hack so I don't have to leave the damn disk in spinnig.
I'd maybe get more from Steam if my bandwidth was bigger. Can't be arsed downloading 2Gb of stuff even when the price is good.
Re: Ummm nope
Slysoft's Game Jackal Pro may be what you are looking for.
Something to add..
I don't think anyone else has mentioned this here but i think it is fair to say that nearly every ubisoft release of atleast the last 2 years and probably further has been a horrible half-baked console port with as little thought given to the pc version as is necessary to get it out of the door as fast as possible.
I own a lot of Ubisoft games, i have problems with all of them on PC except Splinter Cell: Conviction
Splinter Cell: Double Agent: generally an awful game.
Hawx 1: Buggy as hell, multiplayer only works sometimes, tend to resort to hamachi.
Hawx 2: Awful, single player is terrible, awful mouse input lag, multiplayer doesn't work, not even with hamachi.
Vegas 1: Single player okay, multiplayer doesn't function correctly (atleast in coop anyway).
Vegas 2: See vegas 1.
Anno: Buggy single player, repeatedly stuck on quests with terrible, useless tutorials.
future soldier: I'm not entirely convinced this was worth the money, the game on elite mode was a complete joke, i may forgive them for the inclusion of some rather cool gadgets but £30 for a game i completed on elite in less than 9 hours, no.
And before anyone questions the rig i am running them on 6GB DDR3, i7 @ 4GHz, 7970 sapphire.
I'm not sure why i keep buying their games to be honest, they all look so good on release, then you install them and realise that they are still just as terrible. This is what Ubisoft need to look at, this is why they don't make much money.
I despair at ubisoft and to be honest myself as well sometimes for still buying this crap. My 200 game + steam account doesn't at all go against the figures ubisoft are stating here, not at all.
Re: Something to add..
So games suck so that means people will play it just not pay for it.
You know what I do if I think something sucks? I don't play / watch it.
People who pirate and say it's because the quality isn't there are just freetards and never intended to pay.
Re: Something to add..
I bought them. Yeah, kind of flaws your arguement doesn't it.
It doesn't mean i didn't think they were worth the money. Piracy aside they make bad games, make better games, make more money, simple. If what you say is true, perhaps a lot of people do not buy ubisoft games because of the points i mentioned, this being the case (as some replies in this thread would suggest) then ubisoft are losing a lot of money because they make bad games, not just piracy. That is what i am trying to point out.
Bundled network play is an issue too?
I was going to buy Uncharted 3 for PSN until I realised it came with an 'in box' code for online play - that I would then use to get it but would be useless on trade-in.
I've paid for it - I suppose for the online component too - so divvy me up 1 slot on the server. Now I sell it and someone new gets it - I no longer have it. Now THEY have to pay for the privilege of playing online - so Naughty Dog get two payments for one slot on the server.
I know, it's more complex than that but it is how I see it - hence I didn't even buy the software - Saint's Row the Third did it too (didn't realise when I bought it) - that's out of my collection now.
Sad thing is, I don't even LIKE the multiplayer on Uncharted - it was a personal stand against the paid network component.
Re: Bundled network play is an issue too?
For Naughty Dog....
They are welcome to the money!
Oh and on Disc it doesn't fill your drive.
As to selling a game of theirs - philistine!
And just because you don't play does not mean your slot is reused, use multiplayer and a slot is taken, and not reused.
BTW I only MP ND and Guerilla Games, and have 100s of hours on them.
The point is all software producers are going to go this way, I suspect in the end you will just have a thin client and all software will be presented by servers.
Maybe a few people who remember some golden age will moan but most of us will just accept it. People have never owned software only a right to use it this is just going to make this a physical reality
Ubisoft: make all of your games free-to-play...
...and I can guarantee I'll never send another penny your way.
But carry on justifying being a bunch of arseholes whichever way you like.
This topic is closed for new posts.
