The new DRM is called “Hereplay”. It’s where Ubisoft requires you to play the game “here” at their offices.
Are you comparing Window 7 activate-and-forget DRM scheme with Ubi’s various, including always-connected DRM schemes?
I think the biggest problem, which you are basing your argument around, is that the figures he’s quoting are complete bullshit. There is just no fucking way they are accurate whatsoever. If indeed only 7% of consumers were buying their games, he’d have a real argument, but at the same time the entire fucking industry would have already imploded, unless gamers only pirate Ubisoft games, which is highly unlikely.
Indeed that 7% sales number is no way near possible to keep a business running.
Talking about Driver, when I bought it on the steam summer sale, it was pretty much unplayable because their DRM servers were overloaded or something. Every minute it would just stop for like 5-10 seconds when it tried to ping their server and waited for a response that would just time out, even during videos and menus.
It works now that the servers aren’t being hammered, but that was just ill-conceived in the first place
That’s all they are doing is speculating, or flat out lying. They toss out some absurdly large number that literally means nothing and has no way of being verified. And even if it were true, which is ridiculous, what does it even mean? Are they trying to claim that they are losing out on 95% of their sales?..nonsense.
Take the Assassin’s Creed series. For his numbers to ring true there would have to be 560 million pirated downloads of the series, that’s just ridiculous. Look up most pirated games and you will see they cap at about 4 million downloads. AC:B sold 8 million copies, are they trying to claim that without piracy they’d have sold 160 million copies?
This is just typical Ubisoft nonsense, which is why I don’t buy their games.
For the love of god, people, read the original article and not Joystiq’s “excellent” reporting on it. He didn’t say 93-97% of games are pirated. I leave it as an exercise to people interested in an evenhanded discussion (should there be any) to suss out the important contextual difference.
(For the record, Ubi DRM sucks and is part of the reason I haven’t yet played Anno 2070 more than the one day I bought it.)
For clarification, here’s what Yves actually said:
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 93-95 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.
Bolding mine.
Um … the original article states he said “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.”
Did they misquote him there as well?
"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.
How is that any different? He just said that only 5-7% pay…the rest is pirated. 93-95% piracy rate, which would make my last post completely accurate, according to Ubisoft.
Edit: and let’s not blame Joystiq, I didn’t even read the link until AFTER the original source and it says the same thing. It also says the same thing on about every other gaming site that has covered this story, which is a ton of them. Joystiq didn’t invent the quotes.
Yeah, I don’t quite get what we are missing actually. Not being sarcastic, but could you suss out the important context for me? If I’m misunderstanding something I’ll happily stop being extra bummed out that Ubisoft for being led by a raving lunatic.
You could interpret it as he’s only talking about those piracy-heavy countries with those rates…but it’s not 100% clear, as he says it after starting to talk about F2P in general and he also prefaced it with “normally on PC”.
In the original article, it’s clear he’s actually referring to certain countries in particular. “Developing the PC market” probably has little to do with the First World, and more to do with getting money from poor folks like the rising working class in Asia and the boring old regular poor folks in places like South America and Eastern Europe. So, I guess if you’re an investor or something, he wants you to be excited that F2P has allowed UbiSoft finally to monetize that tricky impoverished demographic.
There’s stuff worth discussing in there, but Games Journalism 2012: The Sinkening just mooshes it until it fits it into the usual mold of stuff they think you’re comfortable reading about, no matter how misleading.
Edit: The second paragraph that sets up the interview was:
Speaking to GamesIndustry International editor Matt Martin at Gamescom, Guillemot revealed that free to play has been an effective way for Ubisoft to market product to territories in which PC gaming had been so badly affected by piracy that profit was impossible.
I used to live in one of those regions. It was a pretty neat experience, to be honest. There were brick and mortar piracy stores in the local shopping centers. If you wanted to get a legitimate copy it was hard to do.
Yep. That right there is what this guy is talking about. How do you get people in those regions to pay?
The figure doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny.
Let’s assume that the numbers Ubi gave are typical in the industry.
We know of PC games that regularly sell a few million units (Civilization V for example). Are they suggesting that there tens and tens of millions of Civilization V players out there?
If nearly every game being played is pirated, then one would expect that most people they know are running pirated copies.
I know just 10 years ago, I knew lots of people who pirated games – it was easier/cheaper. But now? With digital distribution? I’m actually surprised when I find someone who went through the trouble to torrent or usenet bin a game. And the people willing to do that, are there scenarios where they would have otherwise bought them?
It’s like Ubi is still living in the days of BBSes and Zmodem where the fastest/easiest way to get a game was to go on the local warez BBS and download it and play it.
I don’t like piracy either but suggesting that 9 out of 10 copies of a given game are being played by pirates is ludicrous.
The only way I’d ever get another UBI game on my PC would be if I downloaded it by accident. No way in hell I’m buying or otherwise obtaining any more games from them.
93% is pretty epic.
So, 7 people bought an UBI title, the other 93 downloaded it to as their way of telling UBI to suck it, I suppose.
I suppose I should finish Assassins Creed on my 360 though.
Would anyone be surprised if UBI Exited PC gaming altogether, with a 93-95% copyright infringement rate how can they survive.
It wasn’t a stretch. There is no etc. Prince of Persia 2008 is the one and only. And it was a game that many people didn’t like, that got decidedly lackluster PC support (including no port of the DLC), so, go figure, it didn’t sell that hot.