Ubisoft Claims 95% Piracy Rate On Their PC Titles
Ubisoft isn’t doing itself any favors when it comes to explaining why it needs its draconian DRM. In an interview with GamesIndustry International, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot revealed that around 7 percent of people who play their F2P games ever end up actually purchasing any premium content. That’s not exactly a shocker.
The shocker is that Guillemot claims that their regular PC products are pirated at a 95% rate. According to him, it’s apparently cheaper to develop F2P content, as they’re basically getting the same amount of money out of F2P as they are out of the regular games. Well, I have some solutions for Mr. Guillemot to help make his regular PC games more profitable.
First off, get rid of that apparently useless DRM. If you’re wasting all your money in developing a DRM that 95% of people can still bypass, then why bother using it? Don’t give me that line that “because then EVERYBODY can pirate it!” After all, Valve and other companies have proven that if you offer a superior service, people will pay to use it. I know that I’d rather shell out the 10 or 20 bucks to play a game than to find a torrent, download it, check it for viruses, and then find a CD-key cracker in order to install the game.
Here’s another tip that kind of ties in to my previous one: quit making gamers out as being the “enemy”. By making statements like “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” you’re telling us that you resent us, and guess what, we’ll retaliate. Many gamers pirate your titles not because they’re cheapwads, but rather out of sheer principal. Trust me, if you start treating your customers as, well, customers, and not as vile, disease-ridden vermin, you’ll probably find your little piracy problem start to wither away quite a bit.
