I saw this on dtoid and I have to ask here as well, is 95 percent rate really that unbelievable? 2dBoy reported similar numbers a few years ago, and they're an Indie company. You'd think their rates would be smaller.
Ubisoft Bemoans 95% Piracy Rate
- Thread starter BloatedGuppy
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Generally speaking I don't concatenate deaths and rapes with Ubisoft acting like a bunch of prats again, which might be why I find this funny and not depressing.erttheking said:
You're missing the point I was trying to make. It's the whole, this is this stuff getting shoved down my throat every time I go onto this website therefore I am desensitized to it and stop caring a long time ago.BloatedGuppy said:
I don't think you're meant to care really. Well, maybe RPS wants you to care. I find it funny. I don't get desensitized to funny things. Each new outrage is a fresh opportunity to laugh. They are clowns, errtheking. Look at their funny shoes. Look at their silly noses. Are you not entertained?erttheking said:
It feels like he just dragged his sweaty nutsack over every single game I purchased for PC. Not that I'm surprised, I'm used to this sort of treatment by Ubisoft.erttheking said:
I already said earlier I'm pretty speechless about this. It's more amusing how far up his own ass the CEO is than upsetting. It's not worth putting any more critical thinking into this beyond that though.
fyi, i'm tired of bashing devs too. But sometimes. Sometimes. You just gotta step back and take a moment to marvel at what you are witnessing before moving on.
...Can't say that I am. Just a little depressed. I've been a little unhappy personally for the past couple of days but then again I've never found pointing out someone else's idoicy to be funny. I don't know, maybe it's because I actually like Assassin's Creed (I wonder how many people on this website now think I'm an idiot for admitting that?) and I really don't care what a company does so long as their games still have a quality that I can enjoy at a reasonable price but...I dunno, I really just don't know. I guess I just don't get as fired up as other people do about these things...heh, guess that makes me a dirty casual.BloatedGuppy said:
While most sane ppl see it as ppl just not buying their games due to DRM and instead buying alternatives on steam.nikki191 said:
I'm sure UBi HQ know this but would rather forsake a large chunk of their existing PC gamers for a potentially more lucretive f2p market.
Anyone with half an eye on the gaming industry can see that the core gamer market is in a period of contraction. Companies like EA and Ubi are looking for a way to survive. And with Onlive closing down and Popcap laying ppl off they are quickly running out of viable solutions
This is the company that, in the past, has botched its PC releases so badly that, in at least one case (Rainbow Six Vegas 2), they had to crib a No-CD patch from a piracy group to fix the problems with the DRM they put on the product. The same company that called their DRM a "success" less than a year ago. Have they finally released that most of their PC players have abandoned them?
Are they seriously implying that, if their piracy rate is 95%, they would have sold 20 times more copies if everyone bought it legally? That is so patently absurd I'm shocked that Guillemot hasn't been fired already. A lost sale does not equal a pirated copy. It's the same as the RIAA claiming that they lost $72 trillion (which is larger than America's national debt at one time) to piracy.
Are they seriously implying that, if their piracy rate is 95%, they would have sold 20 times more copies if everyone bought it legally? That is so patently absurd I'm shocked that Guillemot hasn't been fired already. A lost sale does not equal a pirated copy. It's the same as the RIAA claiming that they lost $72 trillion (which is larger than America's national debt at one time) to piracy.
This is a damn disgrace. I'm quite a fan of a couple of games under the Ubisoft label. I even have two copies of Anno 2070(picked up the retail version and got the collectors ed. as a gift), I even have a collectors ed of Heroes VI. While their DRM is pretty ugly, it's not a deal-breaker for me personally. The games I enjoy from them are good enough for me to jump through some hoops, and my internet connection is stable.
But this, this is disgraceful. How would their PC dept. even operate with 95% of their product being pirated? Seriously?
But this, this is disgraceful. How would their PC dept. even operate with 95% of their product being pirated? Seriously?
Because I'm primarily a console gamer, I'm kind of unfamiliar with this DRM/anti-piracy controversy. However, the economics of this situation really interest me. The author of the RPS article makes some claims about evidence showing that piracy rarely leads to lost sales and that there is anecdotal evidence that it even encourages them. Could somebody just give me a quick rundown on the accepted theory as to why that is? To me, that seems counterintuitive; I would expect piracy to severely hurt sales. What's the deal?
I would love to see how many legit copies they have of any game sold? Then multiply that number by twenty and wonder how they think that without piracy that this many people would have bought the game legitimately.
BloatedGuppy said:
It would also help if you (and others like you) learned the difference between a Game Developer and a Game Publisher...
lol.
Not familiar with the evidence that it doesn't hurt (as far as I'm aware, there's just no hard evidence that it does hurt sales) but the anecdotal evidence comes from several people claiming to have "tried games out" by pirating them, liking them, then buying them.Wayneguard said:
Piracy rates of Ubisoft games are almost definitely inflated by the number of people who will have downloaded cracked copies to ensure they can always play the game. Their DRM has been known to render their games completely unplayable. I stand by my opinion that most pirates just don't like paying for stuff, though. It doesn't matter how hard you make piracy, these people WILL get it for free or just not have it.
95% of the market is not pirating your games Ubisoft. 95% of the market is fed up with your treatment of them and has decided to give other people their money. Seriously shareholders if you value profit whip these Ubisoft clowns into shape.
It is generally accepted that media companies in general greatly overestimate the negative impact of piracy. Often the impact of piracy is measured in a 1 to 1 way, suggesting that every instance of pirating is a lost sale. This is a stupid thing to say, it is rare for people to have the money to cover all the piracy they get up to. That is why they pirate it. The actual impact varies greatly from product to product and is impossible to measure.Wayneguard said:
As for the positive effects of piracy, it basically boils down to word of mouth advertisement. My friend pirates a game, loves it and shows it to me, and I buy a copy of a game I would never have considered. Piracy has generated 1 sale for this game. This sort of thing actually happens quite often, though I highly doubt it completely counters the negative effects.
95% of companies that complain about piracy been a problem would take my money without giving me anything in return if they could.
Or control the internet, oh wait they tried that one...
But this making statistics up is fun
Or control the internet, oh wait they tried that one...
But this making statistics up is fun
Easy - for illustration purposes, let's assume that we have a game that sold 1000 copies and was illegally downloaded 5000 times from, say, a torrent tracker. The game costs $20, so it made profit of $20 000 but missed another $100 000 it seems. Let's examine this:Wayneguard said:
1. One illegal download does not a unique person. It's easy, yes? I can download the game twice or three times easily. Other people can do so, too. That's not to say that everybody pirates the game multiple times but it's enough to say that it's not 5000 different people that did the downloading.
2. Assuming someone managed to prevent all illegal downloads, the pirates might not have bought the game anyway. Not all of them would have skipped it, heck, probably a large-ish portion would have spent money on it, if there was no other way, however, the fact remains - not every single person who is included in those 5000 pirated copies would be a lost sale. They are, however, partially lost sales. Perhaps 1 in 4 people would have actually bought the game. Or 1 in 2. Or maybe it's 1 in 20, who knows (depends how good the game is). But not all of them.
3. There is overlap. Let's say, I pirated the game, liked it, and decided to buy it. Now I occupy both statistics. I'm a lost sale. Or perhaps I bought the game but displaced the CD and/or was just too lazy - in short, I got it off a torrent tracker afterwards. Again, I am part of both the "legal" and "illegal" numbers there. And who is to say that I'm the only one. Maybe there is 50 of us - 5% of the total sales and at least 1% of the illegal downloads.
Now, add these all together and it's pretty clear that our fictional scenario isn't missing out on 100 grand. Make no mistake, there is a loss but it's not as big as we initially estimated.
In the real world, there is quite more things involved but overall, the general trend remains - a pirated copy is not a lost sale. Perhaps 100 or 1000 (we could even go for 10 000 and above, depending on the popularity of the game and other factors) of them are equal to one full priced copy but to claim all of them are, is outrageous.
It sounds like an invented statistic. Let's assume it's true for a second. It's a good thing they put all that DRM in, because it definitely doesn't annoy regular customers and definitely combats piracy effectively