Double A said:
Kanova said:
I'm not really surprised. Most of the people I know torrent and I am sure that a huge amount of people torrent PC games. They sure do lose a ton of money to pirates. A lot. So, yeah. I guess that is what happens.
Judging by the reactions in this thread, a lot of people don't pirate. There isn't an efficient way of finding out how many people do it, and it's even more impossible to calculate how many of them would buy the game if they had to, they're just pirating for teh lulz, or any other reason.
(This deals with PC pirating. Consoles are busy worrying about trade-ins more then anything.)
-Response to quote-
On a wild guess this thread is a terrible representation of pirates especially since it seems none will go forward with it or even if they do, they won't come outright and say it with their reason. That and as you said a completely lack of way to measure it.
-Extra info on pirating history and who will probably pirate-
The people who pirate aren't generally your "average user" on the pc but normally have better knowledge of internet/computers. Piracy became much, more common knowledge and more accessible for people to figure out how to do it basically(First major ease of use jump starting with napster/limewire etc... with music. Then again with torrent programs like bit-torrent/utorrent which is basically where it's still at and much larger in gaming then it was with limewire and such.) To put this is perspective most computer users don't know how to pirate even if they play non casual games(Even on a vent I frequent it seems every new person doesn't seem to know how to do it yet are 20+). That definitely puts Ubisofts numbers completely out of any realistic situation.
-Random info on some old DRM-
As some pointed out developers were still trying to stop piracy back in the day and it was probably quite effectively actually due to a lack of ease of use to find answers to piracy countermeasures in games like Kings Quest/Castles 2 although piracy was probably pretty minimal then. If anyone remembers those annoying answers to questions that you had to answer right from the manual(I actually lost the Kings Quest 6 manual back then causing me to pretty much not finish the game till a much much later date)
-Pirating Scares-
One thing commonly said always you see it all the time but basically since windows, never occurs or even on XP if you stuck to what has credibility is viruses. It is actually very rare for these to ever occur and experienced users never get them. That or anti-virus easily takes care of it.(Not an endorsement/encouragement if it needs to be reworded in a way let me know. It's just really a common scare tactic that originated from somewhere and used by developers all the time. It does work on people who are brand new to computers and in fact does keep them from ever going near pirating for the most part in cases unless they are influenced by pirates or curiosity)
-Reasons normally for pirating-
Basically some of the common reasons you'll see or hear are over,
-Cost-
Australia is especially common to see this.)
-Single-Player-
(Less common but still occurs, more often with people who like competitive multi-player, but still interested in playing a single-player game occasionally) - The game is only single-player so it lacks re-playability over little challenge or interaction. Also theirs absolutely no downside to pirating in this case at all (Multi-player actually has an incentive to play with larger bodies of players)
-Ease Of Access-
The area doesn't carry the game at all or in any reasonable means.
-Friends-
Not everyone owns the same games and don't want to buy a full price game to play with friends that they may play with only a few times.(This one is very major as you see with f2p games)
-Quality Control-
This one is now turning into a much more common one in which games are poorly optimized for the PC and not tested on some hardware specs or the game does not scale well at all on graphics settings due to lack of options or choice. We recently got nailed with a lot of these(Brink, Sonic Generations actually fits in here due to extreme requirements for little, Rage, etc...) It is not uncommon to just see flat out lies on system requirements basically, especially for minimal which you would assume means everything on lowest in 640x800 resolution which many times means less then 5fps on this setting. Or content is grossly over stated or hyped(Spore). This is the one that spawns the downloading game as a demo. Developers don't go out of their way normally to release an early demo for various reasons(Up to you to interpret the reason, if their hiding something etc..).
-DRM-
This one is more then likely over done and used as an excuse to bash with a lot(Ubisoft had it coming basically especially with the single player internet requirements). As for multi-player interruptions surprisingly you don't see many complaints about things for steam friends going down as an example on games(If they have multiplayer and it goes down under this system generally it is the dev's risk they took).
TLDR: Ubisofts most likely making up numbers or getting them with extreme bias, although it was probably hopeless due to their product quality along with the bad reputation they got dished out from all over the internet for their DRM and continued pushing it. Pirating will probably rise due to Quality Control issues. Also lots of extra info on pirating. Then reasons normally for pirating.
Feel free to leave comments responses arguments etc... or to just add to the post. Although I don't check on this site often, I was on to see if anyone responded to games I couldn't get I.D's on mainly.
