Ubisoft Kills Ghost Recon: Future Soldier on PC

[rheianna]

So the 15+ games I have in my Steam library were all stolen? I didn't shell out over 300 Euros for those games? Thanks for the heads up Ubisoft...

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

crackers have been doing it for decades before the current gaming environment.

And phreakers have been doing phones, counterfeiters have been doing money, and plagiarists have been doing plot.

Hell, Barb Wire is a blatant pirate of Casablanca.

Thing is though, it's never been 95%. Not even on the most lucrative deals - which computer games certainly aren't. They have NO way of knowing how many pirated games are out there, or they'd have a way of stopping them.

That means it's just flim-flam.

Witcher 2 had no DRM from GoG. They still made a a good comeback on it, and so did CD Projekt Red.

Similar style of game to AC, similar pricing structure, similar level of bugs.

There's your counter argument.

Ubisoft have just called - let's have a quick look on Steam - 4 million people crooks because they want to play their games.

Even if we're talking 95% piracy, which would be pretty easy to prove is actually impossible, you're talking falsely accusing and abusing 200,000 people online at the moment.

Regardless of the veracity of their claims, that's still a level of social apartheid which is highly illegal and immoral.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

It's sounding like Ubisoft just finally snapped. They just threw their hands up and said, "You know what? Fine. We quit." Can't say I blame them. Repeatedly watching your hard work get stolen, then listening to people yell at you when you try to protect it (even if some of the ideas are probably not the best ideas), I'd quit after a while too.

 

[Findlebob]

Yeah bullshit. The pc community may have the most pirate's but if it was seriosly that many developing for the pc would be impossibe.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Oh this is hilarious, they are pretty much just declaring war on the PC gamer
No worries Ubisoft we wont force you to take money if you hate it.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Ubisoft are being douches to PC gamers?

Wow. I made this exact same post yesterday... Ubisoft are becoming predictable.

they say that WE are bitching?

they are acting like 5 year old cunts.

happy, ubisoft?

you've easily lost 99% of my business in all future prospects of games i might want, no matter what system it is on.

 

[sturryz]

As I PC gamer I am evil incarnate and I eat children, kittens and puppies.'

I also never pirate games

It's a good thing we got Ubisoft to point out how morally wrong I am as a person.

 

[Flac00]

To be honest guys, its not like this hasn't come out of nowhere. Almost every game is pirated constantly. Hell, with some older games, the only people who actually now get it is by pirating it. This isn't Ubisoft being just dicks. I mean sure, they overreacted, but they do have a legitamate reason. Take this as a lesson. PC people (and I am included in this), BUY GAMES, DONT PIRATE. You are ruining the market more than Call of Duty or Madden ever will.

I'm sorry. I buy my games (or receive them as gifts). Maybe it's the companies that should rather look at the quality of the products They try to sell me for 50$ on average. There is a reason why recently, majority of games I bought come from indie companies... those often feel as bargain even at their full price.

When You start to release crappy shovelware under the disguise of a game don't expect people to buy it right away. That's a first thing. Second thing PC market is not console market. We don't buy games on on day of release that often, we buy over longer period of time however. That's why 8 year old PC games still sell and still are played.

You don't see Blizzard constantly complaining about piracy, do You? First StarCraft alone sold in over 11 million copies (and that's just vgchartz data, which isn't really all that accurate when it comes to PC market). A 13 year old strategy game - niche genre.

As I said in previous Ubisoft related thread - please sell Blue Byte and Black Hole if You don't want to have anything to do with PCs. No need for those pesky strategy games to keep You down, right? I do not care about rest of Your catalogue.

Your skirting around the issue there though. Its not an issue of quality or anything like that. Pirating is stealing, no matter how shit the product is or how overpriced it is, it should still not be pirated. Stealing is wrong, both morally and legally, there fore you should not steal.
Think about it this way: Twinkies taste like shit, and probably cost too much money in my opinion. However, if I want a twinkie, I buy it, I don't shoplift. Its a simple as that. Sure, developers do make money selling games on the PC, but many are less willing to do so when they see people walking off with their product for free. They don't always do this for financial reasons, but also for moral reasons (at least in their own minds).

 

[TitsMcGee1804]

F you ubisoft, im a PC gamer but I own a PS3 also...I dont buy your sh*t games anyway, thanks for giving me more reason not to

BGAE is ubisoft right? DAMN

 

[ElPatron]

BUY GAMES, DONT PIRATE. You are ruining the market more than Call of Duty or Madden ever will.

Since the piracy affects mostly those titles, by your logic piracy is actually helping gaming because it is attacking the "annual release" strategy.

To be honest guys, its not like this hasn't come out of nowhere. Almost every game is pirated constantly. Hell, with some older games, the only people who actually now get it is by pirating it. This isn't Ubisoft being just dicks. I mean sure, they overreacted, but they do have a legitamate reason. Take this as a lesson.

Yes it did come out of nowhere. He has no justification to back those statements up. And neither do you, how is it a legitimate reason when people still buy physical games or from services such as Steam? Gaming is still making money.


Hell yeah, I took this as a lesson. I have a urge to pirate that game for my brother's 360. it's not like consoles can't have pirates or selling for the console crowd will grant you millions of sales.






I think that the only way to kill PC gaming with piracy is when you become able to pirate hardware.

F you ubisoft, im a PC gamer but I own a PS3 also...I dont buy your sh*t games anyway, thanks for giving me more reason not to

BGAE is ubisoft right? DAMN

They won't release it anyway. "Ubisoft. Because you suck, and we hate you".

Think about it this way: Twinkies taste like shit, and probably cost too much money in my opinion. However, if I want a twinkie, I buy it, I don't shoplift.

The only thing that is wrong in your analogy is that shoplifting requires a physical object to be stolen.

If someone doesn't like a company's actions, being the game for console or PC, they would not give money to that company anyway, and only play that game because they are presented with a free alternative. By doing so, they are not depriving a company from it's profits, only leeching off their content.

 

[TheBelgianGuy]

To be honest guys, its not like this hasn't come out of nowhere. Almost every game is pirated constantly. Hell, with some older games, the only people who actually now get it is by pirating it. This isn't Ubisoft being just dicks. I mean sure, they overreacted, but they do have a legitamate reason. Take this as a lesson. PC people (and I am included in this), BUY GAMES, DONT PIRATE. You are ruining the market more than Call of Duty or Madden ever will.

I'm sorry. I buy my games (or receive them as gifts). Maybe it's the companies that should rather look at the quality of the products They try to sell me for 50$ on average. There is a reason why recently, majority of games I bought come from indie companies... those often feel as bargain even at their full price.

When You start to release crappy shovelware under the disguise of a game don't expect people to buy it right away. That's a first thing. Second thing PC market is not console market. We don't buy games on on day of release that often, we buy over longer period of time however. That's why 8 year old PC games still sell and still are played.

You don't see Blizzard constantly complaining about piracy, do You? First StarCraft alone sold in over 11 million copies (and that's just vgchartz data, which isn't really all that accurate when it comes to PC market). A 13 year old strategy game - niche genre.

As I said in previous Ubisoft related thread - please sell Blue Byte and Black Hole if You don't want to have anything to do with PCs. No need for those pesky strategy games to keep You down, right? I do not care about rest of Your catalogue.

Your skirting around the issue there though. Its not an issue of quality or anything like that. Pirating is stealing, no matter how shit the product is or how overpriced it is, it should still not be pirated. Stealing is wrong, both morally and legally, there fore you should not steal.
Think about it this way: Twinkies taste like shit, and probably cost too much money in my opinion. However, if I want a twinkie, I buy it, I don't shoplift. Its a simple as that. Sure, developers do make money selling games on the PC, but many are less willing to do so when they see people walking off with their product for free. They don't always do this for financial reasons, but also for moral reasons (at least in their own minds).

Right. Except there's likely as much piracy on the consoles as there is on PC (no statistics - we can make up what we want), and lately games were pirated on consoles before they were on PC.

Think about it this way: Twinkies are being sold to Italians. Then the company goes, "Oh my god 95% (made up figure, no stats) of the Italians are evil criminals who steal our twinkies! We'll stop selling them twinkies and move over to Greece! (where there are as many criminals as in Italy stealing twinkies).

 

[CrystalShadow]

UbiSoft is just trying to monetize piracy. PC gamers will complain about anything.

What a sad bunch of fuckers. Instead of trying to understand why piracy happens (hint: overpriced games that are full of bugs and DRM such that the cracked version works better than the legal version (*cough* Skyrim *cough*) and games that are shitty ports or just crap overall) they piss all over the PC market.

Piracy existed before these things you mention. There's been software piracy before there was ever DRM.

Piracy exists because it gets people free software. These other benefits you mention aren't the driving force behind it; crackers have been doing it for decades before the current gaming environment.

There's been software piracy since at least the commodore 64 days. But... There's been DRM almost as long.

Kings Quest 3 contains DRM. And that's from 1986...
And It's probably not the first.

Granted that kind of DRM wasn't hugely effective. But neither is modern DRM. That's the irony of it.

In any event, for a pragmatic developer the question isn't how much piracy is there, but 'can I make a profit from this game'.

I'm really not convinced that piracy on PC, extreme as it is, is enough to make it impossible to make a profit.

(And DRM is clearly a big issue. One of the MOST pirated games in recent memory is Spore. Which had a big controversy about it's DRM. - It seems particularly ironic this suggests the More extreme the DRM, the higher the piracy figures are.)

 

[Amnestic]

"because we know that 95 percent of our consumers will pirate the game."

There's no other way to really say this so...Source or it didn't happen. I'm no games journalist, but there must be one person out there willing to head over to Mr. Arnoult's place of work and ask him to back his claim up.

He didn't say he 'thinks'. He said he 'knows', which implies empirical knowledge. He should therefore have no trouble proving it then, and indeed should be all but happy to.

 

[Vrach]

we know that 95 percent of our consumers will pirate the game. So we said okay, we have to change our mind."

In other news, Ubisoft proclaims their always-on DRM a success!
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111951-Ubisoft-Says-Always-On-DRM-A-Success

OT: Ghost Recon still exists? Wasn't that the subpar shooter we had some 10 years ago that everyone wondered what good it did next to franchises like Splinter Cell/Hitman/etc.?

 

[Tigurus]

What!? The Tom Clancy game I was sort of interested about isn't going to be on PC?! Well, you can kiss my money goodbye then 'cause I won't gonna buy it for the PS3! Bastards!

 

[Keava]

Your skirting around the issue there though. Its not an issue of quality or anything like that. Pirating is stealing, no matter how shit the product is or how overpriced it is, it should still not be pirated. Stealing is wrong, both morally and legally, there fore you should not steal.
Think about it this way: Twinkies taste like shit, and probably cost too much money in my opinion. However, if I want a twinkie, I buy it, I don't shoplift. Its a simple as that. Sure, developers do make money selling games on the PC, but many are less willing to do so when they see people walking off with their product for free. They don't always do this for financial reasons, but also for moral reasons (at least in their own minds).

I'd almost agree..if not that recently companies started to using the piracy as excuse for poor sales. They pretty much count every pirated copy as a copy that otherwise would be bought which is not really the case, or at least there is no proof behind that statement.
I dare to say in quite many cases those two, unrelated events.

The fact i don't buy any given game is not because I don't want to buy games or i want to pirate them I don't buy them because I do not consider them worth the money. I may buy them later, when They are discounted or may completely ignore them (like every sports game and majority of shooters). It doesn't mean I pirate them.

Same time there is group of people that just wouldn't buy the game anyway. They pirate, play it for 20 minutes, delete it because They don't like it. They want to play as many games as humanly possible without really giving a damn about them. Back in the days we had proper demo/shareware versions for it, now it's often not the case. Those people probably wouldn't spend 50$ for 20 minutes of gameplay.

Next is a group of people that pirate a game and actually buy it later if They like it. They still count in "game downloaded illegally" table and are counted twice in the statistics. Yes. They pirate at first which is bad, but in the end They aren't reason for low sales either.

Finally is the group that does pirate because They don't want to pay for games. Those are the bad guys that do hurt industry and if piracy wasn't so easy They probably would buy games. Not all of the games They do pirate, but some at least.

Problem with statistic is that They are easy to manipulate. Whole first year of Sociology on my Uni was about that. When You take a number say - 15 million of copies downloaded from torrents You can't really determine in any way how many of those people bought the game afterwards, how many never bought it, how many of them re-downloaded it 2 or more times, how many did it but never really played the game, how many of those were back-ups or people who downloaded the pirated version despite having original one due to technical reasons.
Yes, majority will be pirating for sake of not paying, but it's still not accurate enough to really calculate effect on market.

The scary truth is some people might not have bought the game at all if They wouldn't try it before illegally, some indie studios even release a "bugged" versions of Their games on torrent sites to gain recognition.

The bottom line is : sometimes low sales just means that the game was deemed not worthy the expense and not because everyone pirated it.

 

[Irridium]

I am so close to just taking a picture of my balls and sending it to Ubisoft. Shame it's against the law. Seriously, fuck you Ubisoft.

Ubisoft are fucking right. Why, just this morning I heard that Bethesda will never develop for the PC again, as Skyrim utterly failed on the platform - meanwhile, Valve are abandoning the sinking ship that is Steam, because, hey, what use is a PC games store when we're all fucking thieves?!

And it seems that CD Projekt Red and GoG are closing up shop. Because so many people are pirating Witcher 2 and GoG's games since they have no DRM. I mean, if only GoG was able to convince publishers that DRM-free modern games was viable with Witcher 2, which would cause publishers to sign with them to offer newer games with no DRM [http://www.gog.com/en/news/gog_coms_plan_for_the_future_gets_some_news] now that Witcher 2 proved it can be done.

If only.

 

[Lyri]

Boy you're sure doing some good PR here Ubisoft, you're really on the ball when it comes to anti-piracy measures.
I'm super sure the boys and girls of PC gaming will rally to your banner and fight the evils of Piracy.

LOLJK.
Pass the rum, bitches.

 

[Treblaine]

"clearly meant to be ?60's worth of super-Hollywood content"

Well they are right, PC gamers I think definitely do not want that kind of tripe. I mean "super hollywood" as a way of describing a game and "60 Euros worth" of it just gives the impression of a Michael Bay marathon.

Mouse aim can't fix a game with that kind of premise. It would help but not much.

"because we know that 95 percent of our consumers will pirate the game."

How in the hell are they your customers if they pirate your game? They aren't buying it! Are they trying to say 20x as may will pirate their game as buy it?!? Or are they saying in surveys of their target market only 1 in 20 were prepared to buy the game the game though they were interested in it...

All we ever hear about Ubisoft's games is how utterly crap their DRM is, it never makes the topic of discussion how good they are!