Ubisoft Kills Ghost Recon: Future Soldier on PC

[Wolfram23]

This is the industry that charged $60 for a 30 second Atari game. How in the hell do you say a game with 70,000 times the playing length and several trillion times the content should be worth less than that?

They did find a happy medium - $60. The price should be around $110. And for games like Skyrim, $230.

Or, you know, the Atari game should have cost $5.

PS: I'm fairly sure you're being sarcastic, but I felt I needed to reply in case you're actually that stupid. Hard to tell sometimes.

But OutrageousEmu is right - £50 is a happy medium.

A large pizza costs about £12 and lasts maybe an hour. A decent meal can cost £40/£50 and lasts a couple of hours. Even a game like Portal 2 provides dozens of hours of entertainment for £50 - the same as four pizzas. Something like CoD or Skyrim can provide hundreds of hours of entertainment. Thats pretty good value to me.

Because clearly pizza is charged to us based on how long it takes us to eat, not on how much ingredients and labour and overhead cost to make it...

You could probably build a very simplistic Flash game that has infinite length (random generating dungeons for example) in a matter of days... doesn't mean it should be worth more than five cents.

Do you think CoD MW3 took anywhere near as long or as much money to make as Battlefield 3 or Skyrim? No fucking way. Plus it sells a shit ton more overall, which means they should actually charge a hell of a lot less! Instead they jack their profit margin through the roof. Good for business? Yep! Good for consumers? No!

How the fuck would that work? Less popular games charge more? How in the hell would that help them at all?

Decreasing prices would just drive people to the cheapest games, which would just dumb down the tastes of gaming as a whole. Good for consumers? Well, they get their crap cheaper. Good for gaming? Holy ************, not anywhere close.

But fair enough, a game should charge for labour, materials, and a healthy profit on top of that. And woah, lookit that, that price is $60. Almost as if game developers already worked this out.

And people complain about $60 as they would about it costing anything - because the people who do complain about price are either too poor (in which case they may need to recognise that gaming is just a hobby outside their price range - sad but true) or, more likely, because they're entitled whingers. Like the people who demand well kept roads and high standards of public education but don't want to have to pay any taxes.

Right, because for all the millions who shop at Walmart, there's of course nobody who bothers going to Armani Exchange for their clothes. For all the Dodge Dakotas out there, nobody bothers buying a Nissan Titan. For all the copies of Amnesia: The Dark Descent sold, nobody bothers to buy Skyrim.

A product is as valuable as people are willing to pay for it. If Ubisoft thinks "95%" of PC gamers are pirating their game then something must be terribly wrong when there's plenty of games/publishers making loads of cash on PC. Maybe that something is that the real value of the product is far less than the $60 they want for it so it doesn't sell like they hoped, and then they have to make up stupid numbers and blame arbitrary "pirates".

Let's say someone engineers a product and that costs $100,000. Then to fabricate it, it's another $10,000. To sell 2 products they'd cost over $60,000. But wait, if they can sell 10 products, the price drops to $20,000! 100 items it's only $11,000!

You can't possibly believe when MW3 breaks all kinds of sales records, and given that it came out in only 1 year, and given that it runs on the same engine as the other CoDs (plus a little tweaking), that it could possibly have cost the same to produce as a game like Skyrim, whether looking at whole development cost or cost per sold item. Obviously they're just charging $60 because they can get away with it. It is not at all a competitive market. If Skyrim sold for $70 and MW3 sold for $30 I would consider it reasonable. Premium rate for a premium product (well, hopefully they'd fix more bugs before shipping) and low rate for a pile of poo.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Ubisoft are being douches to PC gamers?

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

A bit sad that the gif must be used again so close to when it was last used in reference to this exact same company.

Eh, for me it's just a excuse for using it. The thing took me 30 minutes to make, so I feel like I need to use it at least 30 times, to make up for every minute I could have used instead to play Skyrim.

That's fair enough but it doesn't look good for Ubisoft and their seemingly absent PR department.

I have the most horrible feeling that Ubisoft does in fact have a huge PR department, it's just comprised off all the insufferable dicks who were kicked out of the other departments for being....well, dicks.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had one but I would be surprised if they new the meaning and use of a PR department at this point with the stuff that has been said.

 

[Joe Cobler]

Couldn't get through the storm of rage and buttthurt to figure out if anyone took the pragmatic view. So I may be repeating someone.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see PC or something like it survive as a gaming platform, if only because of digital distribution having made it somewhat possible for an indy scene to be profitable, and because the tools of development are readily available and for the most part cheap or free (fuck Adobe, though).

That said, if I was management at a company that tries to make big games with fucktons of art assets and fancy engines that throw around shitloads of geometry and dynamically generated animations and blah blah blah, I'd probably be pushing for us to go console-only. Even if the rate of PC piracy was only slightly higher, or even lower than that on consoles. The development effort is more work for less reward. Either you spend way, way more time on development and testing, or you run the risk of, say, the video card vendor whose hardware you didn't test managing to make your team look like shitheads. Or users pissing and moaning that they spent thousands of dollars on a monstrous gaming rig and you didn't bother to actually render extra geometry just for them. If they don't try to suggest that you should have made something the majority of users would not be able to run at > 10 frames per second. On console you build towards and test on two, maybe three platforms (or as few as one!).

Yes, it was a dick move for Ubisoft to scream "pirates" on their way out the door. That was the wrong thing to say. But what could they possibly say that *wouldn't* piss off, like, the entire internet? Even quietly not developing for the platform anymore would piss you guys off.

 

[Jaeger_CDN]

Maybe Ubi spent all their development and anti-piracy money while fighting the post-it war with the bank next door? [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112242-Ubisoft-and-French-Bank-Go-To-Post-It-Note-War]

 

[vrbtny]

Ubisoft are being douches to PC gamers?

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

A bit sad that the gif must be used again so close to when it was last used in reference to this exact same company.

Eh, for me it's just a excuse for using it. The thing took me 30 minutes to make, so I feel like I need to use it at least 30 times, to make up for every minute I could have used instead to play Skyrim.

That's fair enough but it doesn't look good for Ubisoft and their seemingly absent PR department.

I have the most horrible feeling that Ubisoft does in fact have a huge PR department, it's just comprised off all the insufferable dicks who were kicked out of the other departments for being....well, dicks.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had one but I would be surprised if they new the meaning and use of a PR department at this point with the stuff that has been said.

Maybe PR has a different meaning in Ubi-land.

Public-Retardation?
Public-Ridiculousness?
Public-Rum?
Pelvic-Reaches?
Porn-Representative?

 

[Darth Sea Bass]

Well fuck you too ubisoft! You know why people pirate your games on pc? Because you make shoddy fucking ports!

I have rainbow 6 1&2 and they both lag and my rig far exceeds even the recomended specs.

 

[Brinnmilo]

Meh, I wont miss them. I forked out money for AssCred, Farcry 2 and Rainbow 6 Vegas and was only slightly impressed with the latter.

 

[Joe Cobler]

Meh, I wont miss them. I forked out money for AssCred, Farcry 2 and Rainbow 6 Vegas and was only slightly impressed with the latter.

Yeah, this here? This is pretty much what I was talking about.

 

[Wolfram23]

Couldn't get through the storm of rage and buttthurt to figure out if anyone took the pragmatic view. So I may be repeating someone.

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see PC or something like it survive as a gaming platform, if only because of digital distribution having made it somewhat possible for an indy scene to be profitable, and because the tools of development are readily available and for the most part cheap or free (fuck Adobe, though).

That said, if I was management at a company that tries to make big games with fucktons of art assets and fancy engines that throw around shitloads of geometry and dynamically generated animations and blah blah blah, I'd probably be pushing for us to go console-only. Even if the rate of PC piracy was only slightly higher, or even lower than that on consoles. The development effort is more work for less reward. Either you spend way, way more time on development and testing, or you run the risk of, say, the video card vendor whose hardware you didn't test managing to make your team look like shitheads. Or users pissing and moaning that they spent thousands of dollars on a monstrous gaming rig and you didn't bother to actually render extra geometry just for them. If they don't try to suggest that you should have made something the majority of users would not be able to run at > 10 frames per second. On console you build towards and test on two, maybe three platforms (or as few as one!).

Yes, it was a dick move for Ubisoft to scream "pirates" on their way out the door. That was the wrong thing to say. But what could they possibly say that *wouldn't* piss off, like, the entire internet? Even quietly not developing for the platform anymore would piss you guys off.

I honestly don't see it being harder to develop for PC. All GPUs are running DX9, 10, and 11, and/or OpenGL. These are all standards, and if you program within the standards it will work. The only thing they need to do is make absolutely sure that they give AMD and Nvidia a lot of time to tweak their drivers for the game. Almost always when there's issues with a game running, it is a driver issue. Very rarely is it inherent in the game's code. On top of that, porting a game to PC isn't very hard. The only tweaking it needs is with controls and menus. Other than that, throw in high quality textures and most people are going to be pretty happy. I don't give a crap that Skyrim is only DX9, but I do wish they had tried a little harder on the shadow map (ie: make it bigger for PCs). There was indeed a shit storm over, say, Crysis 2 not being DX11 but that was for good reason... not only did the developer promise it would be, but it's also Crytek... they were promoting it being some uber gorgeous high tech game. Basically they brought it on themselves.

 

[Korolev]

Well, as bridge-burners go, accusing 95% of your (now former) fans who buy your games for the PC of being pirates is a good one.

Look - I am a PC and a Console Gamer. I'm relatively wealthy in that way. I prefer to play games on my PC when available but I have nothing with games being on Consoles. I understand, I perfectly understand why some developers are taking a step back from making PC games - they are generally more difficult to make, and investors usually want the developer to put some sort of bad DRM on it, and that makes the community upset and at the end of the day the console market is just.... well, larger. If a developer doesn't want to make a PC version of their game, that's FINE. It's a business decision. Not necessarily the right decision in my opinion, but that's their call to make. If they don't think their game will sell on the PC, then it's obvious why they wouldn't want to contribute resources.

But a simple "Sorry, we're not developing a PC version for business reasons" would have sufficed. To make somewhat ludicrous claims that "95% of PC gamers pirate" is silly. Steam makes a ton of money. Skyrim sold gang-busters on the PC. 95% of PC gamers do not pirate their games. Hell, I doubt more than 30% regularly pirate their games.

If Skyrim, Portal 2, Batman Arkham City, Fallout New Vegas, Mass Effect 2, Saints Row The Third can all do relatively well on the PC, well enough to turn a profit for the developers, then the PC market is hardly dead or infested with Pirates now, is it?

Maybe Ubisoft just aren't confident in their ability to develop for the PC.

 

[octafish]

Does this constant blaming of PC Gamers kind of remind people of the olden days of screaming, "Witch" while bringing out some poor innocent soul to go roast on a stick because someone got the sniffles?

Nope, nor does it remind me of Nazi Germany, McCarthy era USA, the White Australia Policy, the Great Leap Forward, Stalin's Purges, The Crusades, various South and Central American Death Squads, Apartheid South Africa, the Atlantic Slave Trade, Internment Era Northern Ireland, or when Spock died.

It's just some company acting like a sack of cocks.

Admit it. It's a little bit like when Spock died.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Ubisoft are being douches to PC gamers?

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

A bit sad that the gif must be used again so close to when it was last used in reference to this exact same company.

Eh, for me it's just a excuse for using it. The thing took me 30 minutes to make, so I feel like I need to use it at least 30 times, to make up for every minute I could have used instead to play Skyrim.

That's fair enough but it doesn't look good for Ubisoft and their seemingly absent PR department.

I have the most horrible feeling that Ubisoft does in fact have a huge PR department, it's just comprised off all the insufferable dicks who were kicked out of the other departments for being....well, dicks.

I wouldn't be surprised if they had one but I would be surprised if they new the meaning and use of a PR department at this point with the stuff that has been said.

Maybe PR has a different meaning in Ubi-land.

Public-Retardation?
Public-Ridiculousness?
Public-Rum?
Pelvic-Reaches?
Porn-Representative?

Yeah to be honest that probably sounds about right either that or they hate money.

 

[Keava]

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see PC or something like it survive as a gaming platform, if only because of digital distribution having made it somewhat possible for an indy scene to be profitable, and because the tools of development are readily available and for the most part cheap or free (fuck Adobe, though).

Sorry for little OT, but really complaining about Adobe? If You are at the level of professionalism that requires You to use Adobe over freeware alternative You can make the costs of Creative Suite in a few months time considering the prices on quality commission art (100$ for lineart alone is pretty standard, coloured can easily go for 250-300$). Not to mention student discount available. Professional tablet will be cost of 1,000$ for starters anyway, and before You get one of those You do not need Adobe stuff.
It costs a lot because of high returns if You utilize it well. Just like any professional 3d design software or game engine licence with full source code.

 

[QUINTIX]

What they did with Prince of Persia [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/12/pc-prince-of-persia-contains-no-drm-its-a-trap.ars] (the confeti-colored one) was absolutely obnoxious. Yes, pirating is high on the PC... in developing nations and amungst middle-school kids that don't know any better (What's steam? [http://romsteady.blogspot.com/2006/07/games-hidden-cost-of-piracy.html]; I got this game from a friend), but guess what else is higher in developing nations: the desktop PC install base. Computers are a modern middle class necessity, like dishwashers. Consoles are not.

Edit: I'm sure there are plenty of people in Africa/South America/South East Asia willing and ready to throw in an 80 USD radeon 6670 into the 8x PCI express slot of their 300 USD Athlon-II/Pentium Dual Core machines. If they continue to be so intent on turning their back on that market, they will be hurting themselves far more than they hurt potential pirates.

 

[Jaeger_CDN]

Does this constant blaming of PC Gamers kind of remind people of the olden days of screaming, "Witch" while bringing out some poor innocent soul to go roast on a stick because someone got the sniffles?

reminded me of the Witch scene in the Holy Grail

http://youtu.be/yp_l5ntikaU

Ubi is using the same wonky logic as they do in this scene

 

[CardinalPiggles]

This doesn't bother me too much because I play a ton of games on the Xbox still anyway. This whole thing is such a mess though, and the pirates are to blame. Here's a hint, if you don't like their game, or their service, or the prices, don't friggin' play 'em. Pirating will cause them to make life for everyone more difficult. Not buying their games because they are shit will cause them to put more effort in, it's that simple.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

Maybe if every developer stopped treating PC gamers like dirty pirates who steal everything, they'd stop torrenting games to avoid god awful DRM. Personally, I don't pirate anything and I think anyone who does is breaking the law, obviously, but I can see why they feel they might be forced to do so.

 

[Darh Abdomino]

I gotta say, I can understand where Ubisoft is coming from. It's infinitely times easier to pirate a PC game than a Console game. When a business makes a product, they are devoting costs beyond what it takes to simply develop and make the game, they are applying wages, taxes, operational costs, and a host of other things, with the hope that the game will generate enough money to pay those costs off, and have enough leftover to create another game. But their attitude is inexcusable. You don't get to simply brush off one of the largest markets, not just in gaming, but in existence, with a couple simple "screw you, this is your fault" comments. Again, I don't have a problem with their decision to move from PC to console, it's business decision, whether it's a flawed one or not is an argument that could last weeks, but their simple dismissal of some of their most loyal fans.