Ubisoft Claims PC Piracy Rate of 93-95%

silentbrad sends this quote from GamesIndustry: "Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has told GamesIndustry International that the percentage of paying players is the same for free to play as it is for PC boxed product: around five to seven per cent. ... '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. It's around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage. The revenue we get from the people who play is more long term, so we can continue to bring content.' ... 'We must be careful because the consoles are coming. People are saying that the traditional market is declining and that F2P is everything — I'm not saying that. We're waiting for the new consoles — I think that the new consoles will give a huge boost to the industry, just like they do every time that they come. This time, they took too long so the market is waiting.'"

100% - 7% Paying != 93% Piracy

[Silentknyght]

...lest we forget aftermarket sales. It's a physical disc that can be sold & resold. These people are not pirates, but their purchases are not going directly to the game production company as attributable to that particular game, either.

Mark my words: Diablo 3 will be the paradigm

[Pausanias]

DRM is so old school my friend. Diablo 3 showed us that people will pay for a single-player game where only the art is on the client and the code runs on the server. Fast forward ten years: computing and bandwidth will be much cheaper and more powerful and the whole thing will be transparent to nearly everyone.

Diablo 3 will be the model for making people buy games.

Re:DRM worked out then..

[djdanlib]

Yup, their DRM makes their games unplayable on my computer. Standard Windows PC with the only optical drive being a DVD burner. You know, one of the standard choices available on most PCs. Their customer support people got angry that I kept pressing the issue and told me to read the box more carefully next time I buy a game... Guess what, I will do that: I will skip anything that says Ubisoft on the box. It didn't say anything about not working if a burner was present.

Re:DRM worked out then..

[gigaherz]

Prince of Persia (whole series), Assassin's Creed 2 & Brotherhood, Rayman Origins & Legends, From Dust, ... and that's just the ones I liked the most. IMO, Ubisoft is, at the moment, the best game publisher.

Re:All the power to them.

[admdrew]

I think the main claim against Blizzard now is the Diablo 3 single player game, which requires a constant internet connection to function at all, which is functionally a form of DRM.

Re:Didn't they sell

[fm6]

Your math is off. It would be 20-30 million. Still unlikely, I admit.

But the thing that's missing from the headline is that Guillemot is claiming 95-97% pirated copies for all games, not just Ubisoft's. And the only reason he even cares is that it helps justify him switching to a Free to Play model, where the percentages of users who pay is also about 5% and costs are much lower.

So, even though his facts are very dubious, he's using them to justify moving away from DRM. So, who cares?

Incorrect assumption?

[InvisiBill]

As I said in my other comment, he specifically mentions "countries" where their games were "played but not bought" before stating the 93-95% piracy rate. Assuming he's talking about those developing countries with rampant bootlegs and counterfeits, that would fall under the 0.10m "Rest of the World" sales. Using that number, you're talking about 1.4-2.0m pirated copies. That's still a huge number compared to only 1.03m actual sales, but it's much more reasonable than 15-20m. That would result in a total of about 3m copies, which is more in line with your Bioshock number (which was released nearly 5 years ago, so there should be more consoles worldwide now).

Re:DRM worked out then..

[djdanlib]

I just wanted to play Raving Rabbids. Yeah, imagine my embarrassment when I had to tell my girlfriend's family, who gave not-financially-well-off me the gift card for Christmas, that I'd bought a game I couldn't play and basically their money was wasted. Telling her was bad enough. I couldn't even return the game since it was already open. Ubisoft wouldn't help, the store wouldn't help. So they don't get any more of my money and I'm happy to tell the story.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:DRM worked out then..

[daenris]

Actually, he is saying it's 93-95% pirated.
this is a quote from TFA where it is quoted from Yves Guillemot

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. It's around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage.