Ubisoft: PC Piracy Levels 95%, and 95% of Free-To-Play Users Do Not Pay

I cannot understand the responses from people here and on reddit stating that the figure is totally made up and it can't be that much. reddit specifically is filled with people who are proud of how they pirate all ubisoft games because of the "terrible DRM". Indie games that have no DRM and great prices[1] have reported very high piracy rates, published games that have no DRM and very high ratings also have bad piracy rates[2].<p>Most people seem to suggest that piracy is a result of having a crappy product and the only way to stop piracy is to improve their product, so surely making their product free (therefore removing any need to pirate) solves exactly this? Why aren't people applauding Ubisoft for adapting their business and products to their audience (people that want to play games but don't want to pay -- and those that do want to pay, can)?<p>It seems most people on the internet want to think that<p>A] Piracy is not a problem B] DRM causes piracy C] If you have no DRM then your game will sell well D] Free to play is a terrible dis-service to gamers<p>I don't understand what gamers want from companies like Ubisoft?<p>[1] <a href="http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of-goo-piracy-rate-near-90/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/29/interview-cd-projekts-ceo-on-witcher-2-piracy-why-drms-still-not-worth-it/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/29/interview-cd-projekts-ceo-...</a>

I'd like to know which magic hat the 95% comes from as usual. I pay for most PC games and so do my friends. I highly doubt we're in the 5%.<p>Feels like a classic "the subject is not the percentage" in order to make everyone comfortable with "95%".<p>I also highly dislike DLCs. Usually they're <i>required</i> to keep up in online games (else you're at unfair disadvantage), or they're just fixing bugs/adding stuff that should have been there from the beginning. Plus games usually cost $50 .. then need $15 DLCs (3, 4 of them).<p>F2P generally need $50-$100 of stuff overall as well.<p>Make the game $5, I'll buy it and so will everyone. Heck, I buy all phone games for that reason. The price is reasonable, and pirating it is more hassle than just paying. (ofc, if you put horrible DRM restrictions on top, $5 or not, the pirated game is generally easier to get)<p>Note that I'm not requiring games to be $5. I pay for $50 games <i>today</i>. I just reckon that they'll probably get more money if they sell them cheaper.

Not all piracy ends up to be a lost sale. There are some people out there that pirate, with no intention of purchase. I'm not surprised that Ubi is also finding that F2P users aren't paying either, some people just don't see the value or don't want to spend their money.<p>Let's take this problem out of the gaming/IT industry altogether. The last time you went to Costco (for non-Americans, it's large warehouse grocery chain), did you see the throngs of people waiting to take whatever free sample was being cooked up? And how many of those people ever actually pay for the real product? Maybe Costco has the conversion rates, but I bet they're wildly unreliable. IMHO, what I tend to see are a bunch of freeloaders who will take anything that is free and then leave when the offer is made to purchase the product.<p>Free-to-play, free-to-sample, it's all the same thing.

I checked both this article and the articles referenced in it and could not find a single place where they back that number up with any hard research. Willing to bet there wasn't any.

It depends on what you consider a player, in my opinion.<p>I admit that 95% of the users who open a PC game may not be playing a copy they purchased, but in all likelihood most play it for about 5 minutes. Just as with pirated iPhone apps, where it often seems people install 400 apps and never open them twice.

<i>“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,” [Ubisoft CEO Yves] Guillemot said.</i><p>Their customers convert from free-to-paying and from pirate-to-paying at the same rate. Releasing a game as free-to-play doesn't cut into their revenue stream, since it'll just be pirated anyway. The same number of people will pay for it, either way. Essentially, DRM is a pointless expense for them.

Ergo, 95% of your users are not your customers.

Half on subject. Just a note about fair pricing:<p>I downloaded my first pirated copy of anything ever the other day and this is why.<p>My son is playing LEGO star wars. He asks me how to advance and I tell him I don't know. He asks, "haven't you seen the movie?" I say yes, would you like to? Of course he says yes.<p>I set out to find a Star Wars (a new hope). Can you buy from iTunes? No. Netflix have it? No. And so on. The only option was Amazon who only had it as a super deluxe diamond ultra edition box set for more more digits worth of money than I was willing to spend on a movie that I saw in theater for less than $5. Things need to be reasonably priced for reasonable people to pay for them.<p>According to apple I (or my wife) have purchased 261 mobile apps. Most for real money.<p>I think the best business model I've encountered from a revenue point of view was a chess game that came in two varieties. There wasn't free to pay or pay to play (reg &#38; lite), there was $1.99 and $6.99 (reg &#38; pro), the second just being much more featured. I bought both. No upgrade option. Bought both outright, because $2 is a reasonable gamble and $7 more is reasonable for a game I know I like.<p>I wonder how the developer is doing.

Aside from the number being pulled from their asses, Ubisoft is continuously one of the worst publishers in terms of utilizing harsh DRM. I wouldn't be shocked that people go out of their way to pirate Ubisoft games.<p>I know I haven't bought anything Ubisoft in a long time.

I really don't believe that number. Even when i was a poor pupil and student and pirated stuff, never ever was my games collection 95% pirated. And that was when most games weren't bound to having an internet connection or used multiplayer on the internet.

Taking them at their word on their statistics (seems reasonable as citricsquid pointed out based on interviews with the World of Goo developers and CD Projekt), I wonder how that would look broken down by country.<p>That is to say, is piracy really that rampant in the US, or are these numbers inflated by distribution in countries where games/movies are pirated and sold in hard copy form on the street or in shops? Which is worse for piracy, the ability to anonymously download the game via bittorrent, or being able to feel psuedo-legitimate about paying real money to a real person on the street or in a shop for a burned copy?

Ubisoft is not a great advocate for the industry, in my opinion.<p>I buy their games occasionally, since they own some of my favorite franchises. I also occasionally pirate them first to see if they are unplayable console ports, or have game-breakingly bad bugs or performance-- which they consistently do.<p>I know I probably don't represent the average pirate, just throwing that out there.

I find it hard to feel sorry for Ubisoft, really. I still enjoy playing SCCT from time to time. Due to the retarded Starforce that won't receive an update for Windows versions above XP / 2003 Server, I find myself in the odd position of using a "no-DVD" patch for a game that I own.

So many amazing insights from HN:<p>- the 95% aren't players<p>- the 95% aren't customers<p>- people must be buying the boxed game then installing a pirated version<p>- the number must be a lie because it makes piracy look bad<p>- ubisoft deserves it<p>HN2012 = Digg2007

What I'm curious about is whether or not DRM actually reduces their piracy levels.

It's funny because Ubisoft has made one of the most horrible online experience I have ever heard of in Heroes 6, basically you log in, your "offline" saves become inaccessible and sometimes they just vanish forever.<p>They clearly don't get it. They should watch and learn from Blizzard, Riot Games and the others. If you provide value in online play people will pay for the game solely for the online experience, see World Of Warcraft. I wonder how many people pirate Star Craft 2, Diablo 3 or World of Warcraft.

&#62; Nevertheless, the latter [free to play] model can be a great opportunity to beat piracy.<p>Ah "free to play" doesn't beat piracy. It makes piracy "legal". If anything it's a capitulation that distribution can't be controlled and that you can't force people to pay who do not want to. An acknowledgement that a new business model is needed cause crippling software with DRM and lobbying congress for more draconian laws isn't as profitable as they lawyers promised.

Too bad that Free2Play will almost always inevitably lead to Pay4Fun. I've see few games where this wasn't the case (the first few years of GuildWars being an example, I don't know about the current state of affairs). More often than not, it doesn't become "cashing in to get a better experience", it's "requiring money to play properly at all". And I don't trust the major publishers with their history of retarded DLC to do any good in that regard.

I hope this insight:<p>"What has become apparent in recent times through this and similar experiences is that DRM only hurts paying customers and does little to stop pirates from releasing hassle-free versions of Ubisoft games online. But with DRM or without, according to Ubisoft piracy levels are massive."<p>Really does become apparent to folks who make these decisions.

It would also help if Ubisoft ended their relationship with Digital River. Digital River for some inexplicable reason enforces a limit on the number of times you can download a title. For a digital download service I have a hard time understanding the rational behind that decision.

95%...for Ubisoft. I read this as: Sales are down 95% and our investors want a reason. Could it be the always-online draconian DRM you force on everyone? Could that be the reason for the drop in sales?

I wonder if charging $5 for the game would lead to a massive increase in the % that pay. Steam did a lot of testing around this, hence having F2P (TF2) and $20 games with discounts (L4D etc)

If that figure is true for Ubisoft games, they fully deserve it.<p>In other news, Steam and GOG are doing just fine.