Ubisoft has now officially lost it. I'd like to keep things fair and in perspective, but they've simply just shot themselves in the foot. How can you respect a company that is laying down and saying "heck, piracy will just take up all of our would be sales so lets just not release it?". This is coming from a company that has the absolute worst DRM among all current PC releases. They usually are extremely intrusive, require a constant internet connection, signing up at their website and registering your game several times over just to turn it on and play. No wonder your titles are pirated so often when pirates over the game without all the intrusive DRM you have required that makes a game unplayable for paying customers. You are making your games such a poor value to PC gamers that you are encouraging your own piracy issues. If you make your games a better value by perhaps utilizing Steam's VAC system so that DRM is nearly unnoticeable people would buy your games at a much higher rate because your offering the same easy service that the pirates are.
Piracy is an issue, yes, but for a major company to roll over and just give up is inexcusable. CD Projekt Red, a small developer in Poland, has been able to sell 1million copies of its RPG hit The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings (with about a quarter of the sales through digital distribution) with no large publisher behind it, no marketing, no console version released, and you guessed it, NO DRM. PC gamers do pay for games, we aren't all looking to score a free pirated version, we just don't want to deal with the crap developers hand us because they think piracy is a big deal and great inconveniences for us. Ignoring the PC platform is foolish, sure they aren't as readily available as consoles are as far as sales, but they aren't dying in the way most people would like to paint it. Until Ubsisoft gets it's act together (and perhaps gets back to making good games as they've been on a steady downfall when you look at the review patterns over the past 5 years), I'm not going to buy another title from them whether its on my PC, my PS3, or my Xbox 360 till they figure out how to better treat its customers. What do you think? Is piracy such an issue that Ubisoft should stop making PC games? Is Ubisoft just an awful company when it comes to how they handle PC games? Do we need stricter or more lenient DRM features? And is the console pirating and sale loses through used titles being really underplayed next to how easy it is to pirate on a PC? Sound off below!
I never thought I'd see the day when Ubisoft does something so stupid. We need more forward-thinking people in the gaming industry who understand that pirates can be their best friends if they actually open their minds to how they can use piracy to their advantage!
ReplyDeleteExactly. Like Gabe Newell recently said, pirating is a service issue. By making something like DRM such a burden to paying customers they are promoting people going to the pirates that will provide a hassle free experience. I think they need to reduce DRM as much as possible and ensure that their product is good, if they give no reason to pirate the game they will see better returns.
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