Ubisoft: EndWar PC Impacted by Piracy [Oct 08, 2008, 09:31 am ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Videogaming247 quotes Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Michael de Plater
on how piracy is a reason Tom Clancy's EndWar is appearing on consoles
first, with plans for a PC edition remaining vague (story). He
says this of a PC version of the voice-controlled RTS game: "To be honest, if PC
wasn’t pirated to hell and back, there’d probably be a PC version coming out the
same day as the other two," also saying: "You know, the level of piracy that you
get with the PC just cannibalizes the others, because people just steal that
version." He goes on to agree with dire predictions about the impact of piracy
on PC gaming: "But at the moment, if you release the PC version, essentially
what you’re doing is letting people have a free version that they rip off
instead of a purchased version. Piracy’s basically killing PC."
Yeah the core issue here is not piracy, or game quality, it is sales. Piracy, game quality, number of potential customers (i.e. people with PCs who meet requirements) all factor into that though.
I just think that its a dwindling customer base that is making the PC sell so poorly, not piracy. The vast majority of people I know who pirate stuff do so because they simply want more games than their budget allows for. I don't know many pirates who pirate every single game. Most of them actually spend most of their extra cash on games, hardware, and other software, and pirate the lower-priority stuff that they can't afford.
That doesn't justify it, but it certainly explains why DRM is never going to work. Even if piracy did become impossible, it isn't going to magically make people be able to afford the games they were previously pirating. If I buy 2 games a month and pirate 8 games a month, do they honestly think I'm suddenly going to be able to buy 10 games a month?
That combined with the sheer cost of keeping a PC up to date that can comfortably play the latest games really harms the platform. Everyone needs a crappy integrated GPU PC to do their school/work/family business, but its becoming increasingly difficult to justify spending $1000 a year when you can get the same thing, minus the stupid DRM, for $300 every 2-4 years.
Honestly I'd rather see PC gaming revert to the good ole days when graphics were secondary and gameplay came first. Stop wasting all this time and money on fancy graphical assets and spend more hours working on the story and gameplay. I could care less about graphics, I'll fire up my console and HDTV for that. On my PC I want complex and enjoyable games that don't require me to spend a billion dollars keeping it upgraded.
This comment was edited on Oct 8, 2008, 13:12.
I just think that its a dwindling customer base that is making the PC sell so poorly, not piracy. The vast majority of people I know who pirate stuff do so because they simply want more games than their budget allows for. I don't know many pirates who pirate every single game. Most of them actually spend most of their extra cash on games, hardware, and other software, and pirate the lower-priority stuff that they can't afford.
That doesn't justify it, but it certainly explains why DRM is never going to work. Even if piracy did become impossible, it isn't going to magically make people be able to afford the games they were previously pirating. If I buy 2 games a month and pirate 8 games a month, do they honestly think I'm suddenly going to be able to buy 10 games a month?
That combined with the sheer cost of keeping a PC up to date that can comfortably play the latest games really harms the platform. Everyone needs a crappy integrated GPU PC to do their school/work/family business, but its becoming increasingly difficult to justify spending $1000 a year when you can get the same thing, minus the stupid DRM, for $300 every 2-4 years.
Honestly I'd rather see PC gaming revert to the good ole days when graphics were secondary and gameplay came first. Stop wasting all this time and money on fancy graphical assets and spend more hours working on the story and gameplay. I could care less about graphics, I'll fire up my console and HDTV for that. On my PC I want complex and enjoyable games that don't require me to spend a billion dollars keeping it upgraded.
This comment was edited on Oct 8, 2008, 13:12.
Do you have a single fact to back that up?
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