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."
Plus, they already do. Try playing a movie with PowerDVD using your computer's component output. But yes, it's going to cause quite a stir when they flip the HDCP switch (not having your pS3 will only work for so long since eventually a new disc will require an update)
I can't think of a single copy protection method for any intellectual property that inconveniences users lasting long. iTunes DRM works because its seamless and in the end it's actually not very effective at all, it just keeps the casual users in line. HDCP works right now because most people aren't aware of it but when they actually turn on the content protection flags you can bet your ass people will be upset. TPM in mainstream desktop boards was already attempted by Intel/Microsoft with the intent of protection for applications and games, the uproar was so crazy they backed off within days.
The only way to make it effective is unfortunately always an inconvenience to the user and people don't tolerate it in computers for the most part.
I believe the overall effect piracy has on whether or not a game is successful is limited at most, and negligible most of the time. Disagreement with that is fine, but I have never seen any concrete evidence to the contrary, and it is not, as a matter of fact, "common sense". It is a specious, speculative assumption, much like reported numbers of pirated games are.
To be fair to his position(however blunt and rude it is), I've never seen any statistical proof that piracy doesn't have a vast effect on the PC gamind industry. What I can see with my own eyes is thousands of torrent sites, files on usenet and so on. It's not really hard to understand where publishers come up with the idea. Some of them monitor their master servers and can see pirated copies attempting to login. Guess those people just hated the game so much they wanted to hop online too!
This comment was edited on Oct 8, 2008, 22:11.
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