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."
So in retrospect, if you spend $500K on a $40 game, as a publisher, you're looking at around $25 per unit from retail. After marketing, production, DRM fees (which can be as high as .50c per unit in some cases) etc, you end up with about $22 per unit. Well, you'd need to sell about 228K units in order to just break even.
Hmm, let's try some basic math here...
228K = 228,000 units
$22/unit
228,000 x $22 = $5,016,000
production cost = $500K = $500,000
$5,016,000 - $500,000 = $4,516,000
If you consider $4.5 million in profit "breaking even", you're even stupider than I thought. So that leaves the following options: Either, you meant $2.2/unit profit, 22.8K units, or you're a complete and total idiot.
Well, $2.2/unit is right out, since you mentioned $25/unit as the starting point, and you wouldn't screw up the decimal place twice. 22.8K unit sales is so bloody low that even Hellgate surpassed that. So I guess that leaves us with option C.
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