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

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

torrentfreak.com

26 pointsanons201156 comments

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].

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)?

It seems most people on the internet want to think that

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

I don't understand what gamers want from companies like Ubisoft?

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of...

[2] http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/29/interview-cd-projekts-ceo-...

> I don't understand what gamers want from companies like Ubisoft?

It's just like music:

1. AAA titles without paying a cent 2. Innovation, but not too much (being a newbie is a cardinal sin, remember?) 3. No DLC, just free content released periodically afterwards

Piracy does quite a number on people with existing entitlement issues.

This isn't entirely an issue of greedy people having feelings of entitlement.

Like many of you all, I do not know of anyone who pirates software, movies or music (ever since I graduated college) anymore. That's because the piracy rates in the US are much reduced compared to elsewhere in the world. International publishers, like Ubisoft, then feel that if they are going to sell their products in these high-piracy areas that they need to protect it. Then, because they have to protect it from the pirates elsewhere, they give us a crippled product in the US.

If Ubisoft thought of its customers strictly as Americans, they would not have implemented all the crazy DRM stuff they have today.

Regardless of whether you believe Ubisoft is justified in pursuing DRM at all costs like they have, the issue is /not/ primarily one of entitlement.

http://portal.bsa.org/globalpiracy2011/

> I cannot understand the responses from people here on reddit

You are lost again citric. This is hackernews, not reddit.

Sorry, typo, it's meant to say "here and on reddit".

I think a reasonable view is:

A] Unauthorized copying is rampant. B] This is not a problem; profitable business exists regardless.

The most interesting part of the above statistic in my mind is how it shows heavyhanded copy controls have absolutely no effect. So you may as well not bother.

The software industry is not and has never been under an existential threat from unauthorized copying. These numbers are solid evidence that it is possible to have a booming, profitable software industry despite a 95% unauthorized copying rate.

The problem is that "gamers" are not a monolithic group. People say contradictory things not because of cognitive dissonance, but because they disagree. As with most issues, there are more than two sides to this one.

> A] Piracy is not a problem.

Piracy is a problem without a clear-cut solution. It is a modern incarnation of the classic free rider problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem).

> B] DRM causes piracy

I have been tempted to pirate games with onerous DRM (I haven't). That said, I think that DRM is a common excuse that pirates use to justify their actions.

The point I'd like to make is that DRM and piracy rates have no correlation . The only legitimate purpose that DRM serves is to interfere with launch-day piracy. Once a product has been cracked, it only hampers legitimate customers. And there is no uncrackable DRM.

The always-on DRM that companies like Ubi love to use just rubs salt in the wound. Now I, a paying customer, have to be connected to the internet 24/7 to play your game? When pirates don't? What's next, are you going to hire a goon to monitor me and protect your precious intellectual property?

EDIT: I want Ubi to stop putting barriers between me and their products. I'd even be fine with steam DRM, but they need to cut the umbilical cord and let me play their games.

One problem is that most of the large publishers ignore is that people who pirate aren't necessarily people who would buy the game if they had no option to pirate. Every pirated copy does not represent a lost sale.

> C] If you have no DRM then your game will sell well

All things equal, I'd choose a DRM free game over a DRM-encumbered one.

Amazon's Digital Download service group often has Steam and DRM-free versions of the same game available - they probably have direct data that can show if "DRM-free = more sales" is true or not. (While Steam offers many benefits, the upside of not needing to launch the Steam client when you want to play a game is a big one).

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)?

Because it is a "terrible dis-service to gamers"?

Suppose I pirate all my games, what do I gain from F2P? A worse experience with constant nagging about buying useless crap.

Suppose I buy all my games, what do I gain from F2P? A worse experience with constant nagging about buying useless crap.

A got sick to my stomach for buying Battlefield 3 Premium, why? What I wanted was the expansion packs but to get that I had to pay for having double XP events, strategy guides, ability to reset stats etc. etc.

If paying for something makes the play-field uneven you have effectively destroyed the value for both free and paying players.

Piracy is a problem (but one illegally downloaded game does not equal a lost sale, I'd also be interested in knowing how many hours are being played on pirated vs. bought games). DRM does not hinder piracy, but it hurts paying players. If you have no DRM then no one will suffer from it (also you don't have to implement it and you won't have to fear the backlash from it). Free to play is a terrible dis-service to gamers.

F2P is good for discoverability, it lowers the barrier to trying. In the old days we had something similar that we called a demo. The equivalent of today is to pirate the game and see if it is worth it. Now the barrier to buying is even higher since you'd have to take care of any progress made, uninstall, buy, install, redo all your settings and progress. Not defending it, but that is often the only way to try a game today - and with all the crap that's being produced wanting to try it out before buying is understandable.

> Free to play is a terrible dis-service to gamers.

This isn't a priori true. Valve seems to have a good handle on non-sucky F2P, for example.

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%.

Feels like a classic "the subject is not the percentage" in order to make everyone comfortable with "95%".

I also highly dislike DLCs. Usually they're required 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).

F2P generally need $50-$100 of stuff overall as well.

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)

Note that I'm not requiring games to be $5. I pay for $50 games today. I just reckon that they'll probably get more money if they sell them cheaper.

> Make the game $5, I'll buy it and so will everyone.

That assumes that most people are pirating just because they think the game's too expensive.

- If someone pirates games because their parents don't want to drive them to the store and they don't have a credit card for buying games online, then dropping the price to $5 won't change anything for them.

- If someone pirates games because they've gotten so used to doing it that the idea of going to a store never even crosses their mind, then dropping the price to $5 won't change anything for them.

- If someone pirates games because they don't want to shell out for a complete unknown, then dropping the price to $5 won't change much for them.

That last one is one I'd like to unpack, too. Even assuming Ubi's 95% figure is correct, that presumably comes from just counting individuals. According to that metric, someone who pirates a game because there's no demo and plays it for ten minutes before deleting counts as just as much of a pirate as someone who steals the game and then plays it 4 hours a day for months. And someone who pirates it and plays for an hour before deciding to buy it is counted as both a legitimate buyer and a pirate.

I'd be much more interested to know what percentage of play hours are logged on pirated vs. legitimate copies of a game. I realize that's not in line with most game makers' pay models, but I suspect it would still turn out to be instructive.

How about this idea that every potential costumer is either a pirate or a buyer. I think people hold their wallets when they see the price of games. I know I'm holding on Guild Wars 2, and I was one of the early hypers, dreaming with this game. Some years later I just don't think it's worthy, though I did throw more than that at F2P games.

The original article hinted at the reason for your views.

Firstly, the 95% piracy rate they are reporting is worldwide, not the rate of piracy in the USA.

In the USA, piracy rates have never been all that high, but cart yourself over to China or Singapore and you find people selling pirated software/music/whatever on the street corners.

What annoys me the most about DLC is the cost relative to the value added. $5 DLC for a $50 game is adding another 10% of the base cost of the game itself, but you don't add remotely that much enjoyment/value/playtime.

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.

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.

Free-to-play, free-to-sample, it's all the same thing.

Yep, the F2P statistic is absurd. How many people have downloaded LoL, played for 15 seconds and uninstalled. I realize Ubisoft didn't make LoL, but the point is the same.

Its a useless metric.

I like the Costco free sample comparison, haven't thought of it that way before.

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.

Here is an article from a developer that provided information on piracy numbers (and claimed 70 - 90% on a DRM free game): http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-of...

edit: source of the 90% (or revised 82%): http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/ (sorry bsphil!)

Which is also a completely unsourced number.

It's an estimate with a solid base: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/

Sorry, wasn't able to find that from the original link. I take back my last comment.

I guess it boils down to how many of those pirates you think were ever potential customers. Assuming piracy was theoretically impossible, how many would've purchased it rather than not play at all?

Not many, I'd make a completely un-verifiable estimate of 5% or less.

From the article, "...a lot of smart people have been questioning the accuracy of our 90% estimate, and with good reason, it’s a very rough estimate and the measurements are flawed."

It depends on what you consider a player, in my opinion.

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.

“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.

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.

Well, we already know DRM is a pointless expense, look at all the piracy it is stopping, according to ubisoft no less.

But i think this could easily just be seen as users using piracy to try-before-you-buy.. and that most users might not like your game?

I strongly doubt 95% of users who play a significant amount of game X are pirates.

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

And yet the 95% enjoy a far higher quality product than the 5% that actually pay, when it comes to Ubisoft games.

It could be that a lot of customers buy the boxed product, then install the warez version because it doesn't have any DRM associated with it. This doesn't clarify how they know the games are pirated.

Ubisoft is one of the worst offenders lately when it comes to treating their customers like criminals. Even products bought through Steam have all kinds of added on DRM and CD-Key nonsense.

I refuse to buy Ubisoft products because of the DRM. I'm not going to pirate them, but I sure as hell won't do business with a company that constantly treats me like a criminal.

I've already passed on several games because of this. Some game publishers believe that you can turn 1 out of 1000 pirates into paying customers [1]; it stuns me that Ubisoft ignores how invasive DRM can turn away a significant fraction of potential customers.

1. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350

I was speaking specifically of the F2P users.

Pirates are neither users not customers.

Half on subject. Just a note about fair pricing:

I downloaded my first pirated copy of anything ever the other day and this is why.

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.

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.

According to apple I (or my wife) have purchased 261 mobile apps. Most for real money.

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 & lite), there was $1.99 and $6.99 (reg & 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.

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.

I know I haven't bought anything Ubisoft in a long time.

I'm in the same boat. They make some really, really good games. If they had a bit better track record on DRM I would have purchased at least six games from them recently, looking at wikipedia.

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.

I imagine that the global amount of piracy would be very different than, say, the piracy rate in the U.S.

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.

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.

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.

I know I probably don't represent the average pirate, just throwing that out there.

It really saddens me to see what Ubisoft has done to some of my favorite franchises.

I loved Anno 1404, played it tons. Haven't bought (or played) Anno 2070 because of the awful DRM.

I loved the Silent Hunter series. Played 3 and 4 for countless hours. I didn't buy (or play) 5 because of the DRM.

IL-2 Sturmovik is one of the greatest flight sims of all time. Cliffs of Dover is an abomination.

Meanwhile, after Lock On: Modern Air Combat, the developer split from Ubisoft and went on to make two of the greatest flight sims of the past decade in the DCS series (and they're still going strong).

Not even Ubi's $1 sale could get me to install their client and buy theirs games.

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.

I actually use No-CD/No-DVD patches for all my Ubisoft games (Assassins Creed and Anno), so it isn't that unusual a position.

So many amazing insights from HN:

- the 95% aren't players

- the 95% aren't customers

- people must be buying the boxed game then installing a pirated version

- the number must be a lie because it makes piracy look bad

- ubisoft deserves it

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.

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.

> Nevertheless, the latter [free to play] model can be a great opportunity to beat piracy.

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:

"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."

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)

Ubisoft last weekend offered some of their games for $1. I'd bet those games sold like hot-cakes. They also sold most of their catalog for $1 a few years ago (for about a day completely by accident), I wonder what their sales numbers were around that time.

If that figure is true for Ubisoft games, they fully deserve it.

In other news, Steam and GOG are doing just fine.

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