Of all the companies that might put forth suspect data in order to win someone over, our money’s on Ubisoft misrepresenting statistics in order to avoid making their digital rights management schemes look draconian. Speaking with GamesIndustry International at Gamescom, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that the amount of paying free-to-play PC players equals out to the same amount that had previously purchased boxed copies. It may have been in Cologne, but something stinks here.
It wasn’t all that long ago that a Google engineer revealed that Ubisoft’s Uplay DRM shenanigans included a major security flaw. These are also the same people behind the Starforce fiasco. So, it’s safe to say that Ubisoft’s relations with PC customers have been utterly miserable for many years. The feedback loop created by Ubisoft implementing terrible DRM strategy after terrible DRM strategy is something to behold.
Guillemot mentions that the amount of piracy, as well as the amount of folks that don’t pay for free-to-play games, comes out to something like 93 to 95 percent. That’s not exactly in dispute; those kinds of numbers aren’t beyond the realm of imagination. What the numbers fail to relay is the fact that Ubisoft themselves are at least partially responsible for that exorbitant number. If they made buying and purchasing their games a simple proposition, more people would be liable to do so.
Instead, we get flawed tidbits like Uplay that cause more harm than good. If Ubisoft really wanted to make money the traditional way, they wouldn’t make such baffling additions to their PC offerings.
(GamesIndustry via TorrentFreak, image credit via Julie Falk)
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