I think 95% is a ridiculously high number but I guess they have to blame something when PC sales are down and the investors come calling.

Source: http://www.vg247.com/2012/08/22/ubisoft-pc-piracy-rate-around-95-f2p-is-the-way-forward/

How can they even claim this? Where are they getting those numbers from? Also, isn't Ubisoft notorious for making so-so PC ports of their games?

Yeah, I saw that too, and was equally incredulous. I can only assume it's based on ridiculously optimistic sales projections compared to actual sales figures. Maybe they'd have more success if they'd quit insulting their customer base and mucking them about: just an idea...

Well that number seems crazy high, of course Ubisoft have made the PC gamer life rather [censored] with their terrible DRM. I know people who buy their games and then dowload a pirated version and play that. Ubisoft can't really blame anyone but themselves. In their pursuit of stopping pirates they probably created more.
Of course their numbers are way off the charts and probably made up.

He made these claims to an editor for GamesIndustries International and they just accepted it seemingly without question. Good job whoever they are.

I'd say the AC games are decent ports. They work better with a controller ofc.

Their DRM is notorious though


Fun fact: The Witcher 2 was pirated 4,5 million times according to the dev, and has 0.8 million sales on PC (from vgchartz, doesn't include digital sales) , that means the piracy rate is 85% at most,
that for a game that doesn't have a DRM vs 95% piracy of games with heavy DRM. What say you Ubisoft?

pffff... i wish

Weren't they claiming that the annoying DRM that they used actually works?

Hmmm


http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08/22/ubisoft-boss-declares-f2p-is-because-of-95-piracy-rates/



Hear hear, people playing free to play games without actually paying for it are pirates.

We should burn them at the stake!

And once again Ubisoft are talking out of their backsides.

Sadly seems common practice to blame the piracy bogeyman whenever a company doesnt do as well as they'd hoped.

Their ports usually aren't *too* bad (they range from the pretty good, like the Prince of Persia games and Beyond Good and Evil, to the middling, like the Assassin's Creed games and Driver: San Francisco, to the downright awful, like From Dust and the digital-download version of the King Kong game), but they're notorious for saddling them with the worst DRM available at the time. From disk checkers that could actually destroy certain disc drives, to limited install activations that could be used up by something like changing your graphics card, to always-on DRM that would boot you out of your singleplayer game if you lost your internet connection for more than a minute or two. You name it, and they've saddled their customers with it.

Recently they've been improving somewhat, eg their new Uplay service has an Offline mode that actually works consitently and doesn't require you to activate it before you can use it (unlike Steam's offline mode), but depending on the game you might have almost no DRM at all (eg, Driver: San Francisco, From Dust), some minor bonuses removed if you aren't online (eg, expanded ammo capacity in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood), or some fairly major parts of the game not working unless you're online (like the Ark feature in Anno 2070), or the aforementioned limited activations (again, Anno 2070. It's like they looked at their recent releases and went "Holy [censored], we forgot to cripple our games with pointless DRM! Quick, put everything we've got into this one!")

Thats funny 'cause all I play are F2P games

The PC ports for the Assassin's Creed games are pretty solid. Nice amount of graphics options, pretty well optimized, and they do look better than the console versions. The only issue I've had with all of them is that you're limited to the same amount of hotkeys for weapons as the console version for no reason. Keys 1-4 are used for hotkeys. Keys 5-9 aren't used at all.

Sure the From Dust port was horrible, but mostly they're okay. The DRM is the problem. During the Steam summer sale many people bought Ubisoft games that used the UPlay service, which resulted in the UPlay servers getting overloaded and http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/16/udontplay-ubidrm-servers-wobble-during-steam-sale/. And then there was a http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/30/psa-possible-security-risk-in-some-ubisoft-pc-games/ for some kind of UPlay browser plugin that they automatically install on your PC without telling.

This is just their excuse so that they can begin to phase out the PC market.

What are these free to play games? Who makes them and why are they free?

It looks like they're using it as an excuse to move into the F2P market instead. Which doesn't seem to make any sense to me based on the argument they're making but whatever. They didn't need to use piracy as an excuse to go in that direction, it didn't need any excuse at all. They're just pissing off their potential customers for no good reason.