Set sail gamers for there be controversy on the high seas! Hold close yur booty and make ready yur sea legs…
All joking and diction aside, Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot said some pretty controversial things on August 22nd while communicating with gamesindustry.biz.
“On PC it’s only around five to seven percent of players who pay for Free to Play (F2P), but normally on PC it’s only about five to seven percent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated.”
Now I’m not a math whiz or anything, but that equates to about 93-95% as Guillemot’s Official Piracy Rating. That is a vast and overwhelming majority that Guillemot is accusing of piracy. Whether or not these numbers are legitimate research numbers or something Guillemot said in hyperbole is up for debate.
Perhaps something causing these “high numbers” is Ubisoft’s own universally criticized Digital Rights Management, or better known as DRM. DRM is a system that Ubisoft uses to restrict the number of times you can download a game onto a computer.
So, if you travel frequently or have multiple computers, you’re SOL. DRM also affects your single-player experience of a game by making it impossible to play an Ubisoft title without being connected to the Internet. It’s an issue that isn’t even specific to Ubisoft titles.
Electronic Arts, Valve and Blizzard are guilty of these implementations of selling you access to a game and not the game itself. Heck, I recently learned that when you download a game using PlayStation Plus—Sony’s paid online service—you lose the ability to play the game if you end your subscription.
Jeff Holmes, a graduate student at the Center for Games and Impact at Arizona State University, gave me his view on “Free to Play” games and the companies involved:
“This is an issue of access—who has the right to access the experience of play, the content of the game, and the ideas and talents that made those things happen?” he says. “It comes down to how the F2P model is implemented. This is a shift from a ‘product’ model to a ‘service’ model, and it can cause some real headaches if we're not careful.”
When does the madness end and the gaming begin?
Follow me on twitter @MaroonandGamer or shoot me an email at shfawcet@asu.edu.
