Ubisoft - Responds to Piracy with DRM Free Title

The game will get pirated more for sure. The big question is, how much more? And how does the money lost to increased piracy compare to the cost of DRM (both putting it on and supporting it)?
 
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mmm...the Nth title in a series, surely people are getting sick of PoP? So, when it's sales do poorly they can blame piracy! Quite clever actually. The big problem, imho, is that publishers treat games differently from books, videos etc Although (technically) the legality may be debatable, once I own those I can lend them out to my friends who can read/watch them countless times, and no one sqwawks about that. I can even (at least for books) sell them on again and recoup some money. How much does it cost to burn a DVD for a game, and how much does the retail game cost? There is a huge, huge difference. Sure, part of that must go to pay for the work and time of developers, but the greatest chunk (based on what indie devs locally have told me) goes to publishers. And then the still inflict their expensive DRM choices on us (and make us pay for them). I'm not sure they really need to exist in this age of increased internet connectivity and digital distribution...
 
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I generally stay out of piracy threads because you can only lose by entering one. Still, here I go. I lose.

I don't understand most of your points.

Books aren't a good comparison. They're not easily reproduced in a usable form and it's pretty hard for two people to read the same book at once, whereas a simple easy-to-find crack means both you and your friend can play most games at the same time. Books are also potentially cheap to produce; they are essentially the work of one artist and some authors are capable of producing several books in a year. Compare this with teams of anywhere of 10 - 200 developers and 2 - 5 years (yes, I'm generalising - pretty hard not to). They have zero support costs, multiple editions (usually at least hardcover and softback) and can continue selling indefinitely.

What does the cost of disk duplication have to do with anything? The development costs (then marketing and distribution) are the real costs of game development. These days, most AAA games well exceed $10M to develop plus marketing - that's what you're trying to recoup.

Yes, most of the money goes to the publisher. They paid for it. This is the way business works. Why the hell would a publisher give a developer $10M to develop a game if they didn't get a good return?

None of that means DRM works but let's not confuse reality with wishful thinking. As an aside, I often see references to "expensive" DRM - has anyone ever seen a reputable costing? I haven't. It's entirely possible it's as little as cents per disk, which would be almost irrelevant on a $10M development budget. I'd love to see real figures, not just assumption.
 
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JemyM said:
It's ok to not buy a game if it has poor review scores, which on the sell-rate have the same effect as piracy.
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Of course! :) It's just that I've head the argument "The game sucked, so I wouldn't have bought it anyway - but I still liked it enough to download a pirated copy to play" too many times and misread you post for something similar.
 
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Dhruin said:
As an aside, I often see references to "expensive" DRM - has anyone ever seen a reputable costing? I haven't. It's entirely possible it's as little as cents per disk, which would be almost irrelevant on a $10M development budget. I'd love to see real figures, not just assumption.
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Simple CP for video DVDs only costs a few cents per disk. A google search should come up with a couple of quotes.
Even a complex PC & DRM scheme like SecuROM can hardly cost more than, say, 50 cents per disk because otherwise it would be a good investment for big publishers with 30+ titles per year to develop their own technology.
I personally believe it's much less than 50 cents for large volume, but of course I can't prove it. Just take The Sims as an extreme example. Why would EA pay Sony 50 cent * 50 million units for DRM and / or CP? Or are they at 100M now? On such a scale even 10 cents is too much from a business perspective.
 
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Dhruin said:
I generally stay out of piracy threads because you can only lose by entering one. Still, here I go. I lose.

I don't understand most of your points.

Books aren't a good comparison. They're not easily reproduced in a usable form and it's pretty hard for two people to read the same book at once, whereas a simple easy-to-find crack means both you and your friend can play most games at the same time. Books are also potentially cheap to produce; they are essentially the work of one artist and some authors are capable of producing several books in a year. Compare this with teams of anywhere of 10 - 200 developers and 2 - 5 years (yes, I'm generalising - pretty hard not to). They have zero support costs, multiple editions (usually at least hardcover and softback) and can continue selling indefinitely.

What does the cost of disk duplication have to do with anything? The development costs (then marketing and distribution) are the real costs of game development. These days, most AAA games well exceed $10M to develop plus marketing - that's what you're trying to recoup.

Yes, most of the money goes to the publisher. They paid for it. This is the way business works. Why the hell would a publisher give a developer $10M to develop a game if they didn't get a good return?

None of that means DRM works but let's not confuse reality with wishful thinking. As an aside, I often see references to "expensive" DRM - has anyone ever seen a reputable costing? I haven't. It's entirely possible it's as little as cents per disk, which would be almost irrelevant on a $10M development budget. I'd love to see real figures, not just assumption.
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I think the profiteering of some publishers is out of whack and that unreasonably inflates costs - I am happy for them to recoup their investment and a reasonable profit. If that is all they are making then, I have no problem with that. But given the way that the world works (credit crunch anyone?) and the retail cost of games (esp titles like Bioshock), I seriously doubt they are only adding a small markup to their games. Perhaps DRM does not add that much, but they do not divulge this information, so one can only speculate - why don't they reassure everyone that it is *not* a major cost contributor, since this objection is raised frequently? I suppose books were not a good example - but I object to the inability to resell PC games that I purchase, which I can do with both books and movies (at least here). Why should the copyright on a PC game be so different (They allow trading of console titles here) ?
 
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JemyM said:
This exclusively depends on how good the game is. The game's average score on gamerankings is 78.6%. I am sure they will end up blaming piracy anyway.
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Gamespot:
Critic Score 81% (29 reviews)
User Score 90% (4608 votes)

It will be interesting to see how this will go. I was planning to buy this but canceled when I heard som bad stuff about it. The reviews seem to prove othervice though.
 
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Which is the 2nd game without CP? GameStar writes Ubi released 2 games. Unfortunately their newsbit doesn't work.
 
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Yeesh said:
You think game quality is the sole determinant? Why don't you take a look at the sales chart:

4. Spore
7. The Sims 2 Deluxe
9. The Sims 2 Apartment Life
12. The Sims 2 Mansion & Garden Stuff
13. Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy
18. Spore Creepty & Cute Parts Pack
19. IGT Slots: Little Green Men
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I think that list suggests that one way to avoid piracy is to make games for the casual gamers who wouldn't know how to download cracked stuff.
 
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Here's the list:
Prince of Persia 1989
Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow & The Flame 1993
Prince of Persia 3D 1999
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time 2003
Prince of Persia: Harem Adventures (Mobile) 2003
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within 2004
Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones 2005
Battles of Prince of Persia (NDS) 2005
Prince of Persia 2008

The first two is a series. The "3d" game might be a part of that series or stand alone.
The Sands of Time, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones is a stand alone trilogy with a new story.
In the 2008 game is also stand alone from previous games (new story, new prince).

The mobile version of The Two Thrones and Sands of Time looks and plays like the original Prince of Persia, but with borrowed story of the newer game.

There also seems to be a couple of remakes.
4D Prince of Persia 1994 (unofficial tougher rebuild of the first game)
Prince of Persia: Special Edition 2003 (browser driven remake of the first game)
Prince of Persia: Revelations 2005 (enhanced port of Warrior Within for the PSP)
Prince of Persia Classic (3d remake of the first game)

Trivia: JemyM haven't completed a single PoP game.
 
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Benedict said:
I think that list suggests that one way to avoid piracy is to make games for the casual gamers who wouldn't know how to download cracked stuff.
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I read somewhere that Spore is rated as the most pirated game though.
 
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kalniel said:
By what measure though? Proportion of pirated copies to sold copies?
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I think they get their numbers from consulting a medium.
 
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New study on piracy mentions this game:
The argument that removing DRM will result in a net increase in sales has no basis in fact based on the evidence at hand. Not only does gaming history show that unprotected games simply lead to more piracy, recent history also demonstrates clearly that simply removing DRM is not the answer to piracy. As we saw in the Scale of Piracy section, many popular games which have no intrusive DRM, such as Assassin's Creed, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and World of Goo, also have some of the highest piracy rates in 2008. Indeed as I write this, the new Prince of Persia game was released yesterday for PC (December 10, 2008) with absolutely no DRM protection, and a quick look at torrents shows that the cracked version is available, and on two popular torrent links alone there are over 23,000 people downloading the game within the first 24 hours. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear: DRM does not cause piracy, piracy results in DRM.

A recent highly-publicized PC-specific example of the 'DRM causes piracy' argument is the game Spore, and in some ways this is a unique case that bears closer examination. Much-maligned for its use of SecuROM DRM, some people even went to the trouble of giving Spore a one-star rating on Amazon.com to protest the use of DRM. Similarly, looking at Spore's Metacritic Scores, it got 84% from professional reviewers, but a lowly 45% from users, primarily due to the DRM issue. Despite this customer backlash, the game still sold over 2 million copies in its first three weeks alone, making it one of the best selling PC games of the year. To counter this success, one piracy site released the sensationalist claim that Spore is the most downloaded game ever at 500,000 copies during the same period. I have no doubt that some of those pirated copies were the result of people being scared off by SecuROM, however the entire Spore controversy is more important because it demonstrates the somewhat sinister side of the DRM debate. As I'm about to show you, the anger against SecuROM - and StarForce before it - is in large part propagandistic misinformation-laden scaremongering deliberately fuelled by various vested interests. For the moment, to counter the Spore example, bear in mind that the piracy figures we examined earlier show that the key determinant in how much a game gets pirated is how popular the game is, not whether it has DRM.

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
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The Culture of Piracy

In researching this article I read literally hundreds of articles, studies, forum posts, blog posts and general comments from a wide range of people. What disturbed me more than the blatant misinformation and falsehoods regarding various aspects of the debate was the unashamed 'Culture of Piracy' which now appears to be prevalent around the Internet. Not only are the people who are pirating games openly bragging about it, they're flowering it up with a range of excuses, even suggesting that it's their right to do so. Back in the 1980s when my friends and I swapped copies of Amiga games, we didn't blame the copy protection for forcing us to do it, we didn't blame copyright laws, or assume it was our right to copy any game we want in the name of 'freedom', we didn't even make a point of openly advertising that we did it. We copied games for one simple reason: because we could.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and piracy has apparently somehow become a political struggle, a fight against greedy corporations and evil copy protection, and in some cases, I've even seen some people refer to the rise of piracy as a ”revolution”. What an absolute farce. Truth be told I have the greatest respect for the people who simply come out and just say that they pirate because they can, no more, no less. At least then I know I'm dealing with someone who's being honest and has got their head screwed on straight.
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This game was terrible, One of the most idiotic things I have ever played in my life, no one would want to pirate this trash.
 
zakhal said:
Not really.

#Critic Score 79% (5 reviews)
#User Score 87% (500 user reviews)

Thats a very decent review average.
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Do you think there could be the reverse of the protest votes against games with DRM pushing up the user score average? Everyone steaming in to give it 5 stars because they took the DRM off.
 
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I think the problem is that yes, a simple CD check (SecuROM or otherwise) is a good way to stop 90% of would-be-pirates (i.e. those who don't know anything and just think they can install the game in a friend's house). I don't mind this protection at all. Problem is that by them wanting to stop the other 10% they introduce the strongest side of DRM, which affects all legitimate customers, and really doesn't stop the 'knowledged' 10% at all (and never will).
 
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Well, either a DRM protection has to be very strong ( Bioshock ) people even wrote on forums that they bought the game because it was not cracked within a week of release, or they don't have a piracy protection some people would buy the game to support the move. The most useless is to have a protection which is crached before the game is released, so every pirate downloaded it but none bought it to support it because it didn't have a piracy protection.

But the DRM of the PS3 stopped all the pirates so far, none could pirate for this console, so to say that DRM is useless is just wrong, and I do not think it prevented any legitimate costumers from playing either! I think what we need is DRM done right, as sony did with the PS3.
 
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