Examples of Damage Control in Gaming: Ubisoft, DRM, PC Gaming, and You

For the
strangest reason, Ubisoft insists on battling the PC platform and its gaming
audience to the death. For the last few years they’ve argued that piracy is all
too prevalent on it for them to take it too seriously, but they still put their
games on the platform. In a way, this is true. It’s much easier to get away
with piracy PC as opposed to consoles; the latter of those have stricter
guidelines as to what you can play on a system, and can be monitored by the
console manufacturer more easily. Not to say piracy doesn’t exist on consoles, but
it’s not like Ubisoft is showing any concern for truth and logic here.

 

To combat
this, the company began using some utterly terrible, draconian DRM in all of
their games released in the middle of this console generation. This started
with Assassin’s Creed II, and continued
with games like Splinter Cell:
Conviction and the rest of their PC games. Said DRM, of course, isn’t a
restriction on consoles, but PC users who wanted to play the game in a legit
fashion had to have a constant internet connection. If the connection broke
during the game, it would be treated as a Game Over. It’s draconian because it
punishes all players for the actions of a few.

 

It’s also
bad because when some tech-savvy PC players hacked and removed the DRM, the
games themselves ran better. So yes, pirates get the better product in more
ways than one.

 

Apparently
that wasn’t working well enough for them either, so they’re taking this to
another level. I Am
Alive creative director Stanislas Mettra confirmed in an interview that the
game won’t be released on PC because “there’s so few people paying for PC
games.” Soon after that, it was announced that they’ve
decided to pull the plug on the PC version of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier as well, where Ghost Recon Online’s senior producer Sebastien Arnoult said “95
percent of our customers will pirate the game.” They’ll still be continuing PC
releases for established franchises like Assassin’s Creed, but Ubi appears to
be finished with the platform for everything else. And though they haven’t said
so themselves, it wouldn’t be tough to conclude that Rayman: Origins probably isn’t coming either considering it was
announced for every platform except for PC. Why? Because of piracy, of course!

 

In fact,
they don’t like the platform so much that they’ve taken to making up statistics
for how many potential customers will pirate their games. That’s pretty
ridiculous on the surface, but it’s totally silly when it files in the face of
other developers who’ve said they’ve sold plenty of games through the platform.
Games
like The Witcher 2 and the
recent release of The Elder Scrolls V:
Skyrim have proven that there’s a sizable audience on PC that’s willing
to pay for products as long as they’re not given the finger. It’s a little
tough for Ubi to put together that people have either decided not to buy their
games or have pirated them because of
the DRM.

 

And that’s
not even getting into the constant delays they have for nearly every PC game
they release, especially the Assassin’s Creed games. The delay of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations to early
December was a breath of fresh air, comparatively, as the last two released
around four months after the console versions.

 

The best
approach to selling games on PC is to see what Ubisoft is doing and proceed to
do the exact opposite. We’ve seen plenty of anti-consumer crap this generation,
and this situation is the equivalent of the company failing at it and
subsequently taking all of their toys and going home. It’s awfully
shortsighted, and the company could easily profit from the Audience just as
much as Bethesda and CD Projekt if they only took a logical approach.

 

Today, I Am
Alive’s creative director said it was a mistranslation, and that he
actually meant there wasn’t a PC version yet.
A simple miscommunication or weak damage control? We’ll see soon enough.