It's complete bullshit though. No other word for it. He doesn't even have a source for this number, and ironically - as you cannot "steal" (pirate) games, he's unable to provide it anyways. They are copied, not stolen.
In the last few years 95% of publisher released games with multiplayer required accounts OR crazy DRM. It's impossible to pirate most multiplayer titles. If anything you can only have the single player experience.
Secondly it's not a PC problem but yet publishers always blame the PC because they are afraid of something very much different. Console players pirate as hell too - but they do not alter the content of games, mod them or even expect the ability to mod them. Instead they are used to being fed, just pirating a new game release instead.
THIS is the core issue here. Most publishers are actually afraid of F2P because anyone can do it and if they do then it will fail again. The only addition you can make to a F2P title is rubbish, content that a good community would create anyways. Models? Hats? Missions? Titles? Ranks? It's all either worthless or not a big deal compared to fundamental game mechanics.
There is no piracy. You can't steal bytes, you copy them. No one is missing them. And the sales, in 95% of the cases, wouldn't have happened if they had to buy it. There are also examples where pirace actually helped games. A games success is NOT just about money. Some of the most incredible and even lucrative games were sold for cheap and without any or much DRM. A games success is made by the community behind it and it's size.
The real piracy is within publishers, selling uncreative and unprofessional games for very hefty and questionable prices, especially in the EU or AUS etc. They make billions of profits and yet say "something was stolen". So where did it go then? If anything something wasn't bought. But seeing how much money Activision / Blizzard / EA / UBI etc. make I really wonder...
I own some of the games I loved like 5 times or more in some cases. But there was also games where I should've been paid just for wasting time and installing them.
This is just a big scheme of one of the biggest financial sectors - where a damn lot of investors is expecting high returns from the stocks they own and it's getting harder and harder to milk people. F2P is the incarnation of milking whales - and yes, the technical term for a paying F2P customer is "whale", referring to the whalehunt - aka making a damn big "profitable" kill. Search it and you'll see the motivation behind thecrap that Ubi guy is spouting. The only reason he can look into the mirror every day is because of the money falling out of his pocket when he thinks of F2P.
Last edited by Madfish; 08-23-2012 at 05:05 PM.
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