Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillemot stated that the percentage of people pirating on the PC is 93 to 95%,(Guillemot: As many PC players pay for F2P as boxed product) the same as the number of people who do not pay when playing a free-to-play game. I'm not sure where they get their stats from, but with their always-online-DRM, I'm not surprised if people do end up pirating their games just so they can play it without issues, and even those who bought the games might end up pirating or cracking them, so the number of pirates gets inflated. Perhaps they realized this themselves, because an article surfaced today with they stating their DRM have been scrapped since June 2011 and replaced with a one-time online activation (Ubisoft Scrapping Always-On DRM For PC Games). Are they eating their words and crawling back to PC gamers?
Is this a win for gamers? Without the online DRM, I just might start buying their games again. But if publishers continue to blame poor PC sales on piracy instead of acknowledging that they have been bringing really poor and unplayable ports over to PCs, they are just going to turn away the PC crowd. For too many times have great games on consoles been poorly ported over to the PC, so much so that PC gamers may just start to thinking that developers have no interest in the PC market, and if that is so, there will be less and less people willing to pay for PC games. Perhaps things aren't that grim, but I would hate to see things go into that vicious cycle...
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