Even as Gabe Newell of Valve continues to lecture that piracy is brought on by companies offering poor service rather than an unwillingness to pay for games, some game companies seem to have a hard time learning the lesson.
Zachary Knight at Techdirt reports that last week, Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Stanislas Mettra seemed to imply that a PC version of the game I Am Alive would not be coming out because there were too many pirates and not enough customers on the PC platform. “If only 50,000 people buy the game then it’s not worth it,” he said.
After a flood of bad publicity, Mettra hastily backtracked, or “clarified”, saying that there had probably been a miscommunication because he was not a native English speaker—what he had meant to say was that piracy concerns were why the PC version of the game hadn’t come out yet, and whether there would be a port or not was not his decision.
To be fair, I don’t have the full text of what he said, just the snippets of the interview that IncGamers quoted in its article. He doesn’t explicitly say anywhere that the game wouldn’t be coming out, he just says he doubts the gamers who are complaining would buy it if it were available, and that piracy makes porting “hard”. So it could have been the simple miscommunication he says it was.
But there is a history of controversy surrounding Ubisoft’s use of DRM making its games harder for people to play (we covered it here, here, and here), and it seems the company is quick to blame piracy for any problem in the gaming industry. As Knight puts it:
Really Ubisoft, this is getting old. I feel like a parent scolding his child for the 20th time about hitting his sister. You think the child gets it after the first time and that the second time is an honest mistake. But, when the child continues to hit his sister, you need to take drastic disciplinary action. What will it take to get the message through to those in charge at Ubisoft? Gamers want your games and will buy them, but you have to provide the service they want. That is the only way you will succeed.
Of course, as e-book fans know, we have our own problems with publishers in that regard, and it’s simple to substitute “publishers”, “readers”, and “e-books” for “Ubisoft”, “gamers”, and “games” in the paragraph above and let it be just as true.
I wish you have release your game as soon as the piracy have began so that more people will buy your original game design instead of the pirated version of your game. Maybe it is PC support system or it is in your own team who had made pirate of your work. I think you should have investigated before you have started pointing fingers.
Johanna
My blog : bouilloire inox