After dev was previously told to crack down on porn.
Tag: Piracy
[Community] PC Gaming May Not Be Dead, But Lawbreakers Is Starting Out Weak
Cliff Bleszinski has a long history with PC games, although you may not know it if you just started gaming within the last ten years. For a while, Bleszinski had a great relationship with the PC platform, until Unreal Tournament allegedly sold quite poorly on the system (according to Gamespy online stats from the time), leading up to 2008 where Bleszinski announced that Gears of War 2 would not be coming to PC, blaming piracy. In reality, Gears of War 2 didn’t come to PC because it was an Xbox platform exclusive.
“The person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know [BitTorrent] to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC.”
Certain developers have been exaggerating the effects of piracy on PC for years, going further back than 2011 with Ubisoft claiming that 95% of PC consumers would pirate their product, a factor that runs in direct contradiction to their investor reports which consistently show great sales on PC. As a result of his snubbing of the community, Bleszinski’s name has been somewhat dragged through the mud over the years.
Now Bleszinski apologized for his comment at the 2015 Game Awards, alongside showcasing his upcoming (now released) game Lawbreakers. Well Lawbreakers has launched and while it is receiving very positive reviews, from critics and gamers (87% positive on Steam), the population on PC has been slow to adopt the title. Steam Charts shows a launch day peak of 3,000 which has been steadily dropping over the past week. By comparison, Battleborn launched to a day one peak of 12,000 and is presently sitting at a peak of 280 over the last 30 days, including free trial players.
Bleszinski, for his part, has already responded to news comparing Lawbreakers to Battleborn, noting that the game is “a marathon not a sprint,” and that he would “rather be the underhyped game that slowly ramps up into something that people adore than something that comes out with way too much hype that there’s a backlash for, which is why I think the Steam reviews are so positive.” You can check out the entire interview at Eurogamer.
As for Lawbreakers, we will need to wait and see if the game is able to attract more publicity, and thus a more active population, and what plans are in store should traffic continue to dwindle.
[Column] Are Pirates Starting To Admit Defeat?
Video game piracy may be going away, a thought that is sure to terrorize every consumer who feels entitled to a free lunch, but while we’ve been hearing this statement from publishers for years accompanied by their games being cracked and leaked at launch or, in some cases, weeks and months before. We hear it and groan about the prospect of a new piece of half-cocked DRM that doesn’t so much stop piracy as it does harass legitimate buyers and diminish the overall product, but this is the first time we’re hearing about it from the pirates themselves. The message isn’t so much a cry of fear but a sigh of resignation, there’s a sense that publishers are indeed winning this war.
This has been going on for nearly two years now, thanks to a little piece of software called Denuvo Anti-Tamper. While it hasn’t made games completely uncrackable, it has severely lengthened the amount of time and effort required to break the games, in many cases until months after launch when the initial wave of interest is already over. It took a month to crack Dragon Age: Inquisition, six months for Fifa 15, and titles like Just Cause 3 and FIFA 16 still have not been cracked as of mid-January. Chinese group 3DM noted in one of their posts that their cracker nearly called it quits over Just Cause 3’s impenetrability.
According to that same group, piracy may go the way of the dodo within the next two years, at least as far as AAA studios and big releases are concerned. 3DM, meanwhile, has actually pledged to stop cracking single player games for the next year in order to examine how sales are affected by their absence. Whether or not that’s actually their motivation, or if it is a coming sign of defeat, will have to be seen.
And for the record, MMO Fallout does not support piracy of commercial products for any reason. Private servers for abandoned MMOs and abandonware, modifications, and tweaking software to function on your computer are completely different topics.
Despite Claims of Rampant Piracy, PC Accounts For 25% Of Ubisoft Sales
Ubisoft has released their first quarter sales figures for the 2015-2016 fiscal year with results that are better than expected. While the company had forecast earnings of €80 million, the company actually pulled in €96.6 million. Sales have been strong thanks to the performance of Assassin’s Creed as well as continued sales of Far Cry, Watch Dogs, and The Crew. As far as platforms go, digital revenues more than doubled from 23% to 56% of total sales over last year.
Sales for the first quarter of fiscal 2015-16 came to €96,6 million, down 73.2% (75.6% at constant exchange rates) compared to €360.1 million for first-quarter 2014-15 which saw the release of Watch_Dogs®.
Geographically speaking, Europe and North America still hold the majority of sales while the ‘rest of the world’ has grown from 12% last year to 20% of market share this year. On platforms, the Playstation 4 is in a clear lead over the Xbox One (27% compared to 11%), with the latter bringing in as many sales as the old generation of consoles (360 and PS3, 11% each) while the Wii and WiiU combined only accounted for 3%.
The PC, on the other hand, has seen a major growth in revenue share, from 14% last year to 23% this year, giving it more than twice the sales of the Xbox One. The results are even more impressive if you believe Ubisoft’s estimation from 2012 that the PC has a 95% piracy rate.
“On PC it’s only around five to seven per cent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it’s only about five to seven per cent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated. It’s around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage. The revenue we get from the people who play is more long term, so we can continue to bring content.”
Second quarter releases by Ubisoft include Might & Magic Heroes VII, Rabbids Appisodes, and Toy Soldiers War Chest.
(Source: PC Gamer)
MMO Fallout 