I know I’ve used that headline before, but hell, it works. I really do need to find a way to recharge my pun batteries, however.
Assassin’s Creed was one of the most Angry Internet Men-angering games last year, and, like Bioshock, it refuses to go away. This time, there’s a piracy problem. Aaargh. I’m terrified that Assassin’s Creed + Piracy is the secret formula that will cause RPS readers to rise up and destroy the entire planet, but here we go….
1) Ubisoft is suing a disc replication company for leaking AssCreed PC code to the internet six weeks before release. To the tune of $20m. Ouchy.
2) Apparently only 40,000 copies of the PC version sold in the US through June, compared to 700,000 pirated copies. Americans: does “through June” mean “during June” or “up to and including June?”
3) Eyebrow-raisingly, Ubisoft claims it stuck a crash-bug in the leaked code as a security measure. And that the leaked, buggy version thus created word that the port was in poor shape, further harming sales and causing ‘irreparable damage’ to Ubi’s reputation.
Which all adds up to quite the tale, and one I almost dare not comment upon. I’m sure you lot will.
Full story and more details at Gamespot.
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@Deuteronomy: I think that the best way to fight piracy isn’t by punishing the pirates is by rewarding the people who buys originals. Even though it shouldn’t be that way.
Lately DRM has proven that the ones harmed are people who buys originals as they have to cope with a lot of stupid rules that pirates just avoid by simple replacing a file.
Companies have to offer something that pirates just can’t. In any other case I’d go with something related with packaging but with the increase of digital downloads that’s becoming harder to achieve.
I’d post an article I wrote about it (focused for small local companies where the packaging thingy is applicable) but it’s in spanish.
But anyway, I’m more inclined to agree with Stardock’s philosophy about piracy.
@Deuteronomy: I believe mass effect is fully cracked, but I hear its something of a fiddle to get up and running. And by “something of a fiddle” I mean moderately harder than just downloading a fixed executable.
IMHO that is probably enough to discourage a ton of people from bothering trying to pirate it. As ever the persistant & marginally technically savvy will get a free game, but Joe Schmo will probably give up after a few failed attempts. Isn’t this what the aim of copy-protection is?
Will Joe bother to buy a mediocre game like AC if they can’t get a free copy? Probably not. One interesting effect of sucessful strong copy protection might be that people forced to spend more have less disposable income left over, and as a result will probably be more careful with their cash and in the end not be inclined to purchase games of dubious pedigree. Also people forced to buy all those crazy new video games have less money to spend on takeout and beer, which is bad for everybody.
Also they should take heart that AC was at least good enough to warrant cracking. Some poor games never even get cracked. Now that would be hard to swallow.
Also I think they forgot to remove some of those “”crash-bugs”" from the release version. Ooops!
I think Ubi are under the misconception that reasonable sales on the 360 & PS3 automatically equate to good sales on the PC, where as as someone earlier rightly pointed out the system requirements were staggeringly high compared to other ports, which instantly cut the potential audience for the game. Personally I’m waiting till the game hits the bargain buckets before I buy it as I’m only really interested in seeing the environments which I’ve heard so much about. A steam release outside of the USA might tempt me as well, but Ubi seem reluctant to open up to TRoTW atm which is highly annoying as I’ve love to add Beyond good and evil to my back catalog. So if your reading this Ubisoft suit, yes you there twiddling your thumbs, me a European would like to give you money in exchange for goods through Steam, make it happen. :|
Seeing as those 40,000 units sold are only in the US and in retail, I fail to see how that’s a relevant number regarding sold copies. Also, the PC version was released after the console versions, which, as far as I can recall got fairly poor reviews. With this in mind, blaming piracy seems like a huge cop out, especially as I’m sure there are tons of PC games that get pirated a lot more than that, and also have much better sales figures.
Nah, you didn’t need crash bugs to think the port was poor – just read the reviews talking about the daunting system requirements, and watch someone try to exit the game through the directly ported user interface.
I can’t believe i’m the first to point this out but, good on Ubi, as much as I hated AC, at least Ubisoft is pointing the finger at the right place.
The battle against piracy starts with the people who create the warez (ie CD distro companies, ect) not the people who download them. I hope the CD pressers are black listed and have to close their doors because of this.
I admit I used to download games, but now that i see what its doing to our beloved PC gaming industry I’ve been buying everything I’m interested in playing, and encourage everyone to do the same. Fine sometimes I buy a stinker *cough*Bioshock*cough* and regret it, but i regret spending twice what i spent on bioshock on booze last night alone.
this game deserved to sell a lot better.
great production values, really new exciting fun way of exploring a city
to me it was well worth it at full retail value
of course, I bought it for the 360… but! had I not! I would have bought the PC version… if my pc could handle the steep system requirements.
ahaaaa….
stop pirating games!
I was going to by the collectors edition for the PC even though I had a 360 because I heard they were going to improve it some what. So I acept the delayed release date and wait. Then I find out the system requirements, at first I thought it was some kinda joke, the min requirements were higher then Cysis ffs! But no, they were true, so I bought it on the 360 instead. If you port something then optimise it ffs! It’s like they just stuck the game in an emulator instead.
I beg everyone to pirate this crap game. No, better, everyone should go to their local shop and hide all of the copies so ubisoft goes “brilliant! they’ve all sold!” and spend a ton of money reprinting it and still nobody buys it because they deserve to lose money for making this crap.
I actually feel bad for Ubisoft even while I regard them as a pretty bad publisher.
All in all, I actually hope they win this case because seriously, can you even defend people who deliberately leaked the game to pirates?
Late PC releases enable customers to see through the hype. The extended console reaction mean we know whether the game is actually any good. In the case of Ass, we’d heard that it wasn’t great.
Consolers didn’t have that knowledge on day one, they just had the massive hype. Hence bigger sales.
I know I’ve used that headline before, but hell, it works. I really do need to find a way to recharge my pun batteries, however.
Mmm GTA IV used the pun, too.
@Andrew: “Basically Hitman: The Jerusalum Years.”
Pffft.
re: the minimum system requirements, I seem to recall discussion around release time about how Ubisoft had decided to be actually honest about the system requirements for running the game well, and so the requirements listed ended up being much higher than that listed on games of a similar technical level.
That said, the game did seem to be extremely demanding, for not much in the way of graphical return (the glorious cityscapes brought low by the clay-faced populace).
We’re on the verge of a revolution. I want these companies to get pirated to hell so they understand the system as it is now does not work.
I hope they go bankrupt to be honest. The publishers that is, not the developers. Games will still get made as there is a huge audience for it.
We should pay for the game itself and not for a peice of software. Say for example, I buy Assasin’s Creed and then I can download it for my PC, 360 or PS3. Instead of paying for distribution, which is not needed anymore as we can see from torrents, I pay the developers. I know my ideas are flawed but I think it would be fairer than now.
Surprise! The 49 step process needed to quit the game was really just a bug stuck in the release code to make it unplayable!
I’m going to jump off the bandwagon here and say that I like the game; fighting templars on bell towers and free running all day can be fun. It’s never crashed for me, and I enjoyed the end of the story, if not the whole thing.
That said, Ubisoft needs to grow the hell up.
@Charlie
Whose going to stump up the cash for said developers to spend 3 years working on their game? 99.9% of developers require outside funding in order to complete their projects. That’s half of what publishers provide, the other half is the advertising and PR. As a developer you don’t want an entire PR crew on your payroll for 3 years whilst your developing your game, it’s an unnecessary expenditure. Publishing is much more than just distribution, and even in the ever expanding age of DD, publishers still serve a purpose. Sure you could hire a PR firm prior to release, but it makes sense to have one that actually understands the nature of the product you sell.
I’d buy it on Steam, here in the UK, if I could. Instead I downloaded it. If it comes on Steam within a few weeks and it’s under £20, I’ll get it.
Another sore point with consoles is that they also encourage publishers to look at short term sales.
A game on the PS3 or the Xbox is only there until the end of the console’s lifecycle.
A game on digital distribution for the pc is available forever. [I lost my cd key for q3 the other day and bought a digital copy of the game for peanuts]
I must say I still don’t understand why they develop games like Assassins Creed and Crysis that only run well on a small percentage of PC:s and still expect the game to sell bucketloads.
Heck with the system requirements of Assassins Creed you have like 40% of the gamer market as potential buyers and then only like 20% of those can actually run the game well?
Common sense should tell you that you won’t be selling oodles of that anytime soon if it’s not something truly revolutionary.
At least they released it on the consoles where that kind of problem doesn’t exist.
The developers of Crysis should have realised however that if you want your game to sell alot then alot of people have to be able to run it well on their machines, it’s that simple.
You know, points 1 and 3 don’t gel. Why would Ubisoft knowingly stick a crash bug into a version sent to the disc duplication company, which presumably is duplicating the game for retail? Sounds like a made up Internet rumour (shock!) or someone at Ubisoft isn’t thinking up their excuses properly.
I didn’t say my idea was particularly well thought through!
However, maybe if they lean towards to developers more, I remember being told that Free Radical made 1 pound out of every 30 (or somewhere round there) on every copy of Timesplitters sold. That is simply not fair and I don’t want that amount of my money going to the publisher.
I know my theory is pretty idealist but I think I have a point about distribution. Costs should be a LOT lower on games by now.
Look at EA Link or whatever name it is going by now, they charge RRP for games that you only get a 6 month licence to download. It’s like they are encouraging me to pirate! Valve sell their own games cheap on Steam but a lot of publishers are charging rediculous amounts for something that costs them next to nothing.
Maybe if some of the big name publishers do go bust then new ones with new thinking may rise up. Or maybe, just maybe, some of them may start changing their attitudes. It is begginning to happen with games like Battlefield Heroes and publishers moving to Steam but it just isn’t happening fast enough. Finally when their games flop they use stupid excuses to justify it.
“I remember being told that Free Radical made 1 pound out of every 30 (or somewhere round there) on every copy of Timesplitters sold. That is simply not fair and I don’t want that amount of my money going to the publisher.”
Hence Valve.
Gang, we really don’t want to get too uptight about the numbers in this case. They’re going into court. Of course they’re going to make it look like a clear cut, simple situation of huge loss, complex truth be damned.
If you want the foul you gotta ride the stretcher.
Marcus,
Honestly is your PC from 2001? I played and enjoyed Crysis on a two year old system I bought for less than 700 dollars. Sure it was on medium-low settings. But I get the feeling everyone would have been happier if the high settings were removed all together to eliminate the psychological pain of knowing you no longer have a top of the line rig.
Now I have no knowledge of AC’s performance, but I just want to set the record straight. Of course Crysis sold respectably for a PC game in 2007 so maybe using it as an example was just a mistake on your part.
Also Charlie, while I agree with you in theory about “buying for one platform, owning it on all” it’s just not very economical. Writing cross-platform games is *very* hard work. It took me a month to get my game running on Mac, and that is infinitely easier than porting between two platform that share very little in terms of architecture. While I like the idea of “owning the game, not the software” it’s too expensive to give away for free.
http://www.rumblo.com/cc/comics/cc-coolfrog.gif
A couple of things – however you may feel about the actual game, it’s not a straight, no effort port. They added several new investigation types to the game, improved the graphics, and rigged up a mouse and keyboard control scheme that was entirely playable (it’s how I went through the whole game, despite having a 360 pad easily available), even enjoyable. Are there other things that should have been improved (notably, the lengthy quit sequence)? Quite possibly. (though you can alt-F4 out quite quickly, much like powering off the 360 version. That’s what I always did.)
Secondly, I suspect those minimum requirements of being inflated. In many respects my system *barely* meets those standards (I have the exact CPU mentioned, 2 gigs of RAM, and a pair of 7600GTs), and I was able to do 1024×768 with most graphical settings maxed out with little to no slowdown, all the way through the game. Ergo, a lesser system ought to be able to do likewise on lower settings. Though, honestly, the core ingredients of this system would run maybe $200-$300, tops. I’m not going to say that that’s entirely trivial, but it shouldn’t be wildly out of reach either. And they’re that cheap because they’re that out of date. If you’re significantly behind that curve, then yes, you’re going to have some trouble running the latest 3D-graphics-intensive games. It kinda comes with the territory.
Wahey! A piracy thread!
Firstly, Ubi are just simply dumbasses for not making a demo. I’d never pirate a game because there was no demo, but many people do, and even *I* can’t get too judgemental about that. Demos are essential these days.
Secondly, I am VERY PLEASED that they will sue the ass of the duplicators who distributed the code. When I was at LH, I was the one in charge of the internal copyright protection and dongle code. I basically had what we jokingly called ‘launch codes’ that were the key to undo the dongle protection, and was damned careful that nobody else in the entire company knew what they were.
Despite going to great lengths to keep the code safe, we all knew 100% that the day it got shipped off as a master to the duplicator, some scumbag would leak it. they *always* do, every single time, and it’s about time one of them lost his job, and the company in question went under as a result.
Potentially wrecking the work of 100 people for 3 years so you get 1 days bragging rights on some geek forum puts a new spin on selfishness.
So… piracy is bad, demos are good, and people at dupe factories are scum :D
Unfortunately, publishers appear to be trying to phase demos out now, since it’s believed that far from helping a game sell, they actually hinder its chances, and that you’re better off with trailers.
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/04/14/study-publishers-shouldnt-release-demos-just-trailers/
Irrespective of whether that’s actually true, publishers appear to think so, and it’s becoming less likely to see demos, at least for titles that aren’t already almost guaranteed to sell (Like Halo 3). I can understand the theory, in that people will see a shiny trailer and be interested, but a gameplay sample from a mediocre game (or sometimes just a mediocre segment from a good game) can easily lose you consumers. The suggestion of the report was that devs should only provide demos after the game is released.
Shame really. I like my demos. I’m also guessing that for more indie titles that demo’s are a boost, but even leaving that aside, avoiding releasing a demo so your customers can buy in ignorance is outright deceptive.
“A game on the PS3 or the Xbox is only there until the end of the console’s lifecycle.”
In theory, you’re right about short-termism. But (a) you try to go buy anything other than a stone-cold classic from the XBox 1 era for the PC, and (2) My Dreamcast games still play on my console when I hook it up to the telly. The same cannot be said for most of my 9-year-old PC games since I installed Vista.
@iainl
Really? I’ve had no problems with backwards compatibility in Vista. I’ve played games that are around a decade old (the Fallouts, Planescape: Torment) just fine. For older games there’s DOSBox. Still, I’ll admit that backwards compatibility can be quirky for different people.
As for the first point, I don’t know. I see a long shelf of budget £5- £10 PC games from around the Xbox era every time I enter my local GAME. Whilst a lot of them were good, I wouldn’t call all of them “stone cold classics”.
Even this I feel ignores the point that Radiant as making, in that Digital Distribution makes the game available for a far longer, with no additional cost or sacrifice to keeping the modern games. You don’t need to worry about “shelf space” issues. As such the games (in particular classics) have a much longer tail than they currently do on the consoles, which don’t have much going in the way of DD just yet.
Or to put it another way. Everyone acknowledged Ico as a classic after-the-fact. People looking for a copy now… well… rare is an understatement, at least in stores. Anything you buy is going to be second hand and it’s probably not going to be budget priced for the age of the game. But what would happen if Sony had the following two things:
a) Backwards compatibility with the PS2 (long since removed from the current PS3)
b) Ico available for DD onto the PS3
Even if the numbers are small, Ico would still be selling even today. That’s a continuous profit well past its console generation, a good 6-7 years after its initial release. That’s nothing to be sneezed at. On top of that consumers wouldn’t have to get the title off of Ebay and may very well get it at a budget price to boot. This is a good thing for both the company and the consumer. At the moment however, yes there’s more pressure and emphasis on short term sales, which is a real shame when a real classic comes along
@Marcus:
I must say I still don’t understand why they develop games like Assassins Creed and Crysis that only run well on a small percentage of PC:s and still expect the game to sell bucketloads.
Because optimising code takes time and money, and this would reduce the profits made from release. They’re not expecting bucketloads, they’re expecting a pleasant addendum to the initial mega-hyped console release.
@Andrew Wills
> Basically Hitman: The Jerusalum Years
LOL, good one.
“Unfortunately, publishers appear to be trying to phase demos out now, since it’s believed that far from helping a game sell, they actually hinder its chances, and that you’re better off with trailers.”
A bit silly, as that only encourages piracy. (When I was young and foolish, I got a fair few pirated games now feel bad about it.)
There’s also such a thing as good demos and bad demos. The Bioshock demo was great, and I bought it straight away online after finishing it (twice). The Crysis demo was poorly optimized rubbish, and put me off buying the game ’til I read reports that the release game was optimized for multi-core. In that case, I did download an “extended demo”, played it, found it indeed ran better, and in the end bought 2 copies (one for a friend).
One further reason I imagine that console games sell in bucketloads is that, at least at the start of the console’s life, there’s a limited supply of games. I mean, if it’s a slow month or two in PC gaming with only mediocre titles released, I can always go and play one of the countless A-list titles I haven’t yet played; I’ve never ever been stuck for something to play. It’s funny how people say PC gaming is dead, but when I look at the releae schedule for the new few months, my thought is “Oh no, too many good games, I’ll never get a chance to play Planescape Torment this year.”.
Compare this, say, to the Wii. There simply aren’t that many games of interest to me on it (joint purchase with my wife), so I’m tempted to buy games for it that I probably would not buy on the PC. One example is RE4 – I had no interest in this title on the PC (admittedly it was a not-very-good port) but picked it up simply because it was the highest-rated Wii game. And I do actually enjoy it.
P.
The sad truth is most PC games only sell about 40,000 these days when it comes to US retail.
Also, I really hate it when people mention Stardock’s no-DRM example as a way to go. First of all, you can’t do that as a public company, lest you be sued out of existence by your shareholders.
Secondly, people always gloss over the second part of Brad Wardell’s argument: Make the type of games least appealing to pirates. He’s saying the same thing iD, Crytek and Epic have said: If you want to make a AAA action title, make it for consoles. So unless the only PC games you want to play until the end of time are Maple Story clones or low budget 4X space strategy games, please stop bringing this up.
@Deut
“I get the feeling everyone would have been happier if the high settings were removed all together to eliminate the psychological pain of knowing you no longer have a top of the line rig.”
QFT
Personally I think they should have renamed the crysis gfx settings. Very High should have been called “Insane”, high should have been “Very High”, Medium should have been called “High” and low should have been called “Low”. This way people with top spec rigs don’t feel so bad they can’t run settings called “Insane”.
It sounds stupid, but the kind of people that can afford the sort of PCs to play these games are touchy that way.
So that how they explain poor sales..
well yes…. or was the game so crap hundreds of thousands of people wasted their bandwidth on torrents out of boredom?
“well yes…. or was the game so crap hundreds of thousands of people wasted their bandwidth on torrents out of boredom?”
If you have high-speed broadband, downloading a torrent takes absolutely no effort – browse to a page on a torrent site, click on a link. I’d be interested to know how many of those who download a game actually install it. I have a friend who’s lived in the US for many years and had access to high-speed broadband for a long time. While moving from one city to another, him and his wife has left stuff at her parents, including a huge amount – hundreds upon hundreds – of burnt CDs. Not DVDs mind, CDs, containing poor quality VCDs of movies he had downloaded over the years. Few of which he’d actually watched. She was trying to convince him just to dump them, but his reaction was “Hmm, I might watch them _someday_”. I think it’s a hoarding/collecting instinct for many people more than anything else. (This same guy spent a huge amount of money shipping his book collection.)
P.
[I love] UBISOFT!
@cliffski – In my experience, people who have limited bandwidth don’t pirate. But for most people in the US, Canada – and I believe especially Europe – who have broadband, there’s no quota or limit, and so it’s trivial to have torrent downloads running while you do other stuff. As far as I can tell, many pirates just download anything they might someday want to do something with. Worst case scenario, they’re out a few cents on a blank disc or two.
This is one of the reasons that I’m skeptical of any report that lists pirate downloads (where *are* they getting those figures, anyhow?) as being equivalent to lost sales. I’d wager a significant proportion of those 700 thousand downloads never went on to install and play the game, much less decide for or against buying a copy.
The game is bad enough that I don’t even want to pirate it.
Re: Pirating 999 games because its trivially easy but never actually playing them.
In my experience of pirates this happens A LOT.
This is evidence imho that one of the major motivating factors in games piracy is simple lazyness. This also explains why lots of pirates actually pay for steam games. Because steam is EVEN LAZIER than messing about with torrents (no bad downloads, no unraring, no cracking, very fast reliable download servers).
In many cases I think pirates are just following the path of least resistance and the fact that it is free is just the icing on the cake.
Why download free games that you don’t even really want to play? Presumably some kind of Pokemon effect is at work here.
Isn’t this the game that takes more time to quit that it dies to complete?
Now what to say first ?? well here it goes>>
>first about piracy: in my case (i am in school) pirating games its very commun. Why ?? well because of the money!! if i could pay for the game and buy it i would, but money gets in the way every time
>second still about piracy: in my case (again) i dont have a fast connection and i’m downloading games at about 130-max 200 kb/sec so its very boring to wait for the game to get downloaded and i would buy them but again the money problem
>third about AC : well the ideea of the game was fantastic and the first time i heard of this game i was like WOOW!! but then again after its release i went to youtube and i have found out the entire story and gameplay and i was dissapointed :(and the thing with the quit system is shit . Overall in five days im getting a new pc that will run AC maxed and i will finnaly play itand take a final conclusion. Still first thing im going to do its having fun like building climbing and other shit like this and then the story…
>fourth and this is about UBI: Ubisoft really does great games with great ideeas like the Prince of persia triology ( which i fully enjoyed and i still playing it because its very good!!) but in order to play the game you will need a NASA or a PENTAGON computer!! AND when i first heard of AC i knew that it would not be like 512 mb ram, a single core processor and a 64 or 128 video card!! HELL NO!!! and i still think and fear lol SP conviction is going to be something like 2Gb min ram , and 256 video min not to tell you of the processor !! but then again this could be just my imagination because my pc sux right now but in 5 days… :):D so yes UBI is exageraiting with the system requirements and it will always do. and i mean look at EA>> they are producing mediocre games but the system requirments even a 2001-2002 computer could play FIFA 2008 an maybe 2009 sooo you all geting my point.
Well time to end it…
“first about piracy: in my case (i am in school) pirating games its very commun. Why ?? well because of the money!! if i could pay for the game and buy it i would, but money gets in the way every time”
So why not spend your time doing something you can afford, like checking out a book for free from your local library?
“So why not spend your time doing something you can afford, like checking out a book for free from your local library?”
This is about games not books, and dont you care about my books cause i have tons :) as i said its boring to wait for a game to be downloaded and i would go buy it but i don have 40 or 50 bucks ( and beleve me 1 game i could afford but what will i do with just a game ?? it gets boring after sometime and you will need a new one
Sigh.