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Forums - PC - Ubisoft: PC piracy rate around 95%, F2P is the way forward

zarx said:
Mnementh said:
Free to Play is a good way to settle this argument. If 95% pirate a game on PC, than a Free to Play-version of a game that sells around 10 million should have 200 million accounts. Generally, if this number is true, there should be several big F2P-games that have at least 100 million users. If we don't see this numbers in some years, we know this piracy-rate was a lie. If we see it, this rate was spot on.


League of Legends is pretty much the most popular free 2 play game (excluding web/social games which are mostly played by people not interested in "full games") arround (at least in the west) with 40 million users. World of Tanks would be the seccond with almost 30 million.

But really if we look at Battlefeild Play for Free, which is the best example of a free 2 play version of a full price franchise (being basically a tweaked BF2) has 6 million users. BF2 sold 2.2m units after 1 year, it's probably quite a bit higher now.

But the problem is F2P games are almost all multiplayer only (so far), where as most piracy is of singleplayer content. I don't really see most of those converting to F2P games.

Yeah, you're probably right about single-player content. But the first numbers indicate, that F2P can go in the 100M-area in the future. We will have to wait and see if it is stuck at these number or the subscriptions increase with future games.



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Mnementh said:

Yeah, you're probably right about single-player content. But the first numbers indicate, that F2P can go in the 100M-area in the future. We will have to wait and see if it is stuck at these number or the subscriptions increase with future games.


There is also the fact that games like League of Legends have a draw beyond that of most payed games. It has most of the same factors that makes games like Call of Duty so popular, with it's multiplayer design. And the Free 2 Play system of constant content updates keeps players engaged far longer than any games except for Blizzard games and MMOs. It also has none of the things that scare off people from piracy and those that aren't willing to spend money on games. And then you have the generally increasing population meaning as time goes on the potential playerbase is growing all the time. Also keep in mind that many people have multiple accounts on F2P games, I know people that have 3+ LoL accounts as they make smurf accounts so they can vs noobs.

All of which means that F2P player numbers will likely be far larger than piracy, so if the 95% piracy numbers are acurate we would actually expect even higher numbers for F2P games. 



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pezus said:

Where did you get the 4m number? And what torrent site is that?

Black Ops is pretty much one of the biggest games in recent memory. VGC don't show digital downloads, and if we're really going by VGC here we can assume digital accounts for 50-80% (Diablo 3...lulz).

So, we can assume the PC version sold something like 3-5m. Now, Ubisoft are saying 5% are real sales, which would mean around 76m pirated black ops...

http://voices.yahoo.com/call-duty-black-ops-most-pirated-game-2010-loses-7496366.html

"Assuming 20 million copies sold at that price, this means the game has earned nearly $1 billion. TorrentFreak estimates that over 4.2 million copies of the game have been illegally downloaded (as of December 26th, 2010). Using the same $49.99 price point, that's over $200 million in lost revenue for Activision (and Square Enix, who publish the title in Japan).

According to TorrentFreak's data, several other games have been pirated a million times or more this year. Call of Duty:Black Ops' closest competitor was the PC version of fellow war game Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which was released back in March of 2010. Sequels Mafia 2, Mass Effect 2, and Starcraft II rounded out the list of the top 5 most pirated PC games of the year. Though PC games are more commonly distributed via illegal downloads, other platforms are still affected. Super Mario Galaxy 2 was the most pirated Wii game this year, with nearly 1.5 million illegal downloads as of December 26th, 2010. Dante's Inferno took the top spot for Xbox 360, with over 1.2 million downloads. Call of Duty: Black Ops also appeared as the 5th most pirated Xbox 360 game for the year, with 930,000 downloads. Considering the Xbox 360 and PC versions come at the same $49.99 retail price, that's another $46 million in game sales lost."

Only torrent. Just one site... the piracy is way bigger than that.



pezus said:

One site that is estimating the total. It is not estimating downloads on their own site only. Faulty reasoning in that report though (that $200m were lost...lol) and this really proves that the 93-95% figure is nowhere near the truth. Or do you think SMG2 was downloaded 1.5m times on one torrent site?

I believe.

The number is way bigger than 1.5 million... for PC emulation or pirated Wii use.



zarx said:
Mnementh said:
Free to Play is a good way to settle this argument. If 95% pirate a game on PC, than a Free to Play-version of a game that sells around 10 million should have 200 million accounts. Generally, if this number is true, there should be several big F2P-games that have at least 100 million users. If we don't see this numbers in some years, we know this piracy-rate was a lie. If we see it, this rate was spot on.


League of Legends is pretty much the most popular free 2 play game (excluding web/social games which are mostly played by people not interested in "full games") arround (at least in the west) with 40 million users. World of Tanks would be the seccond with almost 30 million. 

But really if we look at Battlefeild Play for Free, which is the best example of a free 2 play version of a full price franchise (being basically a tweaked BF2) has 6 million users. BF2 sold 2.2m units after 1 year, it's probably quite a bit higher now.

But the problem is F2P games are almost all multiplayer only (so far), where as most piracy is of singleplayer content. I don't really see most of those converting to F2P games. 

Well they do F2P for single player like how they did Arkham City but with more online passes.

They could lock out the side quests/side content and different characters with those passes.