Ubisoft CEO Changing Focus to Consoles Due to PC Piracy

[neonvii]

I completely agree with vegettonox above, releasing a PC version of the game will get the pirates off the companys' backs, in a way they are bribing the pirates into not moving more intensively onto the console turf, which is where most of the money lies for the developers.
as for the steam business model, i think it's successful. i personally would never want to pirate from Valve out of sheer love for that company and thier products as well as the fact that most steam games are "more difficult to crack" than most others thanks to their steam business model. so maybe if other developers are as dedicated to the PC as Valve is, perhaps their customer/fan base will become more loyal and be willing to pay for the new titles out of good faith, confidence and love for that develper and thier prodcuts.

 

[MarioJP]

Looks like developers are getting lazy and eventually the gaming industry is going to hit a all time low and be nothing more than suped up graphics with hardly any gameplay involved. oh i forgot the masses are to clueless to realize so its a win win for them. No wonder they want to focus less on the PC.

 

[topographic]

Piracy is a smoke screen. What they mean is they are abandoning the hardcore enthusiasts to make more $$$ from an easy to develop platform. Piracy is a problem for sure, people wont pay if they dont have to, but they should do more work on it, not head for the hills! The next couple of years will show how this will turn out, as the current gen consoles age, there will be a big opportunity for developer to make a console crushing pc game. If that doesnt happen, dont bother upgrading your pc.

 

[Guest]

How about they stop making crap games or doing dodgy console ports from console games? The only reason a lot of people pirate is because they wouldn't pay good money for the junk most developers come out with. The same can be said for consoles. There's just as much piracy on them as on pc.

The distribution system and price makes a big difference as well. Look at Valve and Steam. They're just about printing their own money.

 

[JunkDubious]

You have to either hardware mod your console or soft-mod your console, rip the game to a computer, decrypt the game, and then burn it back to a DVD to have pirated the game. If you manage to do all of that you have successfully turned your console into an offline-only machine without a warranty. Great job.

That's just the price of doing business brother. If your bootlegging games. Hell you might want to fubar more consoles just to get some decent volume and production.

Topo is right. It is just a smoke screen. Last I checked "PC" wasn't some multinational company with deep pockets, but Microsoft and Sony are. PC never really cared about gaming until Microsoft dominated multimedia API's with DirectX. Sorry OpenGL lost games a long time ago. Hell, the only reason there is, and has been, games on PC is Microsoft. Ever since Microsoft has been making consoles you knew it was gonna go down. The console business model is simple: Give away the razor(console), sell the blades(games). If I make a game for PC, Microsoft doesn't get crap. If I make a game for Xbox...profit! What about game devs, AMD or Nvidia they'll complain? Who cares!? One API to rule them all says Microsoft. Its has been clear, for quite some time, that Microsoft wants games to be played on a console. Besides, when it comes to PC who's left? Mac? Linux?! I don't think so. This works great for game devs who already code for DirectX anyway. Only now they enjoy a higher premium much higher than PC. AMD, Intel and Nvidia however are left to duke it out selling console parts. I think this is the reason behind everyone offering higher-end integrated graphics solutions. Console tech has always been just PC tech. Now though you'll see consoles getting first dibs instead of sloppy seconds. What about Sony? Well I know nothing of it's API other than its different then Microsoft's. It has to be. Its on a completely different architecture. Still the success of either console is in hit titles. Its should be interesting to see if Microsoft can leverage its API's to achieve the same effect as its leveraged its OS.

 

[HazardousSmoker]

Ubisoft can drop off the face of the earth and i wouldn't care. Their lack of support & poorly coded PC games make me sick.

Why would anyone want to pirate an Ubisoft game when half of them don't work anyways?

 

[mr roboto]

Guillemot starts off with something almost all PC gamers can agree with: “The consoles at certain periods are more powerful than the PC, but the PC can improve its capacity and ability every year so the cycle changes.

No I don't agree with the first part. Even when the XBox360 was released there were video cards that were more powerful. The 360 is a 3.2Ghz triple core with the equivalent of a 7800gt 256mb video card. It was powerful when it was released, but since then it is basically a midrange type system. I don't remember the exact memory bandwidth but it's not a lot.

 

[clist]

LOL Roboto... I was just going to say the same thing, and you beat me to it! There's never been a time when a console game could compare to what I see on my PC - except perhaps for the days when PC's only had black and green (or amber) monitors, and console games came on cartridges.

I dunno, maybe I'm spoiled with the hardware I have, but I just find the console experience to feel so kludgy.

Cheers,
CList