14 DAY TRIAL // Bohemia Interactive, the company behind the ArmA series of realistic military shooters and the recent Take On Helicopters, says that for every player who purchases a legitimate copy of its video games around 33 others pirate them.
Marek Španěl, who is the Chief Executive Officer at Bohemia Interactive, told PC Gamer that, “Our statistics from multiplayer show that for every three legitimate buyers playing their game in multiplayer, there are 100 attempts to play with a pirated version.”
He added, “This indicates that piracy is an extremely widespread problem on PC, and it’s also really worrying for us as a mid-sized, independent, PC-oriented developer. We do not have any such data for single-player, but I’m afraid there the ratio of pirates to legitimate gamers is undoubtedly much worse.”
Španěl says that this amount of piracy exists even if his company uses a system called DEGRADE, also known as FADE, which is designed to actually make the gameplay experience buggier for those who pirate a game.
The idea is to show players that piracy is not worth it and that they would get more out of the title they are playing if they are willing to pay.
In the ArmA series DEGRADE leads to less accuracy with weapons and sometimes turns the player into a bird.
Bohemia Interactive says that other Digital Rights Management systems, like always on checks and first run registrations, are even less effective because they tend to make the experience worse for legitimate players, which might actually increase the rate of piracy.
Most publisher have implemented stricter DRM solutions in their PC based games in order to restrict the impact of piracy and some, like Ubisoft, are saying that internal figures show that they have been getting good results.
Bohemia Interactive's latest release is Take On Helicopters and they are now working on a new simulation ArmA 3.