14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has decided to voice their opinion regarding the uphill battle that the company is facing against piracy, about DRM, and about what their solutions to this ongoing problem might be.
It appears that the company doesn't believe that DRM is going to stop games from being pirated any time soon, and that developers should instead focus on putting their resources back into their games.
While the perfect hindsight that the company appears to have is astounding, this is also what the system's main criticism was when DRM started to rear its ugly head in the world of gaming, with many knowledgeable voices in the community stating time after time that DRM's sole purpose is to make corporate execs feel safe.
VP of digital publishing Chris Early has admitted that "anything is going to be able to be pirated given enough time," and that the company aims to combat this by making great games and delivering services to their customers.
"What becomes key for us is making sure we're delivering an experience to paying players that is quality. I don't want us in a position where we're punishing a paying player for what a pirate can get around. Anything is going to be able to be pirated given enough time and enough effort to get in there. So the question becomes, what do we create as services, or as benefits, and the quality of the game, that will just have people want to pay for it?" Early says in an interview with GameSpot.
As such, instead of DRM, Early believes that delivering great online services and improving them based on customer feedback is the way to go, as quality online features that aren't available to those who pirate the games will manage to turn the tables and convince more gamers to go legit.
"I think it's much more important for us to focus on making a great game and delivering good services. The reality is, the more service there is in a game, pirates don't get that, so when it's a good game and there's good services around it, you're incentivized to not pirate the game to get the full experience," Early explains.
When the interviewer has brought up the fact the Bethesda's recently released first-person shooter Wolfenstein: The New Order was pirated over 100k times in its first week, Early has stated that the figure should not erroneously be mistaken for lost sales, as the bulk of that represents people who were never going to buy the game in the first place.
Following negative feedback from their customers, the company dropped their DRM two years ago, now only requiring that buyers of Ubisoft games connect to the Internet, after installing the game, for a one-time online activation.