14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft is aiming to limit the degree to which piracy affects its videogames by pushing the release dates for the PC way after those for gaming consoles. EndWar, the upcoming war game which can be controlled through voice command, is the most recent example in this respect.
While talking to VideoGaming247, Michael de Plater, who is the creative director of Ubisoft Shanghai, said that “To be honest, if PC wasn't pirated to hell and back, there'd probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two. But at the moment, if you release the PC version, essentially what you're doing is letting people have a free version that they rip off instead of a purchased version. Piracy's basically killing PC”.
Ubisoft has had quite a history of releasing PC versions of its games rather late. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and its sequel, GRAW 2, were released on the PC almost six months after the launch on consoles. Even bigger trouble was linked to the PC release of Assassin's Creed. The game arrived five months later on the PC, with significant improvements in the control scheme and some of the gameplay, and piracy was so rampant that Ubisoft tracked the leaks of the game to a disc replication firm it used and decided to sue it.
Other developers, such as Crytek, Codemasters and Atari, complained about the impact of piracy on videogame sales and tended to shift to more console releases as a result. Electronic Arts, which directly targeted the PC with Spore, decided to tackle the issue by using more restrictive DRM measures.
EndWar is scheduled for launch on the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable in the first week of November, while the PC version is apparently set to follow in February 2009.