kaztheberserk
11-24-2011, 12:27 AM
Ubisoft, I realize that this man does not speak for the publishing arm of your company. However, his comments regarding the PC version of this game are both utterly offensive to many of your customers, and demonstrably false.
Never allow someone speaking in a capacity related to your company to say that your customers are "*****ing" when they voice a legitimate concern. That is simply disrespectful.
Furthermore, his napkin math relies on a number of assumptions. Mainly, he assumes that creating a PC port of the game will not be worth it if it doesn't sell well. This is true. However, PC gaming is still very much alive and well, one need only to take a cursory glance at Steam's sales figures to prove this. I know that a recent Ubisoft game didn't fare very well on Steam (From Dust), and I submit to you that this was because of the truly horrible job that went into creating the PC port of it. Why on Earth would people buy a game that clearly was ported as an afterthought, with no testing done to see if the new controls worked? Don't give us a ****ty version, and we'll buy it happily. As a side note, I'm fairly certain that From Dust didn't get pirated that heavily either, it was just so all-around awful on the PC that people made the decision not to play it even for free.
Also, he brings up the issue of piracy, and then completely invents facts about it. "so few people are paying for PC games now". Oh really, Stanislas? I could see why you would think that, what with the massive loads of cash Valve is losing by operating Steam. Except that isn't the case. Valve isn't losing money on Steam, developers whose games end up on Steam see massive sales. The statement that PC gaming sales are so low that it isn't worth it to port is simply false. PC gamers didn't buy your last port because it was, with all due respect, a terrible port. Furthermore, Mettra seems to think that piracy is exclusively a PC problem. While it is very likely that it is worst on the PC, all other major platforms suffer from piracy as well.
Also, a study recently demonstrated that piracy even has the potential to boost sales of a product, so there's that (http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/11010021.html)
I won't get into your silly DRM practices for PC, but in future, that is something you might choose to do away with too. Pirates strip your DRM out anyways, and legitimate customers find the DRM so intrusive that they will actually seek out the pirated version of a game they paid for, just so that it works without your DRM installed on it. Gog.com sells games digitally without DRM, and they're doing quite well for themselves.
If you really are THAT concerned with piracy that you're willing to up and abandon the project altogether, you could always adopt the Rockstar model, which is to release the PC version some months after the console version (which is something you've actually done in the past, and yet STILL insisted on adding intrusive DRM).
Anyways, the main point of this post is that you need to respond to the comments of Stanislas Mettra, because they are simply unacceptable to your PC gaming customers.
Never allow someone speaking in a capacity related to your company to say that your customers are "*****ing" when they voice a legitimate concern. That is simply disrespectful.
Furthermore, his napkin math relies on a number of assumptions. Mainly, he assumes that creating a PC port of the game will not be worth it if it doesn't sell well. This is true. However, PC gaming is still very much alive and well, one need only to take a cursory glance at Steam's sales figures to prove this. I know that a recent Ubisoft game didn't fare very well on Steam (From Dust), and I submit to you that this was because of the truly horrible job that went into creating the PC port of it. Why on Earth would people buy a game that clearly was ported as an afterthought, with no testing done to see if the new controls worked? Don't give us a ****ty version, and we'll buy it happily. As a side note, I'm fairly certain that From Dust didn't get pirated that heavily either, it was just so all-around awful on the PC that people made the decision not to play it even for free.
Also, he brings up the issue of piracy, and then completely invents facts about it. "so few people are paying for PC games now". Oh really, Stanislas? I could see why you would think that, what with the massive loads of cash Valve is losing by operating Steam. Except that isn't the case. Valve isn't losing money on Steam, developers whose games end up on Steam see massive sales. The statement that PC gaming sales are so low that it isn't worth it to port is simply false. PC gamers didn't buy your last port because it was, with all due respect, a terrible port. Furthermore, Mettra seems to think that piracy is exclusively a PC problem. While it is very likely that it is worst on the PC, all other major platforms suffer from piracy as well.
Also, a study recently demonstrated that piracy even has the potential to boost sales of a product, so there's that (http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/publications/summary/11010021.html)
I won't get into your silly DRM practices for PC, but in future, that is something you might choose to do away with too. Pirates strip your DRM out anyways, and legitimate customers find the DRM so intrusive that they will actually seek out the pirated version of a game they paid for, just so that it works without your DRM installed on it. Gog.com sells games digitally without DRM, and they're doing quite well for themselves.
If you really are THAT concerned with piracy that you're willing to up and abandon the project altogether, you could always adopt the Rockstar model, which is to release the PC version some months after the console version (which is something you've actually done in the past, and yet STILL insisted on adding intrusive DRM).
Anyways, the main point of this post is that you need to respond to the comments of Stanislas Mettra, because they are simply unacceptable to your PC gaming customers.