Ubisoft Outlines Thoughts On Piracy

Ubisoft’s recent earnings call brought up mention of the impact of piracy, and the way the company plans to deal with it.According to Shacknews, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot outlined the impact of piracy on each platform, with PC and DS users being the worst offenders.Surprisingly, Ubisoft appears to be working on something that will prevent PC piracy, although there’s no word on whether it’s a new form of copy protection or something entirely different. “All together, on home consoles, the piracy is low,” commented Guillemot. “But on the PC, the piracy increases quite a lot, and we are working on tools that will allow us to actually decrease tremendously the piracy on PC, starting next year in fact and probably one game at the end of this year.”DS owners are naughty, too, particularly in Europe. “The DS is affected a lot more [in Europe] than the US, and the US we don’t see the penetration… we expect a lower impact [on the DS] than in Europe,” said Guillemot, who also stated that “[Ubisoft is] working to put new figurines and new elements in the box that will change that for the future.”Which is exactly the sort of anti-piracy measures we like to see, with legit owners getting a reason to buy it rather than suffering limited installs that presumably aren’t present in the cracked versions. This can be likened to earlier comments made by John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, who seemed to consider pirated versions of The Sims 3 as demos, since a huge helping of extra content – some free – could only be accessed through a legal version.This earnings call also let us know that Splinter Cell: Conviction and Red Steel 2 will be delayed, which made us cry. If you’re as upset as us, you can read up on the reasoning behind the Conviction delay here.