Ubisoft's CEO Breaks Down Piracy By Platform; New Tool Will 'Tremendously' Decrease PC Piracy

Jul 28, 2009 9:02pm CST tags: Piracy, Ubisoft
During yesterday's Ubisoft earnings call, company CEO Yves Guillemot outlined his thoughts on piracy as it pertains to each platform, from PC to handhelds.

Interestingly, Guillemot was especially concerned with Nintendo DS piracy in Europe. And in a surprisingly mysterious comment, the CEO said that a "new tool" possibly coming by the end of this year would "tremendously" reduce the effects of PC piracy.

We've broken Guillemot's comments into quotes on each platform, providing a view of the anti-piracy effort from the top of one of gaming's larger publishers:

On the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3: "What we see is that it's very small on PS3. It's actually also good on the 360 because it's very difficult to pirate when you play the games with your machine online regularly--[Xbox 360 piracy is] a difficult thing to do because the risk is quite high."

On the PC: "All together, on home consoles, the piracy is low. 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."

On the Wii: "We see some piracy in some countries, but it's still small."

On the Nintendo DS: "What we are seeing in Europe, especially on the DS, is that the piracy is strong. We are working to put new figurines and new elements in the box that will change that for the future."

On the Nintendo DSi: "For the DSi, the piracy is a lot less than on the normal DS...[Piracy] is more affecting the DS than the DSi at the moment."

On the PSP: "It has always been a machine with lots of piracy. It's a machine we were not developing too much on...there are new ways to control piracy [on PSP] so we have reinvested on the machine."

On the difference between US and European piracy: "The DS is affected a lot more [in Europe] then the US, and the US we don't see the penetration...we expect a lower impact [on the DS] in the US than in Europe. It's more also the continent-side of Europe that is affected than total Europe."

"We see a different attitude towards piracy in the US than in Europe. We made a survey that is telling us that in the US, our consumers will be more willing to buy product than to pirate them. That's a major difference."

        

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