Link to Eurogamer article. Good read.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-30-how-bad-is-pc-piracy-really-article

It made me laugh a bit that it was Ubisoft with the 90% decline in PC game sales. Mostly because of their "DRM is useful, really!" speeches.

Interesting read but more interesting was peoples comments on the DRM.

For me Ubisoft has lost several sales from me due to the coonstant online activation in games i hate that idea after buying command & conquer 4 and the crap when you lose your connection in single player you got booted. I swore never again.

I am not innocent in my youth i used to play pirated spectrum and atari st games but when companies stopped supporting the atari st i bought all my games and been doing so ever since.

I dont have a consol and buy all my games on the pc although i do tend to get fed up of lame console ports which i feel is the main problem with pc gaming right now not piracy but the fact thet companies dont want to spend the time or money on a proper pc version and then they wander why they get crap scores and low sales when people get frustrated with a game that dosent play right or dosent work well on a pc.

They're claiming that their DRM has been a success. Yes, because now they're deterring everyone from playing their games, customers and pirates alike.

I've got a cheaper solution - don't make games for the PC at all. 100% piracy reduction and zero overheads. Genius!

When will companies learn to focus on the sales they do get rather than the ones from people and regions where they'll never make any sales?

Someone actually buys Ubisoft PC releases now?

Pretty good article, even though it didn't really answer the question it made. I especially liked this part, which is what I've been thinking about myself too: That is, use strict DRM at first in order to secure the early sales, and at some point of time remove the DRM. Thus you get purchases both from those who don't mind the DRM, and those who do.

Eh that 90% sales reduction in PC games I bet is harvested from the "Highstreet/boxed copies of PC games" sales data rather than their digital downloadings.

Although to be honest without any real basis for the quotation it could mean anything - random stats quotes though are always fun to read ;)

I never thought a system for imparting guilt would ever surpass the Catholic Church, but it seems that PC gaming publishers are having a good attempt. I mean, seriously, have you ever come across a more complaining industry than gaming?

Every bloody gaming article I read these days seems to drip with greed and self-entitlement, whether it is to defend DRM, poor quality DLC or Always Online. I haven't pirated games since a few C64 tapes in the late 80s due to the ignorance of youth, yet I am tired reading about how publishers keep chasing after the fictional goldmine of the paying pirate.

I understand how investors balk at the idea of even a single lost sale through piracy, but then maybe if the AAA games stopped following a Hollywood policy of multi-million dollar hit-or-miss budgets there would be less to lose. Also, for publishers to ignore how their own steadily declining QA standards have added to the problem of piracy is just as harmful as customers feeling self-entitled. Many people just will not take a chance on a £40 game that lasts 4 hours in single player and is in such a shoddy state upon release that they must wait anything up to six months for their purchase to be rewarded.

Ha, I very rarely rant but this article just seemed to raise my heckles this morning. Thanks again, GOG, for the DRM-free Broken Sword!

PC piracy is as bad as PSP or NDS piracy :D.

How about - you make games aimed at PC as at a platform, and I'll buy your game. Deal?
I don't rant on forums about how shitty games get, but if they want people to actually buy their product the only thing they can do is a make a better product.
As of now, you're usually 'punished' for buying games, and they only add more shit on top of the games.

Me. Unlike most, I'm not jumping on the hate Ubisoft bandwagon simply because they use a DRM system that is similar to both Steam and the Battle Net system while not being a company named either Valve or Blizzard.

Or in other words, ever noticed how certain UK/EU based blogs always bitch about things Ubisoft/EA do (spinning their articles as best they can to make said publishers look even worse), but when certain other publishers do similar, they wind up praising them for it (or at least turning a blind eye)?

So, nope. I don't let DRM choices influence whether I will own a specific game too much unless I've had an extremely nasty experience with said DRM method. And so far, out of all my 20+ years of PC gaming, only one system has ever pissed me off that much (and it's got nothing to do with Ubisoft, EA, Sony or even Microsoft).

But people like to hop on bandwagons. When they see a lot of people bitching about "evil" publishers they love to join in, regardless of whether they've actually had an extremely negative experience with said publisher (just look at that Spore Amazon fiasco, the majority of comments came from people who had obviously not even heard of the game before let alone actually purchased it).

Also: This. No one actually discloses decent figures for digital sales as certain distributors won't let them (it's all under NDA).

The PC Piracy "problem" does not exist, really. There are billion people out there downloading stuff from the P2P (including myself, from time to time), but they are like ghosts in the machine: you can't even hope to measure how many digital downloads there are in a particular point in time, so don't even try and go on.

Software houses should focus themselves on making better games and be more respectful to the customer/player, and they will buy their products. It's simple, really...

I honestly don't know why peoples still waste time writing PC piracy articles, I mean basically they are all the same, they can take an article from 2 or 5 years ago, change some name and date and publish it as is.

Heck I am pretty sure they could take a 10 years old one, replace "Safedisk" by "online activation DRM" and "Starforce" by "always online DRM" and it would work as well.

Spiradisc and Lenslok?

"It's so bad, Microsoft is going to be replacing the 'M' with a 'P' and dropping the 'c' so they can blend in the hacker crowd. But seriously folks..."