But across the whole gaming industry and even ignoring the console industry where piracy is less of an issue, the total revenue is UP and the profits are UP.
It's a fast growing market, it's boomed since the last console generation and with development studios focusing more and more on multi-platform titles there is less growth in quality in the PC space, so despite stagnation we're still growing.
The problem is that everyone looks at this as an isolated case, or they take it personally, piracy has been reported to be as high as 90% for loads of other titles as well, people aren't picking on Ubisoft or pirating their games more because they're AAA games, even the World of Goo devs claimed 90% piracy rate.
You have to consider the industry as a whole because people pick what games to buy from this large pot of games constantly being developed and released, when you have 100's of games and you can only afford a handful of them people start to pirate the stuff they can't afford, it's not "right" but it's just what happens, like it or not.
So when you look at one game and say we should have zero piracy and 95% is really bad, you're not taking into account that your customers spend money on other games and they could very well buy your game instead pirate it but then it's just less money they spend on another PC game and you shift the piracy elsewhere, even if people stopped pirating completely there's no reason to think there would be a significant increase in sales, you cannot get blood from a stone, quite often people simply DO NOT HAVE the physical currency to pay for what they've pirated...let me make this clear so it's unambiguous THIS DOES NOT FORGIVE PIRACY, I'm not saying this makes it OK, what I'm saying is that fighting this particular type of piracy is a WASTE OF TIME because even if you could beat it (and you cannot) your net result would be zero.
Even if you prosecuted every pirate everywhere for millions, those people would have millions less to spend on games in the next X many years as they pay back their fines, it's pretty fucking simple, people have a finite amount of cash and there is vastly more media to consume than the average person can buy, this is how you get piracy rates at 95% and it's also why 95% piracy rate doesn't mean a 95% drop in sales/revenue.
Try thinking about the big picture for a moment, there are many businesses all struggling and competing with each other for customers money, the businesses that make it are the ones which do the best job, development studios like Valve are ROLLING IN CASH, because they're appealing to their fan base and giving them what they want.
I have no sympathy for the wankers like the decision makers at Ubisoft, they've made the concious decision to fuck over their customers in the short term in a futile attempt to make a quick buck and destroyed long term relationships giving themselves a bad name, same with EA, they dug their own graves.
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