Ubisoft Finds a New Rationalization for Free to Play
From The Register, Ubisoft says more than 90% of PC gamers pirate their game, so they might as well go down the free to play path.
Money quote from CEO Yves Guillemot:
“It’s around a 93 to 95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage as free-to-play”
I still find it hard to believe that 90% of gamers pirate their games, and people who spout such numbers rarely go into detail on how they arrived at them, so color me skeptical.
Riders of Rohan Delay
Casual Stroll to Mordor reports that the launch of the Lord of the Rings Online expansion Riders of Rohan will be moved back from September 5th to October 15th. I expect conspiracy theorists everywhere to proclaim that this delay was to get out from under the weight of the Guild Wars 2 launch the way they declared the Mist of Panderia launch date to be a defensive move against the game.
Chalk another one up to the might of Guild Wars 2?
Your Virtual Currency Has Expired!
Massively Multiplayer Fallout brings up a topic from the RuneScape forums. Apparently somebody discovered a statement in Jagex’s terms of service that indicates that RuneCoins, the RuneScape virtual currency, can expire.
Jagex responded, indicating that the terms were correct, but that they had never, to this point, had to expire any RuneCoins. The actual shelf life of RuneCoins was left unstated.
Of course, this makes me wonder when companies like SOE, which seemed to be picking up bad habits from its free to play neighbors, or UbiSoft, which just seems to hate its customers pirates people in general, will jump on this potentially lucrative idea.
And then there is how local law applies. In my own jurisdiction, companies cannot expire things like gift cards. Where does virtual currency fit in that equation?
Bonus Trend: Windows 8
After watching this, I foresee another Windows Vista level PR fiasco looming.
If Microsoft needs to learn something from Apple, it is how to produce software that doesn’t make people angry.
Apple drops OS updates more often that Microsoft, charges for them, and people tend to be interested to indifferent. Microsoft drops a huge OS update every few years and manages to make people run around screaming like their hair is on fire more often than not.
And don’t get me started on how much I loathe every corporate mandated Microsoft Office upgrade. In my mind, MS Word was perfected with version 5.1a about 20 years ago. Everything since has been… uh… Windows dressing?
[Credit to Derek Smart for finding that video, but his Twitter account is locked down so I can’t even link to the tweet.]
The Ancient Gaming Noob 