"Altogether on console, the piracy is low," said Guillemot . "On the PC the piracy is quite a lot. We are working on a tool that would allow us to decrease that on the PC starting next year and probably one game this year."
Guillemot didn't go into any detail about the new tool, so it looks like we'll have to wait until one of French company's three big PC releases later this year. Ubisoft has Heroes Over Europe, Assassin's Creed II and Splinter Cell Conviction all currently set for a 2009 release.
Ubisoft's first-quarter sales were down 51% to €83 million, coming in below target. Guillemot claims that part of the reason is due to poor sales of its DS games and blamed piracy. He said that the company is hoping to make gamers think twice about downloading its DS games illegally by offering them better value for money by offering bonus items, such as figurines, with retail purchases.
"We see it coming country by country," he said. "We see when we put other things with the product (people) go and buy the game. We need to make sure that the value is better when they buy the box then when they download (the game) from the Internet."
It's going be very interesting to whether Ubisoft can really achieve what has so far been an impossible task.
