It was a genuine question for the parent of my post - if Ubisoft have a measurement of how well Prince of Persia sold compared to other titles with DRM (and if they can say it's "pirated ... more so than any of the previous Prince of Persia games", that implies that they do), I'd like to know what the real chart looks like.
Because really, showing that chart (well, a slightly more complex version with the cost side of DRM taken into account) would pretty much end the debate about whether DRM works or not, one way or another.
you know the amount of piracy and the amount of customers - but you never know how much you might have sold if you did things different.
Of course you can't know for sure, but statistics says you can have a pretty good idea based on other titles. At some point you have to make a decision, but that doesn't mean you shut your eyes and plunge in - you still have to look at the results and analyse what happened so you can make a more informed decision next time. It's the same problem as setting the release price of a game (or any other product) - you only get to launch it once, and how do you know how many units you would have sold had you priced it differently? At the end of the day, you have to pick a number and run with it. But that doesn't mean you don't bother to look at how your $60 launch of this title compared to the $80 launch of another title last year.
So, just like management at Ubisoft must be looking at sales from varying price points where they can, they should also be looking at the chart I posted (but the version with real numbers). The thing that doesn't make sense for me is, if the real numbers show conclusively that DRM works, why not just show it once to the
press? Then BAM, debate over. If they show it doesn't work, why waste any more money on it?
I'm amazed the shareholders have let them get away with not showing it for so long, when they are making such big investments for it.
For kicks, I looked at the 2009 annual report and there is not a mention of DRM there. Nowhere in notes to the financial statements do they say "we've adjusted Goodwill by this much due to vehement DRM backlash from PC gamers". (Actually, they have written down their 100m euros of goodwill by 95k - they don't say why but one would assume to represent all the Slashdotters boycotting Assassin's Creed 2). Piracy gets a mention in one paragraph in an appendix, under disclosure of the risks inherent to making video games.
It looks like they spent 258m euros on R&D, and another 63m on IT and admin expenses. Their gross profit off a (roughly) 400m expenditure was 111m. So, if not doing any DRM would shace just 10m euros off the IT and R&D costs (it's feasible - running enough servers to support a scheme like this for the volume of games they sold isn't free), they could increase their ROI by 2.5 percentage points (that's very significant).
So, who is making the decision to invest what is probably millions in servers to support this DRM program, and based on what data? Inquiring minds want to know.