DS Pirates to blame Ubisoft sales drop says president

Boss of Ubisoft says that pirates are to blame for Ubisofts profits dropping on Nintendo DS games

Ubisoft’s sales targets for Nintendo DS games are down 50% for the last financial year a whole 12% less than they thought and they believe pirates are to blame.  "We are currently experiencing a very sharp slowdown in our sales for Nintendo DS as well as sales of back-catalog titles, in the context of a market that is tougher than anticipated. This will have a significant impact on our first-half showing.” Says Yves Guillemot, President of Ubisoft.

So what are Ubisoft are doing to help counter this? “Piracy is strong so we are working to put new figurines and new elements in the boxes that will change that in the future … for example in Europe we have the same market share in DS this year as last year … We see a different attitude toward piracy in the U.S. than Europe. We did a survey that said our consumers will be more willing to buy products than pirate them."

It’s an odd dilemma, you wouldn’t pick the target market of the majority of Ubisoft DS titles pirating their games. 11 year old girls pirating Imagine Baby Sitter just doesn’t sound right, however a clued in parent may be doing it for them.

Then again if it is Ubisoft’s more core titles getting pirated, Ubisoft might stop making them and keep pumping out Imagine titles, though we suspect they may be running out of occupations for little girls to dream about.

Source: Destructoid