While we were busy fawning over Ubisoft’s new games at E3 2008 a few weeks ago, Ubisoft was spending its time filing a lawsuit in North Carolina, against its former disc reproduction firm Optical Experts Manufacturing (OEM).
Alleging that an OEM employee took home a copy of Assassin’s Creed PC and leaked it onto the internet six weeks prior to the game’s launch in April, Ubisoft claims that through willful copyright infringement, breach of contract and gross negligence, OEM is responsible for over 700,000 illegal downloads of the game — and should be held accountable for millions of dollars in lost sales.
Beyond piracy, Ubisoft believes that early exposure of a deliberately buggy version of the game contributed to negative hype for the title, further deflating sales and causing “irreparable harm” to the company’s reputation.
Taking a look at Ubisoft’s initial complaint, filed July 16th in a North Carolina district court, (and available here in PDF format for your perusal) things don’t look particularly good for the defendant.
Ubisoft claims that they were able trace the first server connections to the game from a North Carolina address they believe belongs to an OEM employee; that the pirated version of the game had a unique identification code that matches that of the version they gave OEM for what was supposed to be a limited print run of only ten copies; and that in a meeting with Ubisoft on May 7th, after the game’s retail release, OEM confessed that several of the company’s key security policies were not in place at the time of the incident.
If that last turns out to be true, then losing millions of dollars may be the least of OEM’s concerns — the reputation suffering “irreparable harm” will most surely be theirs.
However, as with any legal case, we’d be careful about jumping to conclusions.
For starters, we’re missing half of the story. While we doubt Ubisoft would file such a lawsuit without substantial evidence, it’s important to note that at this juncture that Ubisoft’s necessarily self-biased report of OEM’s wrongdoing is all we have; and though GameCyte is currently attempting to obtain the disc manufacturer’s side of the story, recent court documents indicate that OEM is not legally required to answer Ubisoft’s complaint until September 16th.
Secondly, though Ubi might have sufficient evidence to prove that an OEM employee leaked the title, it’s hard to say whether or not they can charge the entire company for that employee’s actions. That decision will likely be made based on the contents of the contract OEM reportedly breached — but again, that document was not provided in the filing.
Finally, there’s the decade-old question of whether digital piracy actually hurts sales; and whether Assassin’s Creed PC in particular was likely to sell well regardless of leakage. The PC port of the game arrived five months after the phenomenal console release shipped a combined six million copies — nearly three times what BioShock managed across PC and Xbox 360 — which might leave some doubts as to whether there was an audience left to play the game by the time of its April release. That audience likely shrunk further when Creed’s then-exorbitant required PC specs were announced, and further still when news broke that even the retail game was buggy, and would crash and burn on many PCs equipped with one of the most popular video cards. (This has since been patched.)
Assassin’s Creed PC may have only sold 40,000 units at US retailers through June, but when the DRM-free Sins of a Solar Empire begs to be pirated yet somehow manages 300,000 copies in the same timeframe, you have to wonder if piracy is really to blame.
Update: NeoGAF reminds me that the 40,000 unit figure is from NPD, which calculates neither worldwide nor digitally distributed copies of games. Until we get the actual numbers from Ubisoft, we can draw no conclusions about the game’s real reach on PC.
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