Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has spoken of how piracy has impacted the company’s game sales and development strategy.

Yesterday Ubisoft reported first quarter revenues down 51 per cent. The fall in sales was partly attributed to a slowdown in sales of DS games, and in a subsequent earnings call Guillemot also said piracy on the platform had been a factor in the company’s underwhelming performance.

The exec said that Ubisoft is working on the problem both internally and with Nintendo's help, according to Kotaku.

"Nintendo has been able to slow down piracy a lot in Japan. They are now putting pressure to make sure it decreases in many other countries. We think we will be able to solve this matter."

The company has moved to increase the attractiveness of its DS offerings by including extras with its games.

"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."

PSP piracy levels also concerned the company to the extent that it backed away from development on the platform, but Guillemot said that there are now "new ways to control piracy" on the handheld, and the company is ready to support the system more heavily again.

Finally, Guillemot said that Ubisoft is working on a tool that should help reduce the impact of piracy on PC.

"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," he said, without elaborating.