A sad news indeed for pirates when Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot talked about why the company is now turning all its focus on free-to-play titles for PC, blaming PC piracy for it. He then states that how only five to seven percent of free-to-play users pay for the product via online shop, which is the same for the amount of people who pay for hard copies of their games.
The advantage of F2P is that we can get revenue from countries where we couldn’t previously – places where our products were played but not bought. Now with F2P we gain revenue, which helps brands last longer.
It’s a way to get closer to your customers, to make sure you have a revenue. On PC it’s only around five to seven per cent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it’s only about five to seven per cent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated. It’s around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage. The revenue we get from the people who play is more long term, so we can continue to bring content.
They also released a PC client recently to compete with Steam and Origin.
With Ubisoft also joining the Free-To-Play wagon, who knows what the future might bring for PC gamers. Piracy is like a double-edged sword, where it can hurt the revenue of a company whereas it can also promote and bring light to the company’s hardwork which means more recognition of the developer, can also lead to legit purchasing in the future etc.
Ubisoft is a French global video game publisher and developer with titles and series like Prince Of Persia, Assassin’s Creed, Tom Clancy brand etc under its belt.