Ubisoft is a well-known name in the gaming industry. The company has rolled out a number of hit titles in the past. Its representatives have also often complained about the downside of rampant piracy. Now, Ubisoft’s CEO has revealed that 95% players of its boxed PC games are pirates.
Although Ubisoft has been able to ship out many successful titles, the company has struggled to keep its revenue streams steady. In a bid to accomplish this, Ubisoft released an implementation of DRM, to have the users connected to internet all the time when playing games. But this policy didn’t turn out to be any good and rather, annoyed the paying customers.
Ubisoft’s CEO, Yves Guillemot says that 95% of the players who use Ubisoft’s boxed PC games do not purchase it – rather, they choose to get the pirated version. On the other hand, 95% of the users of free-to-play games don’t spend any money within the game.
He says, “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.”
Still, F2P is turning out to be a great opportunity for the company since it lets Ubisoft get revenue from even such regions where users normally do not pay for games.
According to Guillemot, “We want to develop the PC market quite a lot and F2P is really the way to do it. 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.”
Source: Games Industry International
Courtesy: Torrent Freak
[ttjad keyword=”hot”]
