Ubisoft: Piracy rules PC sector; F2P is the future

Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot has said that atleast 93-95% of the PC sector is comprised of users that pirate games and that adopting a free-to-play model might be the only solution to this in the future.

Speaking in an interview with GamesIndustry, he said that the number of people who buy content on a F2P-model game are just about the same in number to those who actually buy boxed products.

“We want to develop the PC market quite a lot and F2P is really the way to do it,” he said.

“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.”

Ubisoft recently arranged a bunch of F2P titles at gamescom including Anno Online, The Settlers Online, Silent Hunter Online, and Heroes of Might Heroes Online. Even one of the companies latest titles Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Online is taking advantage of the F2P model which seems to be working just fine for the moment.

What are your thoughts? Think F2P is the way to go?