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Ubisoft: PC Piracy Rate 93-95%

[Aug 22, 2012, 10:26 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot gives GamesIndustry International his outlook on free-to-play games as a way of combating PC piracy, explaining the difficulties presented by serving an audience they perceive to be 93-95% thieves:

"We want to develop the PC market quite a lot and F2P is really the way to do it," said the French CEO. "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."

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78.

Re: Ubisoft: PC Piracy Rate 93-95%

Aug 22, 2012, 13:49

Tumbler

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.

I'd like to know the stats from a variety of F2P games before I take him at his word. It's possible that only 5-7 people pay anything after 100 people play a F2P game. Trying to connect that to different products that people pirate is foolish. On one side you've got a game that is designed to limit the content you can see unless you pay the money, on the other side the content is fully available once you download it (piracy) so having an identical success rate is bizarre to say the least.

I'll take his statement with a grain of salt for now. I don't imagine that if we compared TF2, Lord of the Rings, World of Tanks, etc. that we would see 5-7% "attach" rates. Perhaps putting out shit gets you 5-7% but I would hope that a good F2P product can do a lot more.

Any other stats on spending in the F2P model? Diablo 3's stats might be very useful. It costs $60 to get into but once you're in I think the game is basically a F2P business model. You can play all you want for "free" but if you spend money things get a lot easier/more fun so what is the attach rate of people spending real money?




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