Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot stated that the percentage of paying players is the same for free to play as it is for PC boxed product.
In an interview with GamesIndustry, Yves Guillemot said that they want to invest more in the PC space, and that free-to-play games and browser games were a serious consideration.
“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.”
“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 has always suffered for installing an always-on DRM on all its pc games. The DRM protection games are continuously authenticated through online signals, the game will stop when the connection is lost.
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Any normal person with common sense would know that those numbers are way way off. The problem they have with piracy is because of poor accessibility and service to the users, they are treating us like criminals and implementing ugly DRM that depend on unstable servers.
Take a look at Valve and learn how is it done, it's a shame to do that while having a good portfolio of games like Ubi has.
Not just that, also because of the price on games…. Assassin's Creed 3: Freedom Edition cost here in norway 900 kroner, 155,09 USD, 122,12 EURO. Ripoff. Atleast very much for us who lives in norway.
Let's take, for example, Skyrim sales. It's not from Ubisoft, but it's one of the big games released last year.
As of today, it has sold 2.38 millions copies only on PC (source: http://www.vgchartz.com/game/49111/the-elder-scro…
If what Ubisoft says is correct, then Skyrim was pirated… between 23 million and 46 million times, if I'm right.
Now, you don't have to be a statistics genious to know that that number is absurd.