Ubisoft makes as much money from F2P games as regular games, due to 95% PC piracy rate
By Tim Colwill on August 22, 2012 at 6:23 pm
“We want to develop the PC market quite a lot and F2P is really the way to do it,” said Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot to Games Industry International. “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.”
Guilllemot claims that Ubisoft’s games are so heavily pirated that making them F2P and then charging for microtransactions actually makes the company the same amount of money. “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,” said Guillemot. “It’s around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage.”
Source: Games Industry International
Ubisoft suspends work on Assassin’s Creed creator’s new game
We may never know what the hell it even was.
Assassin’s Creed creator claims Ubisoft fired him, will “fight vigorously”
"Ubisoft’s actions are baseless and without merit."
You can use the following bbCode
[i], [b], [img], [quote], [url href="http://www.google.com/"]Google[/url]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
facebook
twitter
google+
rss
It sounds like, what they really need is more DRM.
/me nods
yup they just refuse to drop the DRM knowing full well that is why we pirate their rubbish. Remove the DRM some people would probably pay for them.
95% piracy rate? Seriously? No wonder they hate gamers. But then, surely they’re disgusted at the 93% odd-percent of people who play their F2P games and never spend a cent.
How about a more realistic (but incalculable figure) of those among that number who would never have bought the game anyway?
It surprises me that Ubisoft appears to grow stronger as the months pass… any company that despites its customer base so much surely can’t succeed.
I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and choose to believe this is just one of those off the cuff remarks that a journalist has taken and run with. It’s almost too stupid a thing to say not to be/
Yeah, seriously .. 95% is a pretty stupid number.
They grow stronger but because they aren’t growing as fast as they’d like they whinge about piracy. There are a few studies around that show piracy doesn’t hurt their sales.
Hurr durr, how to mine for maths?
95% Piracy rate!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
How the hell am I going to sleep tonight when I can’t stop bloody laughing!!
WE ARE THE 5 PERCENT.
95% is probably right after buying 3 games from UBI i will never buy another again i am still fighting Uplay to download Driver but all the other games from steam i cant play while downloading driver.
I mean shite it was so much easier when i pirated UBI games, and after all these issues i wont buy from them again.
Perhaps if Ubisoft removed their stupid DRM scheme and uPlay, perhaps I would buy their games.
Is he banging on about this again? There is no way that 95% of all their games are pirated or they would of been out of business a very long time ago.
Then again Ubi also stopped making decent games a good while ago as well if you think about it.
i call bullcrap on the 95% piracy rate.
I mean some titles sell like 5million copies so around 95million copies are pirated? i struggle to believe that for even a second.
Not like the french to make things up…..
Pulled that number out his ass. Stop making shit games, or even when you make good games don’t lump them with uplay? Plus there’s the matter of price gouging which would turn most people off.
Ubisoft makes me so mad! :@
If piracy is so bad then stop f*cking making PC games. If my piracy rates were legitimately that high i’d drop the platform being so pirated, I mean at that rate how the hell am I even making a profit?
I’ve had 1 issue with Ubisofts DRM, and that was the recent browser plugin.
If they keep publishing/making games of such high quality (Ass creed series, Driver: SF), I’ll keep buying them.
To those using DRM as justification for piracy, how about just don’t play the game? If you want to play it, then they deserve the income from you doing so.
And I’m not going into those that honestly try a game for 30 minutes before deciding on a purchase, I’m talking to those who seem to feel entitled to play a game in its entirety, without paying for it.
The DRM is the main reason they are so heavily targeted for Piracy. I regret my purchase of Anno 2070 for the very reason it’s so hard to play at any given time.
I miss the days when Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon meant quality games. I have boycotted paying their stupid Australia tax twice the price games and managed to get cheap keys for Anno 2070 and Anno 1404 which came to less with all DLC than the standard cost of Anno 2070 when it was released.
All this and Yves Guillemot is still wondering why people won’t buy his games…
If its only another splinter cell or ass creed i prolly wont play them anyway not my type of game but i have purchased every game i have played ( maybe not at the time ) on at least one of the platforms i own.
But on pc UPLAY has been the worst platform i have delat with i dont condone piracy either buy it on ps3 or xbox let them have their money but the legitamate sales channel on pc is more hassle then its worth IMO
Don’t make bad ports and fill it to the brim with DRM to annoy people who want to buy the game and you might start getting more people buying it (I like the ports for the later Assassin’s Creed games, they have been good)
This guy is full of shit. “95%”, what a douche. He’s clearly just inventing numbers to make his point seem more valid.
Bullshit.
The thing about looking at ‘download’ numbers to claim a percentage of piracy is that they wonderfully forget that many will download and RE-download, never use and *gasp* BUY the game subsequent to having tried the full thing.
I don’t agree to simply pirating because you don’t want to pay money. I amount that to theft.
Conversely, I also amount marketing a product to induce a sale, then providing no form of refund or compensation for having provided a pathetic product, to theft.
I don’t believe that this F2P micro-transaction thing is the best way to go either – it’s OVERcharging on MINIMAL providing.
What would be better, in my opinion, is having a game released at 30% of it’s intended release price, for new subscriber/purchaser, for ‘x’ days. Trial period ends, if you keep it active, you pay the full price.
95%? rubbish.. but like you really need to wonder why ubisoft’s piracy rate is so high…
f4tal3rror,
rubbish.
the funny thing is that I used to buy Ubisoft games, but that was when they were
a) any good, and
b) without draconian DRM measures
Using Yves’ logic, Assasin’s Creed: Revelation, which has sold over 7 million copies, has been pirated by over 66 million people.
Somehow, i doubt that.
lordezekiel,
7 million copies on PC?
Eh. Before the new UPlay service when you bought a Ubisoft game you would only be able to download it during a set time period.
I kept my CD Keys around and because I couldn’t re-download the game without re-buying it, I instead just downloaded the games from a torrent and used the cdkey again.
So those numbers are already skewed, as I doubt I am the only person on the planet to do this.
Then they need to factor in their crap DRM driving people away.
Then they need to factor in their price gouging in some countries.
Then they need to factor in their crap customer service.
Then they need to factor in their games quality…
They seem to think they are entitled to everyones money somehow, why are they still in business with this crap attitude?
95% piracy, lol. Why dont they say 195% >.>
I do know some people who buy the game, then get the pirate copy.
So, how does that figure into the math?
I really don’t get why everyone complains about the DRM. To my knowledge, you have to be connected to the internet to launch a game. If you lose connection to the internet while playing a game, any achievements you get wont be counted.
Is that right? If so, it’s really not that game.
If there’s anything to complain about, its that the DRM was created to try stop pirates, but pirates found a work around anyway.
It’s really not that bad*
I’m tired, get at me.
Also can’t believe you can’t edit comments here.
He will after he takes Advanced UbiMath.
Wow, nice business to be in if you can still make a metric buttload of cash and keep cranking out multimillion dollar games when 95% of the people playing them are stealing your product….
Although i know its not true, the amount of money they would be raking in if the numbers were reversed would be absolutely obscene.
So much so that on that fact alone i can discount his numbers as pure pie in the sky.
If steam has proved one thing, it’s that games are too expensive to begin with and people go nuts buying when the prices go down…..
I don’t see any compelling reason to buy games at full retail price anymore, i have a backlog of about 50 games from steam sales that can tide me over till the price on “this years best X” drops to half or less.
I love the concept that pirated games cost developers, they don’t cost you anything most of the population is broke as hell especially right now if piracy wasn’t their they just wouldn’t buy your games.
But ubisoft the last game of theirs I bought I had to torrent a pirated version to actually play it it’s DRM made it insanely unstable and I’m someone on ADSL2 and have like 99.9% up time all year round and then you get into the quality of their games and honestly I don’t even think they would be worth pirating.
/rant
Even if the piracy rate was 95% of full paying customers, and this muppet has misunderstood what his marketing people have given him, giving:-
pirates = 0.95*people that bought it
so a total piracy percentage of 48.7% of total used copies of the game, I would still think that could be too high.
Even if you factor in the number of bootleg copies that never get bought, and end up in landfil, 95% is just nonsense.
They can live off the 5% sales because of the inflated prices they charge.
Or to put it another way all of the stockholder’s money we’ve spent year on year for DRM has been completely and totally wasted so trust us when we have this awesome idea to triple your investments!
As much as I hate some of these DRM systems, it never ever condones piracy. If you don’t agree with the DRM, don’t buy it. Piracy just makes the DRM go in one big loop. Pirate the games, more DRM, more piracy, even more DRM. Not buying the games at all might make them think about why people aren’t buying and change their system, instead of them acting in spite and putting in pointless DRM.
There is no way in hell that 5% of revenue would generate enough profit to make that a viable platform *at all*. Not even close. You’d make more money on a lemonade stand.
I can’t see any truth in this statement at all, shareholders would revolt.
how about piracy as a method of using what you purchased ? :P
even back in the day of having to have cd’s inserted I used to use no-cd cracks as often as possible for convenience.
Interesting, ridiculous statement.
Though I would first blame Ubisoft, as they get targeted due to their DRM and alot of their games are crap, I wish I had pirated them for the 20-120mins play I did.
If he’s lying about these figures it should be pretty easy to work out, they are a publicly listed company after all. He can lie in an interview but not in an official company announcement.
I’m sick of reading people say ‘Ubisoft games aren’t even worth pirating they’re so bad!’ because that’s a load of sh!t and you know it. Ubisoft generally make amazing games which is what makes this whole situation all the more painful. Don’t make up sh!t.
The problem here is that even if there was literally 0% piracy they’d still cite obscene piracy levels.
This +1 million
Sounds like their DRM is working well.
That’s probably the worst comment regarding piracy figures I’ve ever seen, 95% of Ubisoft games on pc are pirated? REALLY? That’s an almost impossible statistic, especially considering that historically speaking their games take longer to crack than everyone else’s do.
If it was really that high then I can’t imagine them still being in the pc market for so many years, not unless they’re the worse businessmen on the face of the earth.
I also find it funny that they have that negative view on f2p, “it’s only making as much money because our paid games get pirated so much” is the total opposite of the view that pretty much every other company has on f2p… that being : “it makes as much (if not more) than a traditional sales method BECAUSE IT’S A GOOD SALES TECHNIQUE”.
Sounds like sour grapes to me, it will be interesting i they try and go f2p with the majority of titles because i just don’t think that will work with most games, we’d see too much of a loss in quality/quantity of single player content.