Ubisoft endures 93-95% piracy rate on PC

Ubisoft Yves Guillemot has said the percentage of paying players is the same for free to play as it is for PC boxed product.

This is somewhere between 5 to 7 per cent. Guillemot says free-to-play has been an effective method of making money from territories the company couldn’t previously reach.

“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.”