PC gaming has "around a 93-95% piracy rate" claims Ubisoft CEO

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has been speaking to GamesIndustry International about Ubi's reasons for embracing the free to play model . He says free to play games are more cost effective to create because typical PC releases are so heavily pirated. He claims that "only about five to seven per cent" of players pay for PC games, "the rest is pirated."

Guillemot doesn't provide any evidence for this, but insists that the rate of paying customers for a traditional release is equal to that of a free to play game. He says that the free to play model lets Ubisoft "take content which we've developed in the past, graphics etc," to make "cheaper games and improve them over time."

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

It would be very interesting to learn where Guillemot has taken the "93-95 per cent" figure from, but a belief in that high a rate of piracy would explain the aggressive DRM strategy that Ubisoft have been pursuing for the past few years. Ubisoft recently announced that they'll be charging into the free to play market with three new games, Anno Online , Silent Hunter Online and Heroes of Might and Magic Online .

TOPICS
Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.

Latest in Game Development
princeton review best game design programs 2025
The best game design schools, ranked by the Princeton Review 2025
Sharon Tal Yguado speaking at the 2025 D.I.C.E. Summit.
'These kids do not care about romance': Game devs want to know what today's teens want, and surveys say sex and romance isn't it
Palworld early access
Palworld studio's first move as a publisher is to save a struggling indie dev: 'This is the energy I want to see driving games in 2025'
Yakuza/Like a Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi says his studio's new game won't be that big after all: 'it's not modern to have similar experiences repeated over and over again'
A man with a sausage-shaped head
'Calm down!' says Facepunch Studios: Garry's Mod successor s&box is getting a fan-requested sandbox mode and an alternative to 'Sausage Men'
Hellboy Web of Wyrd
Devolver has a new label dedicated to making games based on comics, films, TV shows and 'cult heroes'
Latest in News
A mech awakens.
Mecha Break developer is considering unlocking all mechs following open beta feedback
Lara Croft Unified Art
Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics lays off 17 employees 'to better align our current business needs and the studio's future success'
A long bendy arm stealing money from people in a subway car
'You're a very long arm. You steal things. It's a comedy game,' explains developer of comedy game where you steal things with a very long arm
The heroes are attacked by monsters
Pillars of Eternity is getting turn-based combat to mark its 10th anniversary, and that means PC Gamer editors will soon be arguing about combat mechanics again
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened
Junah beginning a battle in Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Today's RPG fans are 'very sensitive to feeling like they wasted time' when they die, says Metaphor: ReFantazio battle planner—but Atlus still made combat hard anyway