Yves Guillemot, CEO of gaming company Ubisoft, says the free-to-play model of PC gaming allows the company to “get revenue from countries where we couldn’t previously — places where our products were played but not bought.”
According to Guillemot, F2P games help brands last longer and bring content over longer periods of time. He acknowledges that very few F2P consumers will actually pay, but the company fares worse with high piracy rates.
“On PC it’s only around five to seven percent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it’s only about five to seven percent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated,” Guillemot says. “It’s around a 93-95 percent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage.”
Ars Technica questions whether piracy rates are really that high, noting that pirates are actually a small percent of a potential audience. The article also adds that every pirated copy doesn’t necessarily equate to a lost sale (some pirates couldn’t pay for what they download).
“If you complain about the fact that 95 percent of the potential audience for your traditional game is being lost to piracy, you should be equally perturbed that 95 percent of your potential audience is playing your free-to-play game without ever becoming a paying customer,” Ars Technica argues. “Yet Guillemot seems to treat free-to-play freeloaders as a necessary cost of doing business while simultaneously treating pirating freeloaders as a scourge that is ruining the traditional PC gaming business.”
“Guillemot’s argument seems to reduce free-to-play gaming from an exciting new way to get players interested in a game to a new form of digital rights management, where the most interesting bits of a game are hidden behind an unpiratable paywall,” notes the article. “That’s the wrong way of looking at things.”
“As Stardock’s Brad Wardell has noted, the real threat to having a successful PC game is not piracy, but obscurity. Both piracy and legitimate free-to-play options can be seen as ways of avoiding that obscurity while making only marginal sacrifices to a game’s actual economic success.”
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