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

Ugh. More silly complaints and excuses from Ubisoft. Atleast it is good to see Ubisoft are doing what they are good at. Whining.
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot has been speaking to Gamesindustry International about Ubisoft’s reasons for going Free to Play on lots of their games. . 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.


“It’s a way to get closer to your customers, to make sure you have a revenue. [sic]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. I personally think this is Ubisoft complaining though,