Piracy still a PC problem? F2P to the rescue!

August 22nd, 2012

Ubisoft has a rocky history with PC gamers who accuse the publisher of locking up their games in off putting ways or intentionally delaying the release of their PC games to thwart piracy. 

But there may be a silver lining. Ubisoft business guy Yves Guillemot told Games Industry this week that thanks to free-to-play games, the company is more committed to PC than it has been in the past. 

In other words, it really is the future of gaming. 

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

According to Guillemot, "only five to seven percent of free to play players actually pay. But normally on PC it's only about five to seven per cent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated."

That ends up being the same percentage of paying customers he says. But not only are free to play games capable of netting even more than $50-60 per user (some pay upwards of $100-200+), free-to-play payments are "more long term," Guillemot says, which is an incentive to focus more on PC game development moving forward. 

Regardless of what you think of Guillemot's numbers, it's nice to see free-to-play combating the piracy stigma, an issue the platform has long since struggled with. What do you think?

Read more: PC gaming headlines