Rumor: Slant Six was working on Medal of Honor Vita game
Simpsons, King of the Hill writer joins Angry Birds film
Class of Heroes 2 coming to PSN on June 4
Shelter gameplay trailer is delightful, horrifying
Alan Wake Humble Bundle launches
Ubisoft CEO claims 93% piracy rate on PC, refocuses on free-to-play
by Steve Watts, Aug 22, 2012 12:30pm PDTWhy are game publishers becoming increasingly gung-ho about free-to-play? According to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, piracy is definitely a factor at play.
In spite of its name, free-to-play is one way "to make sure you have revenue," Guillemot explained. "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."
Speaking to GI.biz, Guillemot added that "the revenue we get from the people who play is more long term, so we can continue to bring content."
Guillemot says the key to the F2P model is its adaptability. A game could cannibalize existing content to make the game production cheaper initially, and then iterate on it. "What's very important is that we change the content and make it a better fit to the customer as time goes on."
Another factor playing into the company's free-to-play strategy is the slow console transition. "People are saying that the traditional market is declining and that F2P is everything--I'm not saying that. We're waiting for the new consoles--I think that the new consoles will give a huge boost to the industry, just like they do every time that they come. This time, they took too long so the market is waiting."
In spite of Guillemot's bold claims, the publisher recently launched Uplay PC, it's own branded digital storefront for PC games.
Comments
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot says that only 5-7% of users pay for boxed retail PC games, the same percentage of people who pay into free-to-play titles.
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot says that only 5-7% of users pay for boxed retail PC games, the same percentage of people who pay into free-to-play titles. : Shacknews
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 142 replies.
Just, no.
For the sake of argument, let's assume 93% is correct, but they didn't account for 100% of their legitimate customers downloading cracked copies and were not accounted for in the statistics. This means their actual piracy rate is 86%, which is still an extremely high number. Again, that's 100% of legitimate customers engaging in the activity. Only a "small percentage" doing it in no way undermines those numbers.
Shit is construed as negative all because he trotted out some percentage that, in the end, its not a factual number - its a guess, and EVEN IF IT WAS, and 100% of the 93% were actually pirating - it still doesn't result in 100% of the 93% being lost sales... and trust me, even if they didn't mention it, its all about the sales.
No one is claiming the number has a 1:1 translation to lost sales. The fact is it doesn't even need to be what's commonly considered to be "statistically significant" conversion rate to have a ridiculously huge impact on sales.
Take the 86% from above that was assuming every legitimate customer also downloaded the crack. If you're able to convert 5% (the most common "significance" threshold used in statistics) of those 86%, then you've increased sales by over 30%. That's huge. If the 93% is accurate and you convert 5%, you've increased sales by over 66%. Also really huge.
I'm sorry, but there's absolutely no way you can make your post and have even a basic understanding of mathematics or statistics.
The other thing is, the 85-95% numbers have been reported, repeatedly, by multiple companies, publishers, and independent entities, large and small (indies included) for at least the past five years now. This isn't just Ubisoft saying these things.
You must be logged in to post.