Ubisoft Realizing That Perhaps 'Pirate' Users Are Really Just Like 'Free To Play' Users Who Don't Pay
from the same-percentages dept
Game maker Ubisoft is pretty closely associated with annoying DRM and an insistence that it needs DRM to fight infringement. And yet... the company seems to be recognizing something fundamental as it experiments with "free to play" games that have elements that you can purchase within the game: the percentage of people who pay are the same in both cases.Yes, you read that right. According to Ubisoft's stats, when they determine how many copies of their DRM'd games are infringing vs. how many people play free to play games without ever paying... they're both right about 95%. From that you could make the argument that the people playing "for free" in either case, just aren't that interested in paying. Thus, cracking down on the infringement isn't likely to make much more money -- and, in fact, may be an expensive waste of time.
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Filed Under: free to play, paying customers, piracy rates
Companies: ubisoft
Reader Comments
The First Word
“It all starts and ends with them.
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I can't see any reason why I would spend that much on a single gayme
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SMNC is Uber Entertainment.
Not Ubisoft.
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I like some of the items and I would buy have impuse brought them ages ago but the price just stops me dead every time.
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It all starts and ends with them.
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I play games... Right now Blizzard/Activision are in my crapper... why because I bought Diablo III - annoying DRM, Crap Story, and no (IMO) replay value for what? 20-30 hours worth of content and a stupid auction house (out 60.00 USD)
I also play World of Tanks... I have logged Many Many more hours playing that Free to Play game (5K+ Battles at 15 mins a battle = 1250 hours of game play over 1 year - 3.5 hours per DAY), and i have happily spent lots more money than i needed to (15 per month min) and gotten alot more out of the game....
Developers take note, make a good game, work with the community (WOT is always asking for input and comments, lets us test changes, and all kinds of things) and YOU WILL MAKE LOTS MORE MONEY than over-hyping crap titles with stupid DRM and no real conversation with the people paying.
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Time aside, how about the 8.0 patch coming out soon adding physics. You see any of the trailers or people testing it out on youtube? Holy cow. The whole game is going to change, to be a whole lot more tank-like. Can't wait.
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If the word of mouth of the free players brings in the payers then you may well win out in the end.
Or if the payers only bought because there was no risk involved that could also be a gain.
All this assumes the costs do not outweigh the gains of course.
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I'm fairly confident that that 5% would enjoy being that 100% who play with themselves.
I mean c'mon. More people will buy a game that they can only play with themselves. Less people will buy a game where there are more players playing - whether they pay or not. I mean, who buys a computer game to play with others?!?!
League of Legends is such a goddamn failure where 95% of the customer base don't pay. They company should be belly-up already and all their employees fired!!!! More than likely 95% of the customers never paid there!!!!
Same with Dungeon and Dragons Online!!!! Fire them all!!!! They even failed with Lord of the Rings Online!!!!
[/s]
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Joke about gamers not having girlfriends
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Now obviously that is bs. If a guy won't leave the controller instantly when there's a granted opportunity for sex then beware, he has some psychological disease >.>
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Re: [free to play a waste of time]
I'll never understand the mentality of people who generate a ton of interest, fail to monetize it, and then blame it on the interested people they failed to serve.
My boss the other day told us this amazing story about how he ran an expensive ad that generated so much traffic in one day (something like 8000x normal) that it shut the website down! Except, he only sold 8 extra products. Problem with the website or successfully capturing the interests of that flood of extra people? Nope! He confidently told us all that the ad "didn't work" and was a "waste of time", as if there was just no money to be made there. Simply amazing.
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F2P greatly increases your userbase, for one thing. (Usually, at least). So that 5% of F2P is a lot larger than the 5% of 'other'.
Second, what does it cost them to have a F2P user? A few cents a year for the extra storage & server? Oh, the horror!
Spending a few dollars to allow 20-25 people to play for free per year in the likelihood that 1 of them will pay $15 once every 3 months forever? Sounds like a very profitable plan to me.
Your main problem will be customer support. Now, if only you could crowd-source that . . .
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Not if your company was making a good ROI on those costs, you wouldn't. The key figure isn't the percentage of users who have paid. The key figure is the amount of money in the company's profit column.
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For sample numbers, let's have 100 players, 1 server, 5$ operating costs. 95 people pay jack. Some are good, some are crap players. Now you have 4 people who each buy the 1.50$ "Xtreme Xtra Bullets" package. They generally rise above the 95% to a small amount and are the "serious" gamers. You'll notice that 4*1.50$ easily covers the 5$ server rental.
The money comes in when that last sucker, the 1%, buys the 25$ "Xtreme Aimbot" package.
Now, the real trick with F2P is making the grading small enough that it's not "PAY2WIN LOL", but making the difference enough that it's felt, and the 95% want the bonuses.
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To troll properly, you must refer to Google as "Big Search."
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I mean theoretically, 90% of the downloads could be completely untouched, but there's no way of knowing that.
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Now I just do that with my legally purchased Steam games. =p
If I'm not willing to pay for it, it's certainly not going to clutter up my hard drive.
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The answer is no they don't account for any of that.
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I cannot and will never play any game that has a shred of pay-to-win aspects. Truthfully, I used to play a lot of app games until the App Store allowed in game purchases and every game turned into a sort of trap where it was free but beating the game was impossible without paying. I don't like that sort of experience and there are plenty of choices out there that do not have that feel.
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...I thought that was Blizzard?
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Freebie players have value
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Re: Freebie players have value
Even the most expensive MMO in history (Starwars the old republic) is going free to play, its getting hard for MMO companies to ignore the F2P market and justify a subscription.
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Re: Freebie players have value
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Do they care about increasing the number of paying consumers?
The publisher then claimed its DRM policy was a success, insisting it had seen "a clear reduction in piracy of our titles which required a persistent online connection".
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-22-ubisoft-has-endured-a-93-95-percent-pir acy-rate-on-pc
Note that nowhere in the article is there any mention of increased sales from anywhere except from countries where we couldn't previously - places where our products were played but not bought, so it seems like they have some experience of switching to F2P does actually generate more paying customers but only in countries where no-one buys their games. Which is good for them, but the fact that they don't tell us how good is quite distracting.
I can immediately think of a few questions that might be worth answering to flesh out this situation:
How many people are paying for microtransactions in regions where they couldn't make money before? How does income/profit from F2P/'freemium' compare to the 'old' model? If 95% of 'customers' are actually pirates in both cases, how is that ratio distributed by region (in both retail models)? Are there more or less people (in total and by region) actually playing their games?
If they have this regional data, why aren't they sharing it? How exactly did they calculate their ~95% piracy rate? Can they confirm that F2P actually turns pirates into microtransactioners or are they two different demographics?
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Re: Do they care about increasing the number of paying consumers?
Or there has been a clear reduction in piracy of all Ubisoft games because not only are people not buying them but not even bothering to pirate them anymore.
I used to use the pirate method to demo games before I bought them. As soon as Ubisoft started going hogshit crazy with DRM and treating customers like shit I started boycotting all their products. That includes not pirating their crapware as well.
Everyone needs to do this until this company disappears forever.
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Re: Re: Do they care about increasing the number of paying consumers?
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Don't accept their numbers
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Pirates and freeloaders seem to be in about the same category.
Neither of them will ever make you a penny.
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Bigots and ne'er-do-wells seem to be in about the same category.
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You have a typo.
Pirates and Freebooters are in the same category.
I don't understand how you reached your conclusion. I'll assume it was a typo.
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Let's assume you run a Free-to-play game. There are people who play it for free and generally never pay, and there are a few people who do pay. With your attitude, the free players are looked down on as scum. You don't bother trying to entice them into paying. You either try to shame them, guilt trip them or insult them. With your attitude, no-one actually really WANTS to pay for your game. They've been begrudged into it.
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Did you not read the story? They don't pay, they won't pay, they have no desire to pay, and will never pay. If they can't play it for free, they will pirate it and play it for free. They aren't potential customers, they are AT THE VERY BEST people who might help to create a little online buzz about your game and help you find the 1 or 2 people left willing to pay.
"With your attitude, no-one actually really WANTS to pay for your game."
If I am developing a product as a business, I am concerned with the people who want to play it - but mostly with the people willing to pay to play it. If I want to make a bunch of friends giving stuff away for free, that's easy. That's basic marketing, the easiest sale thing. But really, I want to have a business that sells something, not one that provides a free ride for every lazy fool in town.
Can you imagine a bus company that ran with only 5% of the ridership paying? Neither can I.
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Because they are all one homogeneous mass... Ever considered that people actually change their habits over the years? A student with little money to spend might become an employee with money to spend - on your game.
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This becomes especially evident in games that are converting to a f2p model from a subscription one--they do it in such a ham-handed fashion that all the new players they were trying to lure in basically end up with the view of 'This game is crap--why would I *want* to pay just to make it adequate, instead of finding something else to play?'
Games that start off as f2p (usually) avoid this issue, because they realize the way to do things is to provide an enjoyable enough experience to keep people around as a baseline, and then upsell things from there.
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Going after sites that provide links to content is just as ineffective as suing your customers. Shut one down, five others jump in to take the users from that original one.
It's the business model not serving the customers what they want, how they want it. Fix that.
Or at the very least, go out of business so someone else can fill the demand.
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Explaining 95% Piracy
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hm
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Thanks. If I could, I'd give you a 1000 insightfuls.
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And you'd get a lot better publicity among gamers.
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They believe they are stopping 'casual pirates' but every casual pirate (or even casual non-pirate) knows a hardcore pirate with a crack for everything. They have not stopped a single soul. Game, set, and match.
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Free to Play games are slowly evolving into one of the better ways for companies to try to make money. As long as they keep it honest and don't make it "Pay to Win".
"Pay for Bling" works a lot better than you would think. Or just "Pay for a shortcut" doing a double XP award thing, or just paying money up front to unlock a bunch of content and get it over with.
Assuming the game is balanced and game wise there is no difference between a long time free player and a pay for player this system works wonderfully.
Here's the thing, with free to play, the free players hanging out doing stuff are increasing the value of your game since there are more people playing. There's nothing more that kills a multiplayer game than not having anyone to play with!
Also lets say you have a friend you'd like to play a game with. There's zero risk for this friend to join up with you and play around except for time lost in installing and playing with you.
Games are easier to suggest, easier to get in and start playing, and usually have more content added than games that aren't free to play!
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Yeah, about that
1. It was possible to "protect" it.
2. The cost if the DRM caused our customers' system to fail to run was exorbitant ($10M+ per hour of downtime).
3. The likelihood of "piracy" was exceedingly small since what our customers were paying for was support, updates, etc.
So, after some development proof-of-concept work, we decided to drop the entire idea. The result is that the software is ubiquitous in a major manufacturing sector, and there are zero recorded instances of "piracy" of the product.
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I like how you claim the game being online only is for DRM (it's not), and how the story is crap. Then you announce how an online-only game with no story is superior. :/
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If it took them this long to realize that their shitty DRM wasn't working and their business model was defunct, then they deserve to go out of business. Naturally there will always be people buying "Assassin's Creed: Cyborg Ezio edition" to where that will never happen, but I can dream.
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FTFY...
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