Ubisoft Said PC Had a 95% Piracy Rate, but Now the Platform Is Its Highest Earner

Tsing

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Back in 2012, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot suggested that the PC platform was terrible for business. He claimed that only five to seven percent of PC gamers paid for their games, with the platform's piracy rate hovering around 93 to 95 percent. Now, six years later, Ubisoft's financials are showing that most of its money actually comes from PC sales.

A breakdown of net bookings by platforms in the company's Q1 2019-20 sales report shows the PC leading at 34 percent, a 10 percent increase from last year's Q1 result. That was trailed by the PS4 at 31 percent (which declined by 7%) and Xbox at 18% (which declined by 4%).

Continued performance from Rainbow Six Siege and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey are noted as the biggest factors in beating the quarterly target. The first quarter of the financial year for Ubisoft runs from April through June, during which Ubisoft’s only major new release was Anno 1800 – a PC exclusive – and in a post-report conference call (noted by Dom on Twitter), the company attributes PC growth to both Anno and continued performance from other games.
 
I guess they are saying that really over 65% of their sales would have been from PC if it wasn't for those **** pirates?
 
They'd probably have a lower piracy rate if they didn't require people to create and log into a Uplay account in order to play a single player campaign game :(
 
I'd say that pendulum will swing back towards the consoles once the next gens come out. Currently the parts to build pc's have somewhat stabilized. Not saying it's great but we've had new CPU, GPU, motherboard, SSD, and ram releases in the last 12 months and most prices have either come down or there's at least some competitive choices available. Some impressive gains have been made in terms of speeds for all of those various parts too. Overall it's a good time to be gaming or building PC's. In a year or so when the next gens of consoles come out the onslaught of commercials and publicity for them will sway some of the market back to consoles. Gotta wonder if UBI has a clue about this known cyclical tide of events or if they'll complain again in 12 months.
 
Maybe start releasing demos of games again and I won't have to go get my own before deciding if I want to give you $100 for a game?
 
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