PC Gaming and Piracy

TOM'S GAMES: What about the PC gaming business? There are concerns about piracy, and certainly the consoles are much more popular right now in North America. Where do you see the PC gaming business going?

YVES GUILLEMOT: Well there's always a cycle for the gaming industry. The consoles at certain periods are more powerful than the PC, but the PC can improve its capacity and ability every year so the cycle changes. Generally, the PC gaming business gets better over time in these console cycles. So as we continue this cycle, graphically the PCs will continue to get better and the features will become more interesting.

TG: What about piracy?

GUILLEMOT: Piracy is enormously damaging to the market. The Internet has made piracy easy to do, and there are plenty of sites out there that we don't like at all that are taking our products and making them downloadable. So it's easy to pirate PC games. So what do we do? Well, it's better not to invest a lot of money on that particular platform. We know that the developers that are creating the PC game are not going to get paid for the work they do and the games won't break even. So we prefer to focus on platforms that maybe have less piracy and where more customers are actually paying for the content they consume.

TG: So does that mean Ubisoft will publish fewer PC games now and pull back from the platform?

GUILLEMOT: Yes, we shifted focus. We greatly reduced the number of people working on PC games because of that. But what we are also doing is trying to find a way to protect the PC game when it's played, perhaps a link to a server that will check the game.

TG: So a type of copy protection or DRM system?

GUILLEMOT: Well, a system that will make sure you have a better experience when you buy than game rather than when you don't buy it.

TG: PC gamers on average are very anti-DRM, which I'm sure you know after the Starforce controversy at your company. Aren't you concerned about the backlash over more DRM?

Ubisoft used Starforce copy protection software on its 2005 title Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which caused quite a controversy.

GUILLEMOT: The PC gaming community is very often against any kind of system that prohibits piracy, which I have difficulty understanding. They need to help us to make sure we can invest on the PC, because if we can't get a return on investment with PC games then we will not invest. We put tens of millions of dollars into these products. Look at the console business; they're more and more machines, and because of that, we sell an enormous quantity of games because there are paying customers. If we have enough customers, we can invest huge amounts of money. There's no limit to how much we can invest.

We tried to find protections and good systems to make sure that people had to buy the product, but in the PC world, you have people that are angry if you don't let them pirate. So then we said we can produce for the PC but we have to make sure that it is not our only source of revenue. We still have a few PC games, but less than before. If we find more ways to get revenue from the PC, then we will invest more. So this is the future. The last big PC hit was Far Cry and we are coming out with Far Cry 2 specifically for the PC, but that will be an exception.

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