All of Ubisoft's future games will be influenced by the free-to-play model, the publisher said in an investor conference call today. VentureBeat reports Ubisoft spoke at lengths about the success the company has found in purely free-to-play titles, and how that could transfer over to more traditional games in the next generation of consoles.
“[I]n the future, with games like Sleeping Dogs, we could see more opportunity for $60 games to learn from the free-to-play model. The next generation will offer more and more item-based content,” said Ubisoft's chief financial officer Alain Martinez. “This will benefit our games’ profitability.”
The company expects to earn €50 ($64.4) to €60 ($77.2) million from free-to-play and casual games in its 2013 fiscal year, potentially tripling the same segment's €20 ($25.7) million figures from 2012.
Ubisoft worldwide director for online games Stéphanie Perotti compared the success of The Settlers Online to previous entries in the long-running PC simulation series. Perotti said the free-to-play experiment should hugely expand the series' profit margins.
"The Settlers Online is set to make more money in four years than the Settlers brand did on PC over nine years,” Perotti said.
