Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will not be coming to PC according to Ubisoft, but PC gamers will still be getting the now free-to-play online only title Ghost Recon Online.
The news comes after PC Gamer spoke to Ghost Recon Online’s producer Sébastien Arnoult about the third person shooter, who declared that gaming piracy was to blame for the move as well as the escalating annoyance of their restrictive DRM used in previous Ubisoft releases.
“We are giving away most of the content for free because there’s no barrier to entry. To the users that are traditionally playing the game by getting it through Pirate Bay, we said, ‘Okay, go ahead guys. This is what you’re asking for. We’ve listened to you – we’re giving you this experience. It’s easy to download, there’s no DRM that will pollute your experience.’”
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will be using a traditional payment model and will only be available on console. Arnoult goes on to describe the change to the PC release as ‘adapting to demand’ and how the game began as a straight forward port before being moved to free-to-play due to PC piracy.
“We’re adapting the offer to the PC market. I don’t like to compare PC and Xbox boxed products because they have a model on that platform that is clearly meant to be €60’s worth of super-Hollywood content. On PC, we’re adapting our model to the demand.”
“When we started Ghost Recon Online we were thinking about Ghost Recon: Future Solider; having something ported in the classical way without any deep development, because we know that 95% of our consumers will pirate the game. So we said okay, we have to change our mind.
“We have to adapt, we have to embrace this instead of pushing it away. That’s the main reflection behind Ghost Recon Online and the choice we’ve made to go in this direction.”
It’s obvious many PC gamers will be disappointed with the u-turn, but with piracy still a major problem for the gaming industry (not only on PC) we may be seeing the rumblings of a new standard in game distribution, especially for the PC platform. Don’t forget to let us know what you think via the comments below.
