Ubisoft's digital boss on free-to-play, mobile games, eSports and the new UPlay

Ubisoft showed off its download line-up at its Digital Days showcase in Paris earlier this month, and MCV caught up with worldwide director of online games Stephanie Perotti.
The publisher's digital boss shared with us the plan for the newly-relaunched UPlay downloads service, the ever-growing free-to-play sector, the promising eSports market and those all important mobile titles.
What plans do you have for the revamped UPlay? Will it just distribute Ubisoft, or will you offer third-party titles like EA Origin?
The plan for UPlay goes beyond digital distribution. We continue to evolve the service across all platforms, including PC, console and mobile. The more Ubisoft games you play, the more rewards you can get, as well as several online services that players would expect. On the digital distribution side, we remain open to opportunities. Right now, we’re starting the service with our own games, but as we go forward, we plan to potentially add other titles.
When the new UPlay app launched, your initial range of titles were available for just £1 each. Is there are danger that this can devalue your product?
That’s something we have to be careful about, but not something we see as a threat. This has been a one-time limited time promotion on some back-catalogue games. We would consider the pricing and promotion on UPlay in the same way we do with other partners and try to be as creative as we can on the promotional side without devaluing any of our games.
What effect do you think UPlay will have on your relationship with retailers? Will they see it as another online rival?
We don’t see that as competition. Retail is a very important part of our business and will continue to be so. Digital is complementary to that – you can already buy games from various digital distribution platforms, so it’s just another option we offer to consumer, not something to replace other options. We believe choice is important so the users and the players can decide where to shop for their games.
Earlier this month, you announced you were scrapping the controversial ‘always-on DRM’ in your PC titles. Do you think this protective measure has damaged Ubi reputation? What can be done?
It definitely created a lot of attention and feedback. We’ve listened to this feedback, to move away from that system. We want to prove to the PC community that we are still very committed. We have a lot of PC games [on the way], we’ve been supporting PC as a platform all along, and we intend to continue to create great games and great services for those players.
Are you still concerned about protecting your IP? How will you do so without this DRM?
We’re trying to find the right balance between protecting our IP and ensuring a great experience for our players. The way the system operates today, you still need to activate your game once when you first install it – that’s the standard way of doing things on PC – so that’s how we’re protecting our IP. We’re trying to balance that with less intrusive options.
Your Digital Days showcase featured several free-to-play games for PC. Do you think this model can work in the console space?
Actually, we have one game on XBLA and PSN that’s free-to-play: Spartacus Legends. We are looking at all evolutions of the market and the opportunities there are. So that’s going to be our first entry in the free to play market on consoles, and we’ll see how it goes.
One of the highlights was Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, a free-to-play title by Ubisoft Montreal. Is the fact that you have a flagship studio like this working on a F2P games a sign of how important the sector is to MCV?
I guess it is. It’s something we’ve always believed in – that whatever we do, we always have the same target in terms of quality and experience for the players. So it makes sense that all of our studios get involved in anything we are doing.
It’s also interesting that this came from the studio itself. The team had this great idea and its something that made a lot of sense for us.

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