https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210513/12515546796/ubisoft-shifts-future-plans-to-include-more-free-to-play-games.shtml

The embrace of "free" in the video game industry continues to pick up speed. We were just discussing the years-long success Epic Games has had with Fortnite, a free-to-play game that has nevertheless racked up $9 billion over the course of two years. The point of that post wasn't that all games have to be free-to-play. The point was that there are methods in the industry that completely negate the idea that has far too long permeated industry mentality which amounts to: you cannot compete with "free" or piracy. Not only does the story of Fortnite prove that isn't true, it proves that it's not true in spectacular fashion.

Ubisoft, as a company, has a somewhat tortured history when it comes to its own outlook on this sort of thing. On the one hand, the company has looked for data on just what kind of impact piracy has on its own bottom line. On the other hand, Ubisoft is also a company that has done more to implement restrictive, broken, annoying, and failed DRM than perhaps any other video game company on the planet. It's also a company that certainly has experimented with free-to-play games in the past, but it has always been much more focused on releasing a handful of AAA games per year and making its money that way.