Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately 459
An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting:
"iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."
But... (Score:5, Funny)
It's an empirically proven fact.
Re:But... (Score:3, Funny)
It's an empirically proven fact.
Don't be so restrained, you know it's a fudamental truth.
I am.
Every download is a lost sale.
About everything else, I doubt.
Re:But... (Score:3, Funny)
You know, I think that actually works better without the extra "n" given the smoke being blown around this by **AAs et al. +1 for inclusion in the next update of the OED.
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
You know, I think that actually works better without the extra "n"
Ok.
Do't be so restraied, you kow it's a fudametal truth.
Re:pirates?! blah... (Score:3, Funny)
How much of their potential customers are ninjas?
You'll have to extrapolate this to the sales charts for Pirate Gaiden and Teenage Mutant Pirate Turtles.
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
Young Einstein is an Aussie cult classic and one of the funniest Aussie films of all time IMO
I had no idea it was so dire.
Re:But... (Score:3, Funny)
fudamental
Wascawwy piwates, steawing my intiwectuwal pwopewty.
Or maybe I misunderstood, and the word is a contraction of the acronym "FUD" and the word "MENTAL". :)