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."
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Informative)
Nintendo have: [edge-online.com]
Nintendo has blamed piracy for a 45 per cent drop in DS game sales in Europe between April and December 2009... Last June Nintendo monitored ten overseas websites that allowed people to illegally download software. It found that games had been pirated a total 238 million times, translating into one trillion yen ($10.7 billion) in lost sales.
And Sony, EA, Activision, Microsoft et al have all claimed the same thing at one time or another. They seem to be smartening up nowadays, though.
The statistics that have been published are how many pirates vs. customers the game has, and those have been accurate.
And the numbers are almost certainly not accurate, anyway. Some people DL several versions of the same game - some people buy several copies. Some people lend games to people, thus making customers into pirates, and some people lend copies to friends, making a single pirate into a counterfeiting ring. The actual numbers are completely impossible to determine by any means other than watching what every single person in the world is doing every second of every day.
Re:Piracy is unimportant. Is rocks juice. (Score:2, Informative)
Indeed, its a 'donation' system, but thats about as close as you get to 'Pay what you want' without the same words.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:5, Informative)
I've had to do this. When I bought Mass Effect for a friend for his birthday, we couldn't get it work on his PC no matter what we did. We ended up having to download the crack off ::name redacted:: so he could play the game that was LEGALLY PURCHASED.
Insanely stupid.
Re:Hardcore players (Score:3, Informative)
The courts seem to disagree with you. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/court-smacks-autodesk-affirms-right-to-sell-used-software.ars
Re:Hardcore players (Score:3, Informative)
Re:...forced to pirate? (Score:1, Informative)
Android market supposedly suffers badly from piracy. Boo hoo hoo evil pirates, not giving money to developers who deserve them.
I downloaded Maverick Lite [androlib.com] recently. I decided it's a cool app and wanted to buy the full version.
Until then I was puzzled by lack of paid apps in the market. Now I saw "Maverick Pro" not found.
I checked, double checked and found:
Only 12 countries support paid apps [google.com] and mine is not one of them. I checked, Maverick Pro was only available through Android Market, not any other online store of Android apps.
I faced two options: .apk from SD card.
1. download a torrent of paid apps for Android, and install the
2. root the phone (voiding warranty), install "market-enabler", back-up the current SIM Id, spoof it with ID of one of providers that offer paid apps, then purchase the app from app store.
Guess which one I choose...
The second one. Yep, I hacked my phone and purchased the app legally.
same here, basically i was led to piracy by the powers that be.
1. Apple wont accept my credit card because its from an African country hence itunes is pretty much useless for me, no music purchases, no apps.
2. Microsoft wont allow me to purchase any recent Xbox360 titles online and download them regardless of having xbox live (not that i play online due to the lag), Ofcourse ebay does exist but who ships to africa?
3. Amazon would ship within a reasonable duration but it would cost me $70 to get the next $59.99 game.
4. Paypal only allows me to deposit so its not even worth it
Finally the solution: Torrenting + Last FM
Am off to chip my console,goodbye xbox live hello $5 game titles
Re:...forced to pirate? (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't ever even think about pirating games. Now I'm curious about how to do it. If anything, their complaints pushed a legitimate customer to investigate piracy. That, and I got a good Sudoku when it was free, and it got deleted and I can't download it again without paying (I thought they stored what I own, but they don't save the free apps past a certain point or something like that because it's not there in my list).
So it comes down to when they don't support those that legitimately bought their device, then they will have to turn elsewhere for support.