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Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately
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."
And that doesn't make you feel dirty at all?
When I feel dirty, I wash off the dirt.
You admit that these have value to you, but not the value that you want, so you take it... [...] This means you are taking someones money because you find it too expensive.
It's very, very clear that in this scenario, you are not taking someones [sic] money. This is why it is very clear that it is not theft, but copyright infringement. Are you an idiot or an astroturfer?
Soooo....if something costs too much...ignore it.
Yes, massa! I do what you say!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A thief is a thief is a thief. It cost them something to produce the product you're copying and you're depriving them of the reward for that labor and initial outlay. It's still theft no matter how you justify it.
We believe killing people is wrong,
Then why does the government kill people? Why did the previous 'christian' president order over 150 people to be killed? It's only wrong for the serfs to kill someone.