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Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately

Posted by Soulskill on from the arrrrbitrary-numbers dept.

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."

7 of 459 comments (clear)

  1. But... by tnok85 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Every. Download. Is. A. Lost. Sale.

    It's an empirically proven fact.

    1. Re:But... by Thanshin · · Score: 2, 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.

    2. Re:But... by Zocalo · · Score: 2, Funny

      Don't be so restrained, you know it's a fudamental truth.

      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.

      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
    3. Re:But... by Thanshin · · Score: 4, 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.

    4. Re:But... by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    5. Re:But... by natehoy · · Score: 2, 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". :)

      --
      "This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
  2. Re:pirates?! blah... by tepples · · Score: 2, 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.