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."

Comments

Re:Hardcore players

[DangerFace]

Nintendo have:

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:Hardcore players

[Pojut]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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