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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."
I love the old keyboard and mouse.
But do your friends and family who visit your house love having to wait their turn to use the keyboard and mouse instead of hooking up controllers 2, 3, and 4 and playing immediately?
I love the PS3. I love the Xbox.
But do you love the consoles' entry barriers against small developers?
Exposed. Cleavage. And. Titties. Are. Making. The. Earthquakes. Happen.
It are true, because of my learnings.
Just because they're, as you put it, hypothetical situations, it doesn't mean that it's in principle impossible to figure out lost sales to some degree of accuracy. We use subjunctive (or counterfactual) conditionals (as opposed to material conditionals) all the time in every day life. "If I were a lizard, I would be a reptile" is a subjunctive conditional statement that we can evaluate to a very good degree of accuracy.
Indeed, most scientific conclusions are made in the subjunctive. "We have completed various tests and found the diffraction index of this transparent solution to be $X. Therefore, if light were to travel through this solution, then it would behave like $Y." We tend to think that these scientific subjunctives can be an accurate description of what could have happened.
So it can't be just because we're talking about the subjunctive that it is in principle impossible to evaluate lost sales accurately. There must be some other reason why we can't figure out lost sales, if you were to make that claim.
I'm not an expert in statistics or economics, but I'm willing to guess that a sufficiently robust statistical model of the economics of media/game purchases can predict lost sales to an acceptable degree of accuracy.
That's just another great example to vote Pirate Party... I actually put down my autograph for the Pirate Party in the Netherlands last week, we now have enough people that support us so we will participate in our country's next elections on the 9th of June. This is happening globally as you can see on the nice map here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Parties_International