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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."
That's the second post from that blog in as many days - they were the ones that did the Humble Indie Games Bundle, weren't they?
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Actually, no one has ever published statistics saying its lost sales. The statistics that have been published are how many pirates vs. customers the game has, and those have been accurate.
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?
Do you ever make any sense?
That, that really grinds my gears!
Slashdot users have really gotten more stupid... think for a second.
WoW has no piracy (no, fucking private servers don't count you assholes). What if they were to turn off the serial number checking for a year? How rampant would the piracy get in that year?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Except it is also easy as hell to get PC gamers to buy, it is called giving them a good value instead of squeezing them for that last penny, duh! I'll use myself for a couple of examples: 1.-I bought MoH:10th anniversary, even though I heard the latest game in the series sucked (which it did BTW) so why did I buy? Because they gave me extras that made it worth buying like the original MoH:AA plus the expansions, Moh:PA Directors Cut, plus a couple of CDs worth of soundtracks and making of behind the scenes.
Rubbish. The makers of System Shock 2 gave PC gamers plenty of value yet only five of them bought it.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
Wow, you are fucking moron. You don't want DRM, don't fucking steal. Got that? Or is that too fucking difficult for you tiny little brain?
Don't want locks on doors, don't steal. Don't want DRM on games, music and movies? Don't make unauthorized copies and violate the copy rights of the people who own the copy rights and thus a legally granted monopoly on making and distributing copies of a work.
It really is as simple as that. Now, shut the fuck up.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.