Study Claims $41.5 Billion In Portable Game Piracy Losses Over Five Years

Gamasutra reports that Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association conducted a study to estimate the total amount of money lost to piracy on portable game consoles. The figure they arrived at? $41.5 billion from 2004 to 2009. Quoting: "CESA checked the download counts for the top 20 Japanese games at what it considers the top 114 piracy sites, recording those figures from 2004 to 2009. After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market. CESA and Baba Lab did not take into account other popular distribution methods for pirated games like peer-to-peer sharing, so the groups admit that the actual figures for DS and PSP software piracy could be much higher than the ¥3.816 trillion amount the study found."

Comments

Losses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? How can they call this losses... it's not-earnings...

Re:Losses?

[interkin3tic]

Indeed, I'd call it $41.5 billion in free advertising for your games.

Re:Losses?

[KDR_11k]

Free advertising to whom? Advertising to people who think of games as something you download to a flashcard isn't going to help at all.

Re:Losses?

[Moryath]

The thought occurs:

who in their right mind would buy any game for the PSP anyways? I can count on one hand the number of good titles for it, and none released in the last 3 years qualify...

Re:Losses?

[michaelhood]

According to Wikipedia there's 129M DS units sold, and 60M PSP units sold.. that's $220 worth of pirated games for every handheld in the world. Keeping in mind that a lot of people bought multiple revisions of the DS, replacement units, units that aren't in use, and so on, it's probably more like $300-400 per handheld owner.

Sorry, but that number is completely ridiculous and not credible in any way whatsoever to anyone owning a calculator.

Re:Losses?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's right in the summary, it is based on a 1:1 conversion rate between pirated and not bought, that's why it doesn't make sense

Re:Losses?

[Schadrach]

Not really, you'll have a small subsection of players who have $1-3k+ at retail price worth of pirate DS software (and the study assumes absolutely anything pirated is a lost sale), and others with none at all. Usually people who pirate games for a portable will fill up the largest microSD card they can lay their hands on with anything that looks remotely decent. 8GB is a *lot* of DS games.

Re:Losses?

[L4t3r4lu5]

That's probably true if you get games one at a time, but the only time I've seen a pirated game on a DS was when it was loaded onto a flash card, with around 40 other titles. Unless DS games are $10 each, $400 per cartridge is hardly pushing it.

I agree that it won't be per owner of the device, but just putting an relevant figure out there based on my own experience.

Re:Losses?

[selven]

I'm sure the heavy pirates have many thousands of dollars worth of pirated games, which might actually average out to $220 per handheld. But there's no way those pirates would have bought a significant portion of those games had they not been available for free, and that's why their $41 billion is accurate but ultimately quite meaningless.

Re:Losses?

[stealth_finger]

So whats that equation. downloads x RRP x 4 = lost revenue. Don't think it quite works like that.

from TFA

"After calculating the total for handheld piracy in Japan with that method, the groups multiplied that number by four to reach the worldwide amount, presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market."

Re:Losses?

[Golddess]

The fact that 1 pirated copy != 1 lost sale aside, 3 games a year ($400 spent on games over a 5 year period / $30 per game / 5 years, rounded up) is "completely ridiculous and not credible in any way whatsoever to anyone owning a calculator"? I'd love to know what the mods were smoking when they called that "Insightful".

Re:Losses?

[e70838]

The only information in this post is that the site www.gamasutra.com publishes very stupid articles. They should try to read before what they intend to publish and think a bit by themselves to understand how crappy this is.
Accepting to publish such bullshit is complicity in disinformation. This is bad.

Re:Losses?

[Pojut]

I can name a bunch. Taken from my article on the topic:

Prinny, Killzone: Liberation, GTA: Chinatown Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics, God of War: Chains of Olympus, FlOw, the Loco Roco series, the Patapon Series, Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony, GTA: Vice City Stories and Liberty City Stories, Dissidia: Final Fantasy, Lumines, Wipeout Pure, Space Invaders Evolution, the Monster Hunter series, LittleBigPlanet PSP, and more.

Re:Losses?

[Mattskimo]

Spending that much on games is perfectly reasonable but the idea that piracy causes every single person that owns a handheld to buy 3 less games per year seems a little farfetched. I don't have any stats to back me up but I'm going to guess that the average DS owner isn't very tech-savvy and wouldn't know how to pirate a game. The figures are probably inflated due to a relatively small group of people who pirate nigh on every single game that is released, in every language that it is released in. I'd be willing to bet money on the number of DS owners who have never pirated anything being well over 90%. I'm not so sure about PSP but I'd imagine the figure would still be well over 80%.

Re:Losses?

[Lumpy]

The DS is delicate.. I'm on my 4th.

Re:Losses?

[Lumpy]

40??

Last time I saw one of those cards it used SDHC minis and the guy had EVERY DS title made on it including Japan only releases.

Re:Losses?

[tbannist]

You've kind of missed the point entirely, most of the people who pirate games can't afford to buy all of the games they pirate, so they never would have bought all the games they pirated. However, if these pirates interact with people who are not pirates and talk about the games they pirated and liked, they are providing free advertising.

As the iPhone study showed about 10% of iPhone owners were responsible for over 90% piracy rates on games. That means the 10% of pirates go through games voraciously, at a rate far, far beyond what non-pirates do. This means any comparison between piracy rates and money lost is going be vastly overstated.

The true cost of piracy would probably be better estimated by figuring the average purchase rate for game players and then multiplying that by the percentage of people who pirate games. It gives much lower but more accurate and realistic numbers.

Re:Losses?

[daveime]

People who download the game to a flashcard don't want to pay $29.95 or even more for plastic, circuitry, manuals and packaging they don't get.

They just want to pay a reasonable price for a game, which in these days of online gaming where even $5 can give you a full month of gameplay (more than probably any cartridge), and with ongoing updates to the game, who in their right mind will pay 29.95 for a fixed game, not online, that might turn out to have 3 hours of playability.

Imagine if those $41.5 billion losses (*cough* numbers, ass, *cough*), could have been REAL genuine online sales at a price that the prevailing market will bear.

The days of selling you physical items loaded with preconditions and expectations are gone, adapt or die is the name of the game now.

Re:Losses?

[Tim C]

A guy I used to work with had a collection of pirated DS game files he showed me once; there were easily 60 of them if not more.

At maybe 30USD per game at full retail, that's >1800USD just for his collection - and that's assuming he had them all with him at the time (we were actually at work).

Re:Losses?

[Golddess]

Spending that much on games is perfectly reasonable but the idea that piracy causes every single person that owns a handheld to buy 3 less games per year seems a little farfetched.

Ok, when you put it that way, if "every single person" includes those who do not pirate, it does make a little more sense. It just seemed at first like michaelhood was saying $90 on games per year is a completely unrealistic value. I'd missed that he stopped just short of saying something like "and that assumes that 100% of DS owners pirate games".

Re:Losses?

[b4upoo]

Absolutely correct! Piracy may well have caused a huge portion of the sales of product simply because it advertised the product in its own unique way.
                    I also wonder how, in hard times, so much game software could be sold.

Re:Losses?

[__aasqbs9791]

But what about the losses due to pirates who talk badly about games they didn't like? How will these companies ever con unsuspecting gamers into paying them money?

Re:Losses?

[Rutefoot]

My friend, let's call him Futeroot, had bought an R4 card for his DS after someone stole about a dozen of his legitimately bought games (Probably double that $220 value). Not wanting to repurchase all those games again and with no new decent games out, the DS unit got shelved and forgotten. Then one day a friend of Futeroot's told him about the R4 card and Futeroot thought 'Great! Now I can play Mario Kart again and not have to pay twice!'

The DS got dusted off, and later a shiny new DS was purchased, and despite the availability of thousands of games for free, several games were purchased in this revival (New Mario Bros, Zelda, Guitar Hero, etc... easily over the $220 value)

In the end you could say that the piracy of some of those games created a positive value of several hundred dollars, but if you were to look at the files downloaded, you would conclude that piracy in this case created a loss of at least $10,000. That's a pretty big discrepancy.

Now, this is a single case in millions of different cases, but it illustrates that the situation is far more complex then a simple 'lets look at the download numbers and multiply' scenario. In this case there are a few things worth pointing out:

-Futeroot couldn't dream of affording the $10,000 worth of games, so in no way, shape or form should that be considered lost sales.

-When files were downloaded they were downloaded in bulk for two main reasons
1) It is easier to download a big torrent with multiple games than having to track down and find individual game files and
2) There are a lot more seeders for torrents that contain multiple games than ones for individual games. As a result a couple hundred games might be downloaded when only a dozen or two are even wanted. Sorry EA, Futeroot didn't want a copy of MySims, but keep dreaming.

-Additionally, while engaged in this DS revival, Futeroot had convinced 3 people directly to get DSes of their own, who each went out and bought games for their new DSes.

Re:Losses?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Well, that just proves my(their) point. In that case, only a few thousand, maybe tens of thousands need to have these memory cards in order for the values to be reasonable*.

* Reasonable in a world where possession of a game without paying is a lost sale and not just opportunism, i.e. I won't buy it, but I'll have it if it's free.

Re:Losses?

[geminidomino]

There was some leg-pulling going on. Either he was pulling yours or you're pulling ours. The "Official" max size (per standard) of an SDHC card is 32GB, and most of the SDHC Flash carts I've seen won't go higher than that (if you're lucky. If you're not, they just hang up/crash/etc...).

You can get a LOT of games in 32GB, yes. But the only way you could fit them *all* on there would be to compress them and even that's a maybe, and I don't think any of the cards support that (unfortunately).

Re:Losses?

[Quirkz]

I know you're kind of joking, but I suspect that the voracious downloaders who go through 10 or 20 times as many games as the rest of us probably don't have time to mess around for long with a bad game. If it's not fun, they ditch it and move on, and focus on the good games and probably don't bother to talk about the 19 bad ones they played.

Now a regular guy who shells out actual cash for most or all of his games is going to feel more obligated to at least try to play the bad game, hoping to get some redeeming value out of it. This probably means more exposure to the game, and a far greater sense of disappointment when that expensive purchase fails them. Those are the people who will really complain about a bad game. Allow me to demonstrate:

For instance, take Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for the PS2, which is possibly the single worst game I have ever played, and complete waste of money. The other versions (PS3, Xbox, etc.) are about what you'd expect from a movie knockoff -- not that great, but entertaining enough for someone who grew up thinking space robots were the coolest thing he'd ever seen. The PS2 version, though, is an absolute travesty of a game in every respect, from the horrendous graphics (even for a PS2) to the absolutely linear progress of every single level, the scripted boss fights that require a Simon-Says button pushing sequence, to the fact that half of the levels are simply duplicates of each other, and the basically zero connection to the movie or its plot (weak as the movie was, you still expect the game knockoff that shares the title to pretend to be about the same thing). I don't just want my money back, I want them to pay me double for my lost time, and they have to pay triple if they'd like me to stop telling everyone who will listen just how horrendous that game actually was. Zero stars, seriously. Zero.

Re:Losses?

[soppsa]

You've kind of missed the point entirely, most of the people who pirate games can't afford to buy all of the games they pirate, so they never would have bought all the games they pirated.

Thats the problem. Times have changed. Not all but some. Nobody buys *any* games nowadays. I know far too many people who bought an NDS and a copier for the *sole* purpose of pirating everything. Same goes for Xbox360.

Re:Losses?

[mcvos]

What about the billions that I didn't earn? I think lawmakers should do something about that.

Re:Losses?

[Beardo the Bearded]

That's why I generally borrow a game from the library before I buy it.

Re:Losses?

[Anonymous Coward]

so, so wrong. a ds game is $80 in my country. my are for device takes a micro ess dea card that can hold ~100 games.
thats $8000 in lost sales, or some other such commercial trickery.

EASILY $400 per handheld, but i think the number is more like $4000 or $40,000...

Re:Losses?

[KDR_11k]

most of the people who pirate games can't afford to buy all of the games they pirate, so they never would have bought all the games they pirated.

Of course not all but they could have bought some of them.

However, if these pirates interact with people who are not pirates and talk about the games they pirated and liked, they are providing free advertising.

Only if they don't advertise how to pirate them at the same time.

Re:Losses?

[squinty_s]

You have a library in your town/county? Neat. I thought those were a thing of the past in New York. I have to pay about 10x as much (since I'm not in that district) for a membership and then drive about 30 miles to get to the nearest one. Again, not everyone lives in a large town or city.

Re:Losses?

[KDR_11k]

If that was it then why would people pirate iPhone apps? Those are 5$ or less, often with constant updates and whatnot yet they get pirated anyway.

Re:Losses?

[ildon]

The problem with these studies is they equate 100% of downloads with sales, when more likely 5% at best would have been sales, more likely lower. Especially since portable games are such small files, the people who pirate them feel encouraged to download every single game that comes out, no matter how awful and even if they never even intend to boot it up, just to "collect" them.

Re:Losses?

[Kojiro Ganryu Sasaki]

You have to PAY for using the library?

Re:Losses?

[khellendros1984]

I have a DS and a flash card for it. I only own three games, but then again, I never really play the DS. Most of my pirated games are Japanese versions of weird things I hear about on the internet. 2 of the 3 I own I had pirated copies of before buying the real copy.

I have about 15 games for the 360. They're all legally purchased (although about half were bought used, which many publishers would consider piracy anyhow...)

I've also got a PSP, unmodified, with about 10 games. Every one of them was bought at the recommendation of several friends who had pirated them.

OK, so I'm a outlier on the graph of video game players...but you can't say no one buys any games. At the very least, there's myself and my friends.

Re:Losses?

[DemonBeaver]

$41.5 billion is many things, but not "free"...

Re:Losses?

[DemonBeaver]

$41.5 billion is a lot of things, but "free" is not one of them...

Re:Losses?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those figures in that sense (of how many pirate copies there are and the cumulative value) may not in fact be inaccurate. However in terms of lost sales they may be. Given that copying is near free and incredibly easy, assuming every copy is a lost sale is tantamount to printing money.

To give an anecdotal example:

I have a relative for whom I wanted to purchase a DS game or two for a Christmas gift. She is very young, far under the age or prosecution. When enquiring as to which games she had already with another relative, I was surprised to find that not only did she have official games bought for her by other relatives, but a special card, acquired from school friends, that let her insert a micro-sd card into it filled with a vast number of game ROMs. Despite there being dozens of games on there, this did not equate to an equal number of lost sales. In fact in this case, it equated to no lost sales at all. For a start, I would be hard pressed to find a relative that would buy that many games for her. If one did, I would suspect most likely suspect them of being either insane or a paedophile because it would be such an absurdly unusual thing to do. The only lost sales there might be for games she has already, meaning the only difference is that the money goes to different games (that she hasn't got), however the money received by the games industry, is largely unaffected. Secondly, she doesn't actually play most of the copies on the card. Obviously, she's tried most of them out, but only really plays the few that are good. That makes the majority of the copies effectively null and void, simply taking up space, without value to the "consumer" therefore without value to the company.

Summary: Incidents of infringement to be used in statistics? Several dozen. Money lost to the gaming industry by her activities? Zero.

This is just one anecdote, out of many where I have witnessed vast amounts of copies being made that clearly wouldn't be paid for if not downloaded for free. Commonly, the figure I experience is that when people have collections, typically the amount that could be considered lost sales (where they might actually pay if no option of pirating is available) is far smaller than 0.1. Very commonly close to a hundredth of hundredths for small to medium collections and thousandths for large collections (obviously rounding up very vaguely here). I don't know exactly how typical this is, but could be worrying if they're assuming only a one or a few downloads equals a lost sale when my experience shows this rarely to be the case. Typically, bigger collections means a less lost sales ratio. They need to gather statistics on collection size to individual before anything else rather than just averaging out number of downloads/number of individuals downloading.

At present, it's basically impossible to work out if any meaningful quantities of copies actually holds any lost value at all. Most of these numbers might as well be pulled out of a hat. They're vague statistical guestimates at best.

Re:Losses?

[Tuoqui]

"The true cost of piracy would probably be better estimated by figuring the average purchase rate for game players and then multiplying that by the percentage of people who pirate games. It gives much lower but more accurate and realistic numbers."

But thats exactly what industries DO NOT WANT... accurate and realistic numbers. It is far easier to throw out a 5 trillion dollar amount out there because the dartboard said so than to actually do work figuring it out.

Re:Losses?

[Tuoqui]

Looks like the industry shills are out in force.

$45 BILLION?!?

[IBBoard]

Yeah, that must be accurate, because I'm sure they factored in things like:

1) People downloading way more than they could ever afford to buy
2) Multiple downloads by one person
3) Downloads of games that were already legitimately purchased by the individual but unusable for some reason

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to download games, never played many of them, just had to have the newest stuff.

Also, these studies fail to take into account the fact that many sites require a certain amount of traffic from it's users, therefore some of these downloads are pure "pass along" downloads.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[interkin3tic]

While I also find fault with that figure, I think the 3rd one was probably not a significant contributing factor there given the scale.

I'd argue that the vast majority was 1 with a little of 4: faulty methods for calculating the amount.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[delinear]

Also, consider the third one from the opposite perspective - people who use downloads as a means of determining if the game is worth purchasing. Maybe neither of these are a significant contributing factor (I don't know enough about Japanese culture to definitively say), but considering their method of calculating the world total is to multipl the Japanese total by 4, I'd say there are some pretty big holes in their figures anyway, unless there are studies to show that piracy levels are the same worldwide.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

3) Downloads of games that were already legitimately purchased by the individual but unusable for some reason

I'm kind of a subset of category 3 or maybe my own category entirely. I have a flash cart for my DS, but I've never pirated anything for it. Every game on my cart is one that I've bought and paid for legally. However, I still download the ROMs since it's far easier to do so than to dump my own cart (which AFAIK requires some kind of slot 2 device that I have no interest in buying). Really, I'm just format shifting as I find it far easier to carry around the system with one cartridge that holds my entire collection on a 2 gig microSD card than to carry around an extra bag to lug around my 40+ games. In my case, a download is most definitely not a lost sale, just a way to play my games on my terms until Nintendo can get their act together and make a no-nonsense digital distribution service.

I say no-nonsense because Sony has PSN for the PSP, but their prices are completely out of touch with reality as in most cases new copies of the same games can be bought in UMD format for less than the price of the digital download. Because of this, I suspect (hope?) that a large number of the people downloading PSP games are doing the same thing I'm doing with my DS and getting the advantages of a digital copy (lower battery usage and easier to carry around a large collection) without the brain-dead pricing model Sony has for its legit digital marketplace.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[rakslice]

To put the first two points into concrete terms: Even scrupulous non-pirates will sometimes try a game, by renting it or borrowing it from a friend, and then decide not to buy it. And before even trying a game they'll usually first read some in depth reviews to decide which games are worth it. With portable systems' games' small sizes, and big cheap flash memories, will the pirates pick and choose too, or will they just download every game?

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Aeternitas827]

Yeah, that must be accurate, because I'm sure they factored in things like: 1) People downloading way more than they could ever afford to buy

This is probably the biggest of the bunch...personally, and I know a few similar like-minded people, if I could snag half the games I wanted at no cost, I'd have more games than I would know what to do with. Real world, though, I'll go and buy the best of the ones I want, based on what others tell me of them, and either ignore the rest or wait until they're on some sort of clearance/resale rack at low cost (where the game manufacturers are realising no to low profit on it).

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Mashiki]

Is it me...maybe my math is off being that it's 4:30am, I just got in from a 4x12 shift and the whole calculator thing isn't working for my mind right now. But are they saying that every person on the planet would be spending 600k on games each? I mean if that's right, hell even if it's 60k, that's a hell of a lot of money. Considering in the US and Canada the media wages are between 38-50k/yr.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

4) DS games tend to come in packs of hundreds. I bet they counted a download of "scene dumps 1200-1300" as 100 games downloaded. Lots of people just like leeching every single game released, as they're not too large and they come in huge batches.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[flimflammer]

Well, I for one have copies of several of the games I own so I don't need to carry the cartridges around when I'm out

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Moryath]

Considering that an original PSP gets a 33% battery life boost from running a game off of the SD card rather than the craptacular UMD drive? Or the fact that you can carry all 3 of the decent games for the console on one card, and never have to worry about swapping/scratching/losing the UMD's then?

I think you're underestimating #3.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Andorin]

More like six bucks, actually. 41.5 billion divided by a population of 7 billion (extremely rough estimate).

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's forget developing countries for a moment:

USA's population: 300 000 000
Canada's population: 34 000 000
EU's population: 500 000 000
Russia's population: 142 000 000
China's population (I know China is still sort of a developing country, but piracy is a way of life over there): 1 338 000 000

Add those together, it's 2 314 000 000 people. Let's say every fourth person is a pirate. 578 500 000 pirates. 41.5 bn $ / 578 500 000 = 71.73 $ (60 €) lost per pirate, or the price of Modern Warfare 2.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that must be accurate, because I'm sure they factored in things like:

1) People downloading way more than they could ever afford to buy
2) Multiple downloads by one person
3) Downloads of games that were already legitimately purchased by the individual but unusable for some reason

Also, consider the third one from the opposite perspective - people who use downloads as a means of determining if the game is worth purchasing. Maybe neither of these are a significant contributing factor (I don't know enough about Japanese culture to definitively say), but considering their method of calculating the world total is to multipl the Japanese total by 4, I'd say there are some pretty big holes in their figures anyway, unless there are studies to show that piracy levels are the same worldwide.

What a remarkable series of insights from people who haven't even read the damn report.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Technician]

These studies never count sales that never happened because casual gamers won't spend the money for a console (or portable) if the cost of games is prohibitive. I never bought any X Box or Playstation games simply because of the cost of the console and a dozen games.

Way back in DOS days I bought a PC because stuff could be copied and thus affordable to experiment with the large world of software. I had tons of shareware, etc. If all software was locked down at over $40/title, my PC purchase would have been delayed for years. There is only just not that much interest in playing with DOS for DOS sake.

Games are always priced for the maximum profit (free market) by artificial scaracity. Only the more hard core gamers buy them. Many potential game buyers play freecell and minesweeper along with free online services such as Farmville, neopets, etc., and are content. Seriousely, if Farmville required a pre-play purchase of $40, do you think it would have any traction? Many games that are pirated enjoy this same publicity that the game is good. Some games locked down, don't get much exposure because it is reviewed as broken, slow, hard to make work.

I doubt that game manufactures are interested in attracting the Farmville players to a play platform at prices they would buy a good game. Wii has done a fair job at attracting players that normally won't buy a console.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[iainl]

However, since only two days ago, Sony announced they have sold a total of 50 million PSPs, that's the real population we should be looking at.

Let's assume that every PSP has been modded. And that nobody has bought two (which, given I'm the only person I know who didn't replace a 1st-gen with a smaller, better one, is obviously wrong). That's nearly a grand's worth of piracy each.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that must be accurate, because I'm sure they factored in things like:

1) People downloading way more than they could ever afford to buy
2) Multiple downloads by one person
3) Downloads of games that were already legitimately purchased by the individual but unusable for some reason

Did they factor in those that play it only because they can download it for free, but wouldn't buy it otherwise? Piracy is piracy, but considering every download a lost sale isn't accurate. Some pirates will never buy the game, whether or not he can download it.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much just download every game. I have about 50 odd PSP isos that I have never played purely because I can't be bothered transferring them to my PSP's memory stick.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but if you have a PSP with custom firmware, you can rip the UMDs yourself, no need to download them.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[LingNoi]

and what journal was this report submitted to anyway? Oh wait, none! They just made it up themselves with guestimate math. Slashdotters do this on a regular basis!

It's not even an independent report. It got signed off by the industry.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't that be 41.5 Billion divided by X, where X is the amount of consumers that have a use for the game? I don't see many elderly people playing games on portable systems. And somehow I doubt it's very popular in 3rd world countries.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Vanderhoth]

If you're technically inclined enough to do so.

How hard it is to download a game to an SD card plugged into a card reader compared to trying to rip that same game yourself off a propitiatory media format?

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Nursie]

With a PSP that's running hacked firmware (which you need to play rips)? Trivial. Plug in over USB, copy the iso file that appears in explorer over to memory stick, done.

I've done that with the games I own so I can leave the UMDs at home.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I download all of the games that I buy for the DS. It is way more convenient to fit all of my games on a single cart instead of lugging all of them around.

Also, my class 6 microSDHC card saves faster than a retail cart. For example, if I save on a retail Pokemon cart, it takes up to 5 seconds to complete the write. With my flash cart, it takes 1 second.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[j35ter]

So you admit to being a pirate?
*Arrest this man!*

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[j35ter]

realising no to low profit on it).

Um, how do you make no profit on selling virtual property (software)?

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Last time I looked at one of this type of piracy study, it stated explicitly that it did not consider such cases. Basically, if you download a copy, then you are considered in debt to the copyright holder.

I would check this particular study, but the report is in Japanese (and I draw the line at learning a new language in my efforts to RTFA).

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

....and that most people who pirate would never have bought the games anyway.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Mattskimo]

I agree that the 3rd point is probably small when it comes to games but I'd be interested to know how large a factor it is in music though. I once purchased an album that had retarded DRM to the point that I couldn't play it in my PC/transfer to my iPod so I downloaded it. This would probably be included as a "lost sale" in the RIAA's figures.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Lumpy]

Next we will see studies on how used sales STEAL money from the developers...

you know the game makers are wanting to do that. They HATE used sales.

Hell I know writers that HATE used book stores.

It's all about greed, nothing more.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Dorkmaster Flek]

Interesting you should mention #3. That's pretty much where I sit. I look at the flash card as format shifting. I can adjust the speed of the game, save anywhere in realtime (very handy when so many damn DS games don't have a quick save option for a ten minute subway ride), add cheat codes easily, and I have all my games in one spot instead of having to carry around multiple carts. It's just clearly a superior format.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[rwven]

I didn't think the video game industry was a 40+B industry in the first place....

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[tepples]

Considering that an original PSP gets a 33% battery life boost from running a game off of the SD card rather than the craptacular UMD drive?

Memory Stick, not SD. But that's what PSN is for. As long as you have cable or DSL, you can buy your games on PSN instead of UMD. As I understand it, UMD has become a legacy technology for people who depend on, say, satellite Internet for home use.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Pharmboy]

To put the first two points into concrete terms: Even scrupulous non-pirates will sometimes try a game, by renting it or borrowing it from a friend, and then decide not to buy it.

This is why we need to outlaw sharing, borrowing, and cooperation of any kind. Only then will we all be able to get along.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[GreatBunzinni]

Above that, they are presenting a so called study whose authors, who are either blatantly incompetent at economics or intentionally deceiving, clearly failed to account for fundamental economic mechanisms such as price elasticity. No one who has the most basic grasp on economics will have the nerve to suggest that someone who accesses a free copy of some product is also willing to spend the market price to access that same good.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of newspaper articles about drug busts, where the cops seized $1.2 million worth of cocaine/marijuana/etc. even though there is no way in hell that money value would ever be realized. Honestly, they just pull some number out of their ass, hand the figure to their boss, who adds three zeros, and publishes their "research".

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious to know how much money is defined by "what a customer thought the game was wort" versus "what the industry supplied price" is. That is, how many shitty games, not worth the admission, were sold based on the price point determined by the console maker. Ripped off one way, ripped off another. I suspect the industry is still way ahead, even with their questionable numbers...

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention, sometimes people just wanna test the game to see if it runs well on their setup or is even worth a purchase. How could they know if the downloader already owns the game? I downloaded some stuff from EA a long time ago, but have since lost my ability to re-download it after a reformat. I used my legit key on a pirated copy to play online.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[zeroshade]

Truly you have a dizzying ability for reading comprehension. :) Obviously he was speaking about if he were to buy the games instead of download them.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot another option: download the portable games to play on a computer because they want to try them out but not on a 2 inch screen.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[j35ter]

Well, I have to return this compliment :) He was referring to a profitless sale by the manufacturer. Ie. selling something just to bring in the manufacturing costs. Try analyzing the sentence again ;)

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[zeroshade]

I'll go and buy the best of the ones I want, based on what others tell me of them, and either ignore the rest or wait until they're on some sort of clearance/resale rack at low cost (where the game manufacturers are realising no to low profit on it).

Seems by referring to a "clearance/resale rack" he's referring to used games or clearance sales for old games that a shop just wants to get the stock out. Basically buy the good games at full price, buy the mediocre games when they are on sale or used.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[idontgno]

Well, sure, the assclowns at RIAA consider it a lost sale every time you hear the tune in your head without forking up the royalties. But format/space shifting has marginal (in principle) support in US case law. As far as I can tell, no court has rejected copying appropriately purchased material from one medium to another, as long as the purchaser of that material is the sole user of either format; the courts seem to have heartburn with a general download provider expecting the "The downloader already purchased this earlier" argument to get them out of jail.

In other words, by Recording Indus. Ass'n of Am. v. Diamond Multimedia Sys., Inc, if you make the copy yourself from your own purchased medium, format shifting is legit, whereas by A & M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc, if you download the copy from someone else, even if you have legitimate rights to it, the download provider is in the wrong.

obDisclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. Neither are you. And I bet even a lawyer will tell you, if you ask, that the law is kind of unclear on this. But suffice it to say, if RIAA can't monetize it, they'll be very unhappy.

And back to the original topic: this means that "type 3" downloading isn't completely above-board, since you aren't making the Memory Stick copy of the game yourself. Is it a lost sale? I'm sure the provider believes it is.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

did they factor in the times they downloaded to make sure the content was actually their game and not a virus?

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[interkin3tic]

What a remarkable series of insights from people who haven't even read the damn report.

Would you bother reading a report that was summarized as "Fact: you killed 30 million children last year because you didn't drink pepsi!"

There are plenty of legitimate studies I'm never going to read, a report which is obvious lies to fuel propaganda for the industry is not worth my time.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Spaseboy]

I used to think that was bullshit response, no one pirates something and then pays for it but now I do it all the time with iPhone and iPad software over 99. I have Air Sharing Pro, Air Sharing HD, Pages, Angry Birds, Koi Pond, Words with Friends...I pirated all of them to start but now own licenses.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[arkhan_jg]

3) Downloads of games that were already legitimately purchased by the individual but unusable for some reason

I know someone who bought a whole bunch of DS games, then found about flash cards, and downloaded the lot of them so he could play them all off a single sd card without having to carry around a regular sack of cartridges and constantly swap the things over. The ability to have save games stored to the card for all the games - so he and his wife could both have their own set of saves on games that have only one or two save slots - was just a bonus.

Just like DRM, when the pirates provide an easy to use, simple and more flexible product that's also much cheaper, and you insist on making your product more complex, bulky, far less practical and harder to use, you're doing it wrong.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

One "collector" with every GBA/DS ROM that's been "released" is already running $250,000 if you pretend that every downloaded ROM equates to a sale.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Though your point is correct, there's a couple of mistakes there. The original PSP used Memory Stick, not SD. Also, the UMD's came in a case (much like a minidisc) that made it extremely hard to get at the disk to scratch it.

Re:$45 BILLION?!?

[Moryath]

You didn't have to get at the disc yourself. The UMD drive scratched the hell out of them just fine for you in what $ony laughably called "normal wear and tear."

Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Engeekneer]

This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

Saying one download is one lost sale is idiotic. It has never been true and never will be. It's probably off by at least a factor of 10. And haven't many studies already shown (well, at least with music) that the people who pirate are also the people who buy the most?

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[w00tsauce]

Margin of error: 1337... This "study" is about as credible as the study on how fast the star wars kid swings his lightsaber done by the bob goatse institute for pwning.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Aeternitas827]

This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

Saying one download is one lost sale is idiotic. It has never been true and never will be. It's probably off by at least a factor of 10.

On a wide scope, I can wholly agree with this statement; when you look at piracy on the whole, a good part of it (and probably most appreciably with music) is people wanting to sample before they plop down some cash on the real deal.

In a single incident, however, I can see the legitimacy of the IP holders' argument; if person A downloads item X, and subsequently persons B through F snatch that item from person A, its not an unreasonable conclusion to say that person A potentially caused five lost sales to the company. Using this reasoning, however, to obtain insane settlements as in the Tenenbaum or Masset cases, is inexcusable, and why the apparent lack of needing to prove actual damages to guide any additional award (treble damages and the like) given by the DMCA is fundamentally broken.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[tsm_sf]

There's something about the whole concept of "damage" to theoretical profit that I find extremely disturbing. We're getting into some pretty shaky moral and logical ground here.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[jimicus]

You answered your own question.

A study is just a variant on the good old fashioned scientific experiment where you start with a hypothesis, devise some method to determine whether or not your hypothesis is correct, carry out this method and draw conclusions based on the results. The only difference is that many of these studies are operated backwards - you decide what you wish to conclude, invent results which support these conclusions and devise a method which could reasonably produce such results.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Rogerborg]

Yes, the Slashdot method is much more scientific: we declare that it's unpossible to quantify anything that we don't want to believe, and so therefore cannot be proved wrong.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[jimicus]

It may be possible to quantify piracy but I'm quite sure the numbers being banded around right now are complete garbage, if only because if you believe them you also have to believe that the GDP of the planet would double overnight if you were to eliminate it.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[captainpanic]

This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

Saying one download is one lost sale is idiotic. It has never been true and never will be. It's probably off by at least a factor of 10. And haven't many studies already shown (well, at least with music) that the people who pirate are also the people who buy the most?

Compare it to free newspapers.
Taking a train or bus, I sometimes get up to 3 free newspapers. Does that mean that the newspapers lose out 3 sales each day? NO.

The same goes for all the streaming stuff I watch on the internet (some series and perhaps a movie). Would I buy the whole lot if it wasn't available for free? NO.

The same again for the mp3's I deny to have. No way that I will pay up to 1 euro for 1 song. With the amount of music I deny to have, that would be absolutely unaffordable. If there was not other way than paying for it, I wouldn't have this much... and radio would be a lot more popular again.

And the same would go for games, if I would be playing them. But I don't play many games anymore.

--- Sunlight is lost revenue for the electricity company.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[chewthreetimes]

Either that or that many people lacking sufficient disposable income, if forced somehow to buy legit copies of all media, would shift the money they spend on food and housing toward that. Dream on, IP holders.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[dylan_-]

if person A downloads item X, and subsequently persons B through F snatch that item from person A, its not an unreasonable conclusion to say that person A potentially caused five lost sales to the company

But it is an unreasonable conclusion. It presupposes that the same number of people will pay for something as will accept it for free. In short, it supposes that the Law of Demand does not apply.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Rogerborg]

Well, you're off by several orders of magnitude, but apart from that... wait, there's no "apart from that".

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[GooberToo]

This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

With some fairly common corrections (10-20% conversions; which are commonly accepted statistics), that's still roughly 4 - 8 BILLION dollars of stolen revenue. Even with some additional adjustments to the original numbers we're still talking about 2-6 BILLION dollars of stolen revenue; which is an easily believable and reasonable range of numbers.

Now think for a second if you had a small company and that directly translated into the loss of hundreds of thousands to several million dollars for you - just for your small company. That difference in revenue means lost jobs, fewer bug fixes, fewer employees, fewer bonus, lower wages, fewer benefits, no plans to expand, less customer support, and potentially even one or two fewer product launches; which in turn further negatively spirals a company and the economy. Unsurprisingly, thieves often use the problems they create to justify their stealing ways. "They provide poor support so I'm justified in stealing."

For thieves who wrongly believe no one is hurt by their theft of products, think again. For whatever reason people believe only large, monolithic, "evil" corporations charge for their products. The reality is, people who steal harm all facets of the economy and directly negatively affects small and medium size business. Stealing games potentially is the same thing as stealing from your neighbor or best friend.

Now imagine working for a year or two and when it comes time to collect your check, you're told, "don't worry man, I was just trying you out. I decided I didn't like what you had to offer." And yet, that's EXACTLY what thieves do to companies and people every day. Yes, that sucks, but that's what happens when pirates steal.

Since theft negatively affects all aspects of almost every economy in the world, its no wonder the world is working hard to cut the huge losses imposed by these social and economic criminals. They have no choice but to become ever more draconian. Think about it - they have zero options. This in turn in a reason thieves use to justify their theft. The reality is, they are the very problem they are railing against. Its like bank robbers complaining about higher taxes to pay for a larger police force which is required to combat rampant bank robberies. Most people would call this circular logic retarded - yet that's the day in a life of most thieves.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[GooberToo]

it supposes that the Law of Demand does not apply.

Another fallacy of logic. Actually, it PROVES the law of demand - otherwise there would be no demand for pirated games/applications. None. Zero. Just because something is stolen does not in any way, shape, or form mean the law of demand is inapplicable. The exact opposite is true.

Furthermore, every pirated copy not only validates the product is priced too low (demand is after all high) but that the value of the product has been been diluted and therefore damaged. So not only does stealing hurt the original manufacturer in loss of sales, but it also hurts the value of the product itself. Which of course, also mandates continued high pricing to offset both the loss of revenue and market damages.

Its easy to see why such draconian measures are taken at every opportunity. No doubt about it - pirates are stealing. Pirates are thieves. Almost without fail, every complaint pirates use to justify their theft actually exists preciously because so many pirates so rampantly justify theft. In other words, pirates blame corporations for their own actions and ineptitude.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[mcgrew]

And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

Why is this obviously bogus "study" called a study at all? Are you guys trying to give legitimate researchers a bad name? It's "studies" like this that make people disbelieve science.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[GooberToo]

Using corrected numbers, 2 - 6 BILLION dollars is still a shit load of money by any measure. Stop making it sound like its some trivial number which isn't worth discussion. Even divided by 100 companies that's a significant loss of revenue and market value directly traceable to thieves. Hell, even divided by 1000 companies, that's a shit load of lost revenue.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[dylan_-]

Another fallacy of logic. Actually, it PROVES the law of demand

No, just you didn't understand my post. Their figures are based on the presumption that everyone who "bought" a copy at $0 would also have bought a copy at $60 (or whatever they charge). This denies the law of demand. Therefore you are plainly wrong.

No doubt about it - pirates are stealing. Pirates are thieves.

No, they're not.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Anonymous Coward]

Every person who runs adblock/flashblock is also a pirate since they are stealing content without the content provider being paid (by the advertiser.)

Same logic, different field.

Also same argument
"Well if games weren't so shitty"
=
"Well if ads weren't so fuggin annoying"

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Anonymous Coward]

(10-20% conversions; which are commonly accepted statistics),

No they're not.

that's still roughly 4 - 8 BILLION dollars of stolen revenue.

No it isn't.

which is an easily believable and reasonable range of numbers.

No they're not. They fail quite basic sanity checks.

Now think for a second if you had a small company and that directly translated into the loss of hundreds of thousands to several million dollars for you - just for your small company. That difference in revenue means lost jobs, fewer bug fixes, fewer employees, fewer bonus, lower wages, fewer benefits, no plans to expand, less customer support, and potentially even one or two fewer product launches

Ah yes, the broken window fallacy beloved of MAFIAA goons everywhere. You really are a dishonest little lowlife, aren't you?

happens when pirates steal

It's not theft, it's copyright infringement and you know it. Artificial scarcity at it's finest.

Since theft negatively affects all aspects of almost every economy in the world,

You're full of it. Crawl back under your rock lowlife. Try getting a real job instead of being a spin merchant.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[jollyreaper]

This is once again one of those numbers that will be thrown around by IP holders to get attention from the politicians. And yet the study does the same idiotic assumption as all the other ones.

You are such a cynical, suspicious person! It must feel so awful living inside your head. You probably aren't even able to form meaningful bonds with other people.

No, I'm sure this figure is completely accurate. After all, who knows an industry better than the people who work in it? These numbers should be every bit as accurate as BP's risk assessment for deep water drilling.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[mcgrew]

Since when has any corporation been honest or moral?

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[GooberToo]

No, that's idiot logic employed by thieves. The fact that someone wants it means it has a non-zero value. Thusly blowing a huge hole in your entire bullshit theory. The economic works exactly as I said. The simple fact that pirates want something immediately assigns value to it.

If a pirate attributed something of worth as having no value, they wouldn't want it. Since both the market and pirates attribute a value to something completely establishes a non-zero value.

Funny how pirates only listen to a tiny, tiny portion of BASIC economics which bolster their thieving ways but completely ignore the whole of economics which directly implicates them as thieves.

I sure wish pirates would stop stealing and making shit up to justify their theft at every turn. Everyone pays for their actions and lies.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[dylan_-]

No, that's idiot logic employed by thieves. The fact that someone wants it means it has a non-zero value. Thusly blowing a huge hole in your entire bullshit theory.

Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the facts as I laid them out, since I never claimed they had a non-zero value and in fact stated the exact opposite.

I'm not sure whether you're so ignorant you know nothing about economics, or so moronic you can't understand what is being said, but either way it's pointless talking to the kind of idiot who can claim in a single post that "piracy" both devalues a commodity and simultaneously increases its price. So, bye for now!

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? If a run a grocery store making between $10,000 to $15,000 a day and some joker glues all the cash drawers shut thereby ensuring that I make $0 dollars for that day, are you really saying I'm not losing $10,000 to $15,000 dollars? Sure, that's theoretical profits but yesterday they were real profits and they probably will be today as well.

I'm sure you have some valid issues with how piracy vs. lost sales are related but it has nothing to do with a theoretical loss. If it's likely they would have made money otherwise, it's a loss. The question is, is downloading something I wouldn't have bought otherwise a lost sale? Clearly not, you wouldn't have got my money anyways.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Zerth]

I'm going to agree with you. Every game they want has a non-zero value, roughly equal to the cost of the electricity and bandwidth it takes to download it.

For the average DS game that is probably at least 50 million Zimbabwe dollars. Let's see what that is in US currency...

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Chris Burke]

So non-zero value is the same as full retail value in your universe?

Is that the best you can do to refute the straightforward and plainly true statement that reducing the price of something increases the number of people who will want it, and therefore extrapolating the number of people who wanted something at $0 is the same as the number who would have wanted it had it only available at full price is wrong? Every salesman on earth knows this. There's a small disclaimer for situations where a higher price can give the perception of being a higher value, more prestigious, etc (like sports cars), but that's clearly not the realm we're dealing with here.

Pirated copies != lost sales. Don't claim to be in the same universe where real economics applies if you don't believe that.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[GooberToo]

That's fully to be expected. Every "troll" or "flamebait" moderation validates everything I'm saying. Its easier to censor than it is to stop stealing and deceiving.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[GooberToo]

Every game they want has a non-zero value, roughly equal to the cost of the electricity and bandwidth it takes to download it.

Again, the market sets the value. What you're saying are more incorrect lies told by pirates who steal from people.

The simple fact is, pirates are thieves and people need to treat them accordingly. I'm so tired of seeing the same old lies parroted time and time again this subject comes up. Clearly the lies are working - or people will just look for any lie to justify their stealing no matter how much they know their "justification" if completely full of shit.

Stealing because you don't agree with the price is still stealing. Go to your local Ferrari shop and hand them a check for $20,000. Then drive off with a Ferrari. You'll find yourself in jail really fast because that's theft. Yet it doesn't stop pirates from telling lies like you did trying to convince people that stealing is okay so long as you can come up with some completely bullshit excuse to do so. Wrong! Stealing is stealing and pirating is a form of stealing. If it were not, companies would never take a loss. And yet, for every pirated copy, ignoring sales, the market value of the pirated good immediately takes a loss. That's reality.

Like it or not, stealing harms the entire economy (that's you and me too, just so we're clear) - without regard for bullshit lies.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[GooberToo]

So non-zero value is the same as full retail value in your universe?

Don't be an idiot - oh wait - too late.

You don't get to set the price. The market does. So long as they are selling at their set rate, the market has accepted the price. Therefore, THAT's the market value. Period.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Anonymous Coward]

Walk in to a Ferrari shop and use your magic cloning machine to make a duplicate for the cost of electricity. Inventory the store and see if they still have the same amount of cars for sale.

Excessive copyright is theft from the public domain. I'm looking at you, Disney.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[future assassin]

And each download is money spend in another industry so yah the game industry looses but someone else gets that money so not like its magically vaporized out of the market.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Chris Burke]

Ah, "Period," the word universally used by morons who hope that you won't think about the stupid thing they just said.

The price is set by the seller. The only portion of the market that has accepted that price is the portion of the market who buys it at that price. Were the seller to reduce the price, more of the market would accept that price and they would sell more. Desire for a product varies with the price of that product. Wanting a product at a hypothetical price-point of $0.01 is not the same as wanting the product at a price point of $100. Demand for a product varies with the price of that product.

We were talking about the value of the product to the pirate. You said it's non-zero, because they wanted it, but that does not mean they would want it if only available at retail price. Ergo pirated copies do not translate into lost retail sales. Even a pile of stupid like you understands that, which is why your attempts to dodge the obvious are so obvious and sad.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tired of seeing the same old lies parroted time and again this subject comes up. And a worrying amount of people seem to buy into this copyright infringment = theft bullshit.

Yes, if you drive off with a Ferrari without paying for it, that's theft. If you copy a Ferrari with a magic matter copying machine, though, the situation is a great deal less clear cut. And if magic matter copying machines exist, what the fuck is the market doing trying to sell products based on scarcity?

It's a complicated system. And once the industry actually starts hurting (they aren't hurting at all, their profit *growth* is slowing down), then maybe it's time for the market to investigate ways of making product design profitable post-scarcity. But until then, pretending that the act is theft when from the point of view of the supplier it is literally indistinguishable from a customer simply deciding not to buy, does not help matters.

Re:Why, oh why do they do these studies

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a pretty amusing exercise to replace "theft" in all your ridiculous posts with something like "people deciding to spend their money on books instead of games". Do you think the money that hypothetically would have been spent on games just disappears from the economy?

A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[pecosdave]

I don't care what the publishers say, a pirated game is not necessarily a lost sale, quite the contrary, I've found most pirates to be lazy bastards who wont pay for anything if they can help it. When one of those types pirates it's just a copy in circulation that shouldn't exist.

On the other hand, there is a type of piracy that is a lost sale. I still love the Gameboy Advanced system, and of course they no longer make games for it, so I turn to eBay and the like. More than once I've gotten outright pirated cartridges off of eBay. I always make sure the sellers have some history to prevent that, but occasionally one slips through. Some of the pirated games I've gotten off of there were really high quality, I spotted the fakes, but I don't think most people would have. On more than one occasion the seller disappeared while my game was in transit, when they don't disappear I tattle to eBay. I then have a moral dillema of what to do with said pirated copy. I paid for it, I didn't know it was pirated until it got here, but it is pirated... Hurricane Ike settled that for me on my older cartridges, but I actually did get a pirate cart off of Amazon since then.

I'm of the opinion the MPAA and the RIAA need to police flea markets and sellers like the above, go after file sharers, but leave downloaders alone. The video game guys need to do the same thing. The big difference between the movie and music people and the video game people is when a new format comes out movies and music usually transition to it. Not until recently have classics been commonly re-released on newer systems and they still don't re-release all of them legally.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[Andorin]

On the other hand, there is a type of piracy that is a lost sale. I still love the Gameboy Advanced system, and of course they no longer make games for it, so I turn to eBay and the like. More than once I've gotten outright pirated cartridges off of eBay.

Buying (legit) GBA cartridges second-hand on eBay doesn't put any money into Nintendo's hands, so where does the "lost sale" argument come from? Yes, I understand that you would have otherwise gotten a legit copy, but the whole smarmy justification for attacking piracy is that the game companies and such lose money from it. If they wouldn't have gained a cent even if you'd bought a legit copy, the situation doesn't apply.

Of course, I also believe that if a copyrighted work is not being made commercially available, there should be no penalty for distributing it.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[delinear]

Agreed - the people selling copies of games are the real pirates who are stealing sales and money from the industry. Most serial downloaders are either people who are already spending a large portion of their income on games and couldn't afford to spend more, or their people who never had any intention of buying even if they couldn't get it for free. There's also a not-insignificant subset of those people who are just serial hoarders, I've known people who have literally thousands of downloaded games or music or movies and haven't "consumed" even 5% of them, they just like to be able to boast or take pride in the completeness of their collection. They'd have to take out a mortgage to afford to actually buy all those things, it's ridiculous to assume they're all lost sales, and these people must make up a hefty chunk of the "piracy" figures.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[twisteddk]

I agree with many aspects of what you say. I too have been the unwitting recipient of pirated items from ebay and even once from amazon too. Unfortunately.

Also, you have to consider the fact that many countries actually ALLOW for a copy to be made (but not sold) of the stuff you buy. Many artists, and IP holders recignize that fact, and I even remember a couple of musicians getting pissed that their fans got sued for piracy, when in fact they felt that it was the people profiting from the piracy that should be punished, not the ones who ended up with the copies. In fact many DVDs and music today even comes with a "free digital copy". So times they are a changing.

As for the lazy bastards; I can say that in many places in europe we now have a (nearly) free, legal streaming service for music. For a very low price (about the cost of a single CD pr month) you can listen to and stream as much music as you like, the larger ISPs even include the subscription when you buy internet access (!). Negotiations are on the way for TV, movies and games too. Sorta like the online equivalent of movie rentals. Given everyones legal access to media, there's no need for expensive copy protection, or enforcement. And customers have access to all the media they want without having to resort to alternate methods to obtain it. So I think that "classic" piracy is a thing of the past pretty soon. It's just a matter of the IP holders moving their income stream from the storefront to the subscriptions or distribution services, and ensuring that everyone has access. But I'm sure someone will get pissed about their cut being too small (as usual).

My major concern is that everyone (today) seems to focus squarely on "lost revenues", or "piracy" without considering the fact that modern media needs to be available in modern formats. I'm fairly certain that the guys selling taped music or vinyl isn't wondering what happened to their market any longer. People posting reports like the one mentioned in the article are just showing that they live in the past, IMO. A LOT of people I know haven't bothered to buy a Blu-ray player, because currently more and more movies become available online. Owning your personal copy may be a thing of the past soon enough. I'm certain theis trend will eventually transcend all types of media and entertainment.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[spathi-wa]

The GP is talking about actual piracy of GBA games, i.e. bootleg cartridges manufactured by unauthorized/unlicensed agencies, sold at rates lower than retail, of which the copyright owners get nothing. This is the real piracy which anyone would support laws against. Unlicensed distribution that involves no gains to the distributor i.e. most p2p and 'warez', are copyright infringement, not piracy.

Both are illegal but they are not the same thing. It may be said that actual piracy could have a direct correlation to lost sales without the logical fallacies of equating illegal uploads/downloads with lost sales.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[Andorin]

The GP is talking about actual piracy of GBA games, i.e. bootleg cartridges manufactured by unauthorized/unlicensed agencies, sold at rates lower than retail, of which the copyright owners get nothing.

If the copyright owner is not selling his work in the first place, there is no lost sale. Game Boy Advance games are not being sold by Nintendo anymore; therefore, buying an unauthorized copy of a GBA game does not translate to any sort of loss on Nintendo's part because he couldn't have bought a legit copy otherwise.

I agree that commercial piracy sucks, but let's be sane here.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[AHuxley]

Exactly. People buy games for their Linux, Mac, Windows, "other" devices because they feel like they are getting value, long term or short.
See the download segment as externally hosted demos or a brand building exercise.
Over time they may buy, until then focus on the people who matter and real marketing.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[pecosdave]

Yeah, on one occasion one of the sellers was listed as being in New England, and the game was new in box, sometimes retailers have leftovers or one turns up. I get a package from Hong Kong a week later with a never been popped out flat box and a cart that looks legit, but on further examination wasn't. In this case it would have been a new sale, even though it would have been old stock.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[pecosdave]

Then you have people like me who use tons of pirate utils but stay legal. I rip every PSX and UMD game I own and put them on my MS Pro-Duo cards in my hacked PSP. Not one of the PSX or PSP games is pirated. I buy CDs and rip them, it's actually cheaper than buying downloads for .99 each, especially if you go the still legal used route. I even rip my own kids DVDs to put them on her netbook. Really, you don't want kids handling optical media if you can avoid it. I consider "Digital Copy" a joke. All DVD's are their own "Digital Copy". If they didn't make those things expire I might take them seriously.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[pandronic]

Well, I never buy games, software or music, I'm one of those "lazy pirate bastards" you speak of and I can testify that I'd rather not play games and not listen to music than buy them at the current prices. It's just the way things are, I don't have any moral dilemmas about it, I actually feel a little entitled to it and no matter how hard I try, I really, really can't understand people who pay for this stuff. Maybe if new games were 4-5$ and music was 0,05$/track and 0,5-1$/album I'd think about it, but that will never happen.

I'm not trying to troll, just to provide a little insight in the mind of a so called pirate.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed - the people selling copies of games are the real pirates who are stealing sales and money from the industry. Most serial downloaders are either people who are already spending a large portion of their income on games and couldn't afford to spend more, or their people who never had any intention of buying even if they couldn't get it for free. There's also a not-insignificant subset of those people who are just serial hoarders, I've known people who have literally thousands of downloaded games or music or movies and haven't "consumed" even 5% of them, they just like to be able to boast or take pride in the completeness of their collection. They'd have to take out a mortgage to afford to actually buy all those things, it's ridiculous to assume they're all lost sales, and these people must make up a hefty chunk of the "piracy" figures.

Yup that's true but you can't make the opposite argument either, that everything on the internet is supposed to be free and that piracy does not represent ANY lost sales. I know people who are serial hoarders, but I also know plenty of people who can easily afford their relatively moderate consumption of TV, shows, music, movies and software. When somebody is pirating, say, iPhone games that cost $1.99 to buy or shareware programs that cost less than a couple of Big Mac meals and use them regularly we are not talking about hoarding, curiosity or usage you couldn't otherwise afford. We're talking about a pathetic cheapskate.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[JohnFluxx]

True. I know several people who have legally purposed more books, DVDs or games than they can actually consume.

I know I'm guilty of that in a small way - I have about 6 games that I've bought but haven't touched 6 months later.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[pecosdave]

Based on your use of commas where Americans would use periods and your trailing instead of leading dollar sign I'm assuming you're European. Since you say you feel entitled I strongly suspect so. I really don't like the entitlement mindset. If we want these people to keep making games, movies, and music we need to make sure they profited some how. I've had people argue that I'm just as bad as a pirate because I buy used, but I disagree, I'm paying attention to the first sale doctrine. The license follows the media. The content creator profited somewhere on my copy. If everyone had an entitlement mindset nothing would get done. The proof is in what happens with areas with large amounts of people who have entitlement mindsets, no work gets done, but lots people bitch about what they don't have. I'm looking at both France and New Orleans here.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[pecosdave]

Just six? Just six months?

I've bought tons of media and not gotten to it until much later. I've been working my way through all the Final Fantasy games in order. I finished Final Fantasy IV three days ago, I went to retrieve my copy of V, which I know I bought in anticipation of getting there. I couldn't find it. I realized I must have lost it in Hurricane Ike - that was in in 08, that's some for sight lost. I've bought DVDs and finally gotten a chance to watch them a year later, I do the same with books. Its a lack of time. Internet stuff like this I can do when I have a few minutes here or there.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[hedwards]

That's how the second hand market works. At some point Nintendo was paid for the copy of whatever it is you just bought. Whereas with a pirated cart, they never were. Ultimately, since infringement requires intent, and one intended to buy a legit second hand copy, I doubt very much that there's anything that Nintendo could do in this situation about it. Well other than make your life a living hell by filing a bad lawsuit.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[tepples]

buying an unauthorized copy of a GBA game does not translate to any sort of loss on Nintendo's part because he couldn't have bought a legit copy otherwise.

Buying an infringing copy of a GBA game theoretically translates to a lost sale of the DS game in the same genre. At least that's the kind of argument Disney would use when pursuing infringements of copyright in its film Song of the South.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[tepples]

For a very low price (about the cost of a single CD pr month) you can listen to and stream as much music as you like

In what countries? The United States is not the world, and neither is Great Britain.

And customers have access to all the media they want without having to resort to alternate methods to obtain it.

Say I live in the United States, and I want to watch the movie Song of the South. Where can I rent it? Or say I live in the United States, and I want to play the completed English translation of the first Mother game for NES. Where can I rent it?

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[Jason Levine]

Both of those are true. There are many different types of downloaders. Those who download items they would never have actually paid for if the not-legal free download option wasn't available. Some of these people download just what they use and some act as if they are addicted to downloading - getting thousands of items that they have no intention of ever using for the sole reason that they saw a download link. These people shouldn't be counted in a "lost sales" calculation.

Then there are people who download illegally instead of paying when they would have paid for the title otherwise. These people do actually represent lost sales and should be counted.

There's also a third class of downloaders: Those who download as an "unofficial trial version" and then buy the title if they like it. Rather than constituting lost sales, these people are more like "gained sales." Of course, the flip side is that they might not like the title and not buy it. At this point, an "honest trial downloader" would delete his downloaded copy. Still, absent the download option, some of these people would have bought the item to try and some would have just steered clear. So these people aren't a clear lost or gained sale. They might balance out or tip the scales in one direction or another.

The problem is that studies like this one don't differentiate between real lost sales and "virtual" lost sales. Doing that would take a lot of work and would wind up reducing piracy figures (not a good thing if you are an industry group trying to get additional powers to clamp down on piracy). So they assume that each download is a lost sale. Toss in a few more assumptions (like "multiply by 4 to get worldwide figures" or "we should be making X but are only making Y") and you get an industry piracy cost estimate.

I'd be willing to wager that an actual piracy cost study, one that accounted for true lost sales versus plain downloaders, would come up with a much smaller piracy figure than the industry comes up with.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[mcgrew]

A used book is a lost sale, but buying and selling used books is legal, moral, and ethical. Trying to stop the sale of second hand games as the game publishers are doing is sleazy as hell.

They lose more sales from DRM than from piracy. I'm not sure they lose any sales to piracy, but I'm sure they lose sales because of DRM.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[abigsmurf]

Lost sales revenue comes from one or more of the following:

The original sale of the cart you'd have been buying
Flooded market. The more cheap pirated versions (that are incredibly hard to tell from the real thing) there are, the harder it is to sell legit copies. It costs sales as well as devalues the product.
Reputation hit. When the (innocently bought) pirated cart turned out not to have a battery for save games or the flash memory and people couldn't save their game, they'd blame Nintendo. Likewise there was a tabloid piece in the UK about a family who bought a pirated kids game (neither the family or the newspaper realised it was pirated) and it featured swear words that they got typically outraged about.
No scarcity & demand = no reprint. Sometimes if a game is rare enough and the ebay values get insane, It's worthwhile a publisher going in and printing a few thousand brand new copies. Believe this happened towards the end of the PS1's life with rare games like Suikoden

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a couple of people that have downloaded archives of hundreds of games, for handhelds they didn't have!
Their excuse is usually something along the lines of "If I can ever find a working one, I'll at least have games for it..."

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, theoretically, a high price for a game in the used market would stimulate purchasing of new games - I'll almost certainly buy used if a game saves me $30, but if I only save $5 getting a used version, I'll probably spring for new. Selling illegitimate goods lowers the price in the used market, so it does indeed hurt new sales, albeit indirectly.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[pandronic]

Since you say you feel entitled I strongly suspect so

While I'm European, I think fellow law-abiding Europeans would feel offended by this gross generalization.

I'm feeling entitled not because I'm European, but because in my part of Europe (Eastern part), "piracy", at least for personal use, is the norm. Everybody has been doing it for their whole lives. Nobody gives a damn. It's difficult to change a mindset without giving something concrete back.

If we want these people to keep making games, movies, and music we need to make sure they profited some how.

As I said before, I really don't care. In fact, if mainstream commercial music were to disappear I couldn't be happier. I support my favorite (mostly underground) artists by going to their concerts. I go to movie theaters if I really like a movie, but I do it for my viewing experience, I'm not kidding myself that I'm helping anybody.

Also, I don't care about software and games. I'm only one out of billions of computer users and I don't care what would happen if everybody would do the same as me. I have more important stuff to do.

Again, not trolling, just sharing ...

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[noidentity]

Second-hand sales compete with first-hand ones. Nintendo may later release said games on Virtual Console, or release sequels. If someone can get the earlier one for cheap used, he may not care to buy the new expensive sequel new.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's bullshit. The pirated cartridge didn't need to be bought to be resold. If the guy on eBay had to buy originals, Nintendo would get his money.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[pecosdave]

I annoy the guys at GameStop, they have a real motivation to push used on you, they have a higher profit margin. "Would you like to get it used? You save three dollars!" Uhmm, no, give me the new one. "But you save three whole bucks!" Yeah, but I have to peel the price tag off of the cart and it's going to have that sticky shit all over it and all I get is the cart. For three bucks more I get the box, a clean cart with a warranty and no saves on it, and the original clam shell case the game should be in.

That always seems to disappoint them. Fortunately I've found lots of non-GameStop local game shops that are a lot better to deal with.

Re:A pirated game is not always a lost sale.

[DaVince21]

Then one might see a potential loss on Nintendo's side in the fact that it isn't sold by Nintendo anymore. Unless production cost outweighs selling cost at this point.

Here's how they made the figure for real

[Anonymous Coward]

"First they take a really big scary number. Then they multiplied it by a lot. Then took the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin and added that. then took some pseudoscientific sounding word and 'factored' them in by multiplying by another big scary number."

I've lost several trillion dollars due to greed!

[Arancaytar]

I wanted people to give me a trillion dollars last year, but they didn't. They're so greedy and unthoughtful!

Just for comparison

[phantomfive]

Just for comparison, Nintendo has been making around $2billion a year total profit over that period. So either these game companies would have been a lot richer, or these numbers are off.

Re:Just for comparison

[jimicus]

If you were to believe all the numbers bandied around about piracy, then you would have to believe that if it were to be eliminated the GDP of the planet would double overnight.

... study also confirms end of civilization

[genericcitizen]

Wow, that is an amount of money they have lost in fantasy world...

It's a zero sum game.

[the_raptor]

No money is lost to the economy due to copyright infringement as some MAFIA groups try to argue. It is just not given to publishers for those movies/songs/games that are pirated. But it is spent on other products. This is the broken window fallacy, that a child who throws a rock through a window is stimulating the economy.

I download movies and tv shows because I don't like watching broadcast TV. Any that deserve a repeat viewing get bought on DVD (which is probably about 80%). If they shutdown illegal downloads they wouldn't get more money from me because I have little to spare, they are more likely to get less as I would just shift to other forms of entertainment or free to access media (I have started watching local legal tv streaming sites, which has dropped the amount I illegally download and later purchase).

This isn't the 1990's where the big publishers had little competition. There is so much free or cheap content out there that I don't buy before I try.

Re:It's a zero sum game.

[noidentity]

I don't think it's a broken window fallacy, because they aren't suggesting that we break anything. I think the idea is that they invested money in creating these things, but people didn't buy them, so they won't be able to invest as much in creating future products. If anything, they're arguing for a centrally-planned economy, where the big boys decide what we should be buying, create it, then demand that we buy it or else.

Re:It's a zero sum game.

[L4t3r4lu5]

I download movies and tv shows because I don't like watching broadcast TV. Any that deserve a repeat viewing get bought on DVD (which is probably about 80%)

Shows which I first watched online through unlicensed channels, the result of which being me purchasing a DVD:

- Lost (Series 1 - 3, I regret this now but I really enjoyed series 1)
- Fringe (Series 1, I'm told it's going the way of Lost so I might watch the next one online and see if it's good)
- House (Series 1 - 5. Amazing show)
- Futurama (Series 1 - 4)
- Prison Break (Series 1 - 3, will get 4 when I see it)
- Heroes (Series 1 and 2, watched 3 on iPlayer, may get 4).

Averaging at £20 per boxed set (conservative extimate) I put that at £360 I would not have spent if it weren't for piracy. I certainly would never have bought House (you'll notice a common theme of Sci-Fi through all but one of the other boxed sets).

Re:It's a zero sum game.

[Shihar]

No money is lost to the economy due to copyright infringement as some MAFIA groups try to argue. It is just not given to publishers for those movies/songs/games that are pirated. But it is spent on other products.

It is actually a whole lot less meaningful than that. I used to pirate... when I was 12. Did I cost someone riches whenever I did this? Hell no! A game not pirated was simply a game never owned. I just didn't have any money. No one lost anything when I pirated because I had no money for the video game (or any industry) to lose. When someone with no money to spend pirates, the economy loses exactly zero.

Contrast this with today. I make money. I am a single engineer who living like a monk who makes more money than he can spend each month. When I want a video game, I just buy it. The few thousand dollars worth of games on my Steam account is testament to this. I don't ever pirate anything. Stuff is cheap compared to my income, my time is too valuable to waste pirating, and I get a warm fuzzy feeling giving money to people who make good games. That said, unlike when I was 12, video game companies ARE losing money to piracy from me. How? I DIDN'T buy Assassin's Creed 2. Why? I enjoyed Assassins Creed. I had more than enough money laying around... and yet I didn't buy it because in their zealot like efforts to prevent piracy, they managed to DRM the shit out of their game so badly that I didn't want to pay for it. The 12 year old kids that were never going to pay didn't pay, and the late 20 something engineer who thinks nothing of dropping $60 for a game on a whim didn't pay up either. Good job.

Re:It's a zero sum game.

[Sarten-X]

Yes it is. The broken window fallacy is the mistaken belief that spent money comes out of thin air. John Stossel has a great video on it. He's talking about government spending, but you can replace "government" with "consumer" and get the same idea.

The generally-correct idea is that a lost sale for one industry is a gained sale for another, so pointing out lost sale figures is useless. As stated in the topic, it's a zero-sum game.

Re:It's a zero sum game.

[Myopic]

Do you really think that eighty percent of movies and TV shows are worth watching more than once? I would put that number at under 2%. It is true that I like movies less than the average American, but 80%? You watch four fifths of movies more than once?

"Losses" by some definition...

[MadKeithV]

Considering the ESA claims the whole industry was worth $11.7 billion in 2008, and that was 22.9% growth form the year before, this does not seem to be a very plausible number, since it nearly amounts to the sum of the value of the whole industry over the five years of this "study".

Re:"Losses" by some definition...

[somersault]

Also, I'd like to know why they are "presuming that Japan makes up 25 percent of the world's software market"? To me that seems rather ludicrous.

Re:"Losses" by some definition...

[TriezGamer]

Particularly for handheld games - They are immensely popular in Japan largely due to the excess of mass transit and lack of personal-owned cars, and while they SEEM to be decently popular around here, I wouldn't be surprised if the total sales in Japan actually exceed those of US titles on handheld consoles, despite the massive different in population.

Re:"Losses" by some definition...

[somersault]

For handheld consoles I can see it being true, but just saying "software market" is too ambiguous even in an article about game piracy.

I didn't know that Japan had twice the population of the UK (where I am) until right now, that is interesting and makes the 25% figure seem somewhat less ludicrous when just talking about the handheld games market.

Re:"Losses" by some definition...

[Rogerborg]

Uh, according to food suppliers, the actual population of the UK (3 years ago) was closer to 80 million than the 67 million official figure.

That does rather explain why house prices keep on rising far beyond wages, even in a recession.

Re:"Losses" by some definition...

[somersault]

I dunno, there's plenty of fat bastards around here.

Re:"Losses" by some definition...

[macshit]

Particularly for handheld games - They are immensely popular in Japan largely due to the excess of mass transit and lack of personal-owned cars,

I think you mean "dominance" of mass-transit (in many urban areas); there's clearly not an excess of it, since it's often very crowded.

Re:"Losses" by some definition...

[Rogerborg]

I dunno, there's plenty of fat bastards around here.

Well, their gravitational pull does tend to make them cluster.

About studying losses...

[Psaakyrn]

How much did the industry lose in paying for these studies?

Re:About studying losses...

[Anonymous Coward]

41.5 Billion.... coincidence?

Re:About studying losses...

[Anonymous Coward]

You miss the point.

These studies exist to allow their captive political puppets to spout "independent analysis" in the very rare cases the legislation they're trying to ram through government is questioned. They're very good value, actually.

"I am sorry, Ms. Reporter, but an independent study has concluded that game piracy costs the country a thousand million billion quadtrillion dollars every 10 seconds, and so introducing summary execution for anyone Nintendo accuses of piracy is COMPLETELY JUSTIFIED."

Contrary to popular belief, the politicians are quite aware the studies are bogus. They just don't care because they confuse their personal interests with the public. Indeed, after a while in the political reality distortion field, they lose the ability to recognize the difference.

Re:About studying losses...

[Psaakyrn]

Calling your bluff. Which major gaming companies or politicians have stated that they are or were aware that such studies are bogus, and yet have used said studies to justify their claims previously?

Re:About studying losses...

[EdgeyEdgey]

I would have charged them $50bn, so by not employing me they have made a saving already!
But now I'm going to have to write off $50bn of losses :-(

Re:About studying losses...

[Anonymous Coward]

You misread my post. I never said politicians stated such studies were bogus. I've dealt with quite a few politicians in my time, and the overwhelming majority wouldn't be politicians if they were THAT dumb. To put it bluntly, these studies exist not to shine light on truth, they exist to create an industry-sponsored outcome. Politicians are quite aware of this, and don't care. Indeed, all Western political parties and most government departments happily create equally bogus research to forward their own agenda.

For further reading, I suggest:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/10/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war-on-piracy.ars

I'd also suggest reviewing the seminal work on real-world politics: "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister". The book version, rather than the TV show. It's British, but the techniques described in it are universally applicable to every system of government.

Re:About studying losses...

[PhilHibbs]

He's not claiming they said that they know they are bogus, just claiming that they know it.

Re:About studying losses...

[DaVince21]

None of them are stupid enough to actually publicly announce they know it's bogus.

Let's study losses from second hand sales!

[Psaakyrn]

By the same argument, I'm almost 100% sure the industry lose a lot more potential profit from second hand sales and/or rentals, since without them, technically people would have bought the games first-hand... right?

Re:Let's study losses from second hand sales!

[KDR_11k]

I believe in Japan the law already prevents that from having much impact.

Re:Let's study losses from second hand sales!

[Psaakyrn]

Even if it does, Japan is but one market. One has to take the other markets into consideration.

Open bar

[An anonymous Frank]

Notice how *some* people will get utterly smashed when attending an event with an open bar? They're quite eager to consume far more than they might usually have...

I still don't see how that could possibly represent a tangible "market" with any credibility. However many servings were had (for free) has no relevance to sales you could've had on a normal night.

Re:Open bar

[Kitkoan]

Notice how *some* people will get utterly smashed when attending an event with an open bar? They're quite eager to consume far more than they might usually have...

Exactly, and the same concepts should be applied to this 'study'. When you have to pay for something, your not as likely to get everything you want. But when its free, hey why not? Not like you paid for it. Like free samples in a store, everyone want one because they are free, not because of what they are.

Re:Open bar

[RobVB]

In a few weeks we'll be hearing reports of people being charged $4000 after an "open bar" event at Nintendo.

Re:Open bar

[GreatBunzinni]

Exactly. The fact that the demand increases when the price drops is widely known for ages as price elasticity of demand. It's a fundamental economics concept, which is a part of every basic introduction to economics course. It amazes me how the idiots who compile this crap masquerading as studies have the audacity to spit on the face of everyone, let alone every economist in the world, by pretending that this doesn't exist.

For the last bloody time...

[thegarbz]

For the last bloody time, a download does not equal a lost.... you know what. Fuck it. Fuck them. I hope the CESA paid a lot of money for this study.

Re:For the last bloody time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, don't worry, I'm sure they spent quite alot of YOUR hard earned money on that ridiculous propaganda mill they call a "study".

Not again...

[Lavene]

Don't they ever get tired of throwing these numbers around? And do anyone believe them?

If those numbers were even close to be real they would have managed to stop piracy long ago. I mean, who in their right mind will sit and idly watching billion after billion trickling out of their wallet and all they manage to come up with is some bizarre DRM schemes that never works. One would think that with such amount of money involved investing more in stopping piracy should be well worth it. Say a billion dollars or so.

It's all BS. We know it and they know it.

Re:Not again...

[betterunixthanunix]

"And do anyone believe them?"

The scary thing is not that people believe these studies, but that the people who seem to believe these numbers the most are in a position to pass laws. People in congress hear that teenagers are downloading video games at no cost, and immediately think, "What?! Not the sort of business-driven approach that we envisioned?! Billions of dollars lost? Let's start passing laws to punish all these pirates! Let's try to force other countries to do the same!"

Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[linzeal]

From my teens through my 20's I was a profligate game pirate and I still have stacks of burnt CDs of late 90's and early 00's titles that I dig through every once in awhile. It is nice to be able to play Master of Orion or the original Fable for a sense of nostalgia but now in my early 30's I've begun thinking longer term storage and instead of trying to roll my own I'm going to trust Steam so I can play the few new games I play each year in the old folks home. Until I can get a nice Raid + backup solution for 10-20 terrabytes of games and growing, Steam or something like it seems the way to go.

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam or something like it seems the way to go.

Indeed, renting games at full price is the way to go.

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[L4t3r4lu5]

The Steam service will end, and if it's done through liquidators then Valve won't get to release the DRM. I recall a saying about baskets and eggs...

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[L4t3r4lu5]

So buy at the stupidly reduced weekend sale rates. The original L4D sold at a two thousand percent higher rate when price was reduced by 80%, resulting in 4x as much profit (by my back of the napkin maths, in a perfect universe of no ISP fees etc). Who pays full price nowerdays anyway?

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[crossmr]

You assume that they would just all show up for work one day and the place would be locked up and guarded and no one would have any access to anything. If steam was failing they'd have some idea it was coming. Someone in the company would make the exes available.

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[Anonymous Coward]

If Steam users lose their games through a liquidation, I suspect the market for digitally distributed games will be destroyed. What would Steam be worth to its new owners then?

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[quadrox]

I'm sorry, but I agree witht he AC below.

You're going from a system where you are guaranteed to have your games working in the future to being at the mercy of some corporation that may change management, become insolvent and die, or change in another way, preventing you from accessing ALL of your games?

Seriously?

Buy a big harddriver every couple of years - I bet you do anyway - copy your entire game iso image directory in one fell swoop - done, your games are safe. Of course, always keep the old harddrive as backup somewhere.

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone in the company would make the exes available.

Yea right, 'cause that's the number one priority if you get the news you'll be out of a job soon. It's not like one dev could just put up an .exe for thousands of games. Especially since this might mean publishing a crack for technology they just sold to somebody else; legal suicide.

Not to mention the licensing clusterfuck that would stop this dead in its tracks. Wouldn't be surprised if they aren't even allowed to distribute games completely unprotected.

Never. Going. To. Happen.

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam wont end, its one of the biggest digital distribution hubs for PC games out there, more is starting to be bought through that and other forms of Digital Downloads on the PC than anything else, PC games and shelf space has been dwindling almost everywhere for quite some time now simply because its easier to buy and download the game right at home, Steam keeps track of everything I bought and it doesnt matter how/when/if I format my PC or go to another PC or what have you, my collection of games is always there for me and I never need a CD/DVD again.....how you can say this will end is beyond me

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[canajin56]

Exactly that has happened before. Workers showed up to work, and found that the CEO had stolen all of the storage servers and fled the country, after changing all the locks and leaving notes that they were all fired. He then sold the game they were making to another company, making a lot of money and not having to pay back rent, back wages, back anything.

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[Scoth]

If there's one thing I've learned from the tech industry, it's that you shouldn't ever say "won't", "can't", or "will always". There were times when people would have told you you were crazy for suggesting IBM would ever not be the dominant PC maker, or mainframe vendor. More recently, there was a time when it was assumed IE would maintain its market share and there'd never be a need for another browser, ever, because IE had won. Before that, suggesting Netscape would ever lose it's dominance would have gotten you called crazy. All it takes is an agile upstart with something special, with perhaps some mistakes from Valve, and everything could be back up in the air again. Or perhaps a superheavyweight getting behind something and using its market position to leverage influence.

That said I still use Steam for a lot, but to suggest it will never end and 50 years from now I'll be able to load up Steam 18.2 and show my grandkids Half Life 2 is unrealistic.

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[geekoid]

Reality check:

1) Most games aren't very repayable.
2) Steam offers great deals.
3) You cans till buy hard copies for your games, and install it on steam.
4) Cracks are available. - Granted, this is based on the assumption based on history.
5) When I buy 60 dollars worth of games(retail, price) for 10 bucks, The risk is worth the reward.

6) For any practical reasons, the number 1 concern with steam is resale. Of course, when I'm buying less then half of the retail price, I'm not that concerned.

Another thing to consider:
There are games and game companies that exist right now that wouldn't without steam. Just talk to the execs at Tripwire interactive, for example.

Re:Since Steam, I have pirated ...

[crossmr]

Those workers had been working for free for months if I recall correctly. That wasn't a surprise to anyone.

Easy way of bankrupting Sony and Nintendo?

[tao]

So, to bankrupt Sony and Nintendo I can simply write a script that downloads one game from each company over and over again... After all, if downloads equals loss, enough downloads would bring both companies to their knees. In fact, I'm sure that the entire entertainment industry could be brought to their knees with wget...

Re:Easy way of bankrupting Sony and Nintendo?

[mykos]

Exactly! You could increase your tax losses (and thus writeoffs) by connecting to a torrent tracker an infinite number of times. Pure genius!

In other news, all gamers are billionaires.

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, since all gamers are obviously billionaires, why are they pirating so much? I love the flawed logic of these polls. Do these people have no interest in accurately mapping piracy?

They might as well claim eleventy gazillion

[VShael]

It's just made up numbers and made up words, told by the princelings of lies and falsehoods.

Create!

[Anonymous Coward]

Smith: Fourty-two Hugillions lost to pirates...

Miller: But... but there isn't that much money in the whole world!

Smith: Yes, that's right. We... Create!

Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[black3d]

It's actually on the low side. From reading the article, I don't think they're even claiming that if there had been 0 downloads, then they'd have an extra $45 billion. Rather, they're looking at the retail value of those downloads when compared to a sale. And based on their methodology, this figure is about three times lower than it should be, as it's pretty much just looking at torrents. Emule, rapidshare (and other sharing sites), FTPs in eastern countries, bulletin board distribution, and wholesale mass-produced sanctioned piracy in many ex-soviet and asian countries, are all going very strong. In the scope of the study, the figure's low. Winny - the most popular file sharing program in Japan, even more popular than torrents there, is not included. It was actually a study into the value of pirated software. The biased game sites referring the article are the ones who've spun it into "CESA believes downloaders COST game companies this much..". Slashdot doesn't help.

Maybe some people are in denial about how rampant piracy is. Of my 10 or so close geek friends who I've grown up with (I'm now 28), I'm the only one who no longer pirates anything - cashflow helps that. One other pirates games which are "too expensive". The other 8 approx pirate everything. OS, games, apps, everything they run except.. of course, World of Warcraft. :P I think most slashdotters are in complete denial about how massive it is. For every cash register sale EB Games in Australia made of Call of Duty MW2, 390 downloads were picked up reaching Australian IP addresses.

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[black3d]

Addendum: That figure is based on PBay trackers alone. It could be higher with other trackers, but also could be lower considering some ADSL users here don't use static IPs and switch around, but meh. It's just illustrative purposes only and to be taken with a spoonful of salt.

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[serviscope_minor]

I think most slashdotters are in complete denial about how massive it is. ... or not. I don't pirate stuff, nor to I know anyone who does. I used to pirate stuff when I wass much younger, and I knew people who pirated stuff when they were students. Now I and the people I spend much of my time with are older none of us pirate any more.

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[black3d]

And you folks have adequately proved my point. I say "All the people I know pirate", and even explain the basis of that, and nothing. Servi merely says "Well, the people I know don't", and he's marked +3 insightful. Now, I'm not complaining about the moderation system at all - I've had my share of + and - mods, but you can't deny that there's the general mood of the replies to this article are completely biased.

Nobody's even read the article. They've read a biased summary, taken from another gaming site, borrowed from a third gaming site, which links to the article without translation and says "This is what we think it means". And by the time it hits Slashdotters, you're all foaming at the mouth to disagree with anything anyone suggests that "Hey, you know, you downloaders are actually doing something wrong y'know..".

I don't have to tell you how many times I see folks around here pull out the "It's not physical so it's not stealing" english-semantics argument as if it makes any difference. :p

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[iainl]

Sony claim to have sold about 60 million PSPs over the lifespan of the machine. Assuming that a third of them were either sold to people with another machine (I know plenty who got the thinner, lighter update to replace the big heavy version, or just broke one) that's about $1000 per person. At $40 a game list, that's 25 lost sales per owner. I can't even think of 25 PSP games worth getting for nothing...

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I and the people I spend much of my time with are older none of us pirate any more.

That's because we don't have time to play anymore.

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I only stopped pirating when I switched to opensource.

Back in the day, you had to pirate windows and office, then pirate winzip just to open a zipped .doc

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[Hatta]

From reading the article, I don't think they're even claiming that if there had been 0 downloads, then they'd have an extra $45 billion. Rather, they're looking at the retail value of those downloads when compared to a sale

What relevance does that number have to anything? If they're not saying "this much money is lost to piracy, give it to me", what's the point of bringing up the number in the first place? I would easily believe that the face value of pirated software is 10 times the face value of purchased software. But, so what? What are you going to do with that number? Are you going to try to recoup those costs? Because you're crazy if you do. If you're not, why did you bother figuring it out in the first place?

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[Anonymous Coward]

sure, tell that to my dad.

I recently got an "unlimited" connection and now he can't stop downloading all the episodes of american/foreign shows that are released.

He is also avidly looking for and finding olden classics from the 30's etc, stuff that is not possible to find over here.
Example: Buck Privates ... he's been searching for this one for decades over here, now he just downloaded it, copied it to a mem stick and watches on his el cheapo dvd player (he didn't buy the region1 since it would kill his dvd player)
.

the time has come when even the non technical aware are saying enough is enough

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[geekoid]

The way they gathered the figured show an ineptitude in mathematics, Complete ignorance in the pirate community, and simply doesn't makes sense when you apply the math to the market.

You don't seems to understand the piracy market wither.

" 390 downloads were picked up reaching Australian IP addresses."
You don't see the problem with that number? Do you seriously thing the there would have been 390 people standing in line to buy that game?

Do you even know how bittorrent and P2P works?

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh grow up.
I pirated Battlefield Bad Company 2 before I BOUGHT it because they have no demo for me to test it on my PC. If it ran like crap I wouldn't have bought it.

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[Scoth]

I'm not sure that the primary points people are making are that piracy isn't as rampant as that shows, and indeed the semantics argument is silly. The argument that's being made is that 1 download does not equal 1 lost sale. It's not realistic to say that every download would have translated into a sale.

The morality, right/wrong, stealing/not stealing, etc etc doesn't really enter into it. It's not a realistic number. Just because there were 1000 downloads of Hot New Game 2, it's not realistic to say that the company suffered losses of $50,000 (assuming a $50 purchase price) because it doesn't follow that were that download not available, there would have been 1000 more sales.

Is piracy a problem? Definitely. Is it wrong? Absolutely. Is pointing it out with studies like this accurate? No. They're doing more harm than good by doing it this way precisely because of the frothing that goes on on gaming and other sites from it. There are two separate issues that often get mixed together - The impact of piracy and the ludicrous numbers that get attached to it. They really should be handled separately. People get too caught up on what piracy is and isn't, whether it's justified based on DRM/etc, and such when the real issue is that studies like this get used to the detriment of legitimate gamers.

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would be not.

Most of the people who have posted their concerns with the figure have given very reasonable justifications. That's something I can't say for the source of the data itself, or really for you either. (Except of course for saying that you don't know much about it)

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that MW2 download statistic was in no way influenced by the complete screwjob that game turned into. From the locked out LAN play to all the other BS, I literally know no one who bought it.

BTW, I see your anecdote and raise you mine, I pirated when I was a kid, on my C64. Now I don't because I have money and it's too much effort. It's the same old argument in MMOs, people with time grind, people with money buy gold. Ergo, piracy is not rampant. See how easy that is?

Oh, and if your buddies are playing WOW, they probably have about 0 time left over to play their pirated crap, saving if they are unemployed. In that case they probably have more disposable income than I did as a pre-teen, but not much.

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point many of us are trying to make is that one download != one sale.

Here's the same fallacy, extended: if you hold an hour long meeting at work and you invite 9 other people, you've spent 10 man-hours on that meeting. However, that assumes that all 10 attendees would've otherwise used that hour effectively on something else; this is not always an accurate assumption.

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[Anonymous Coward]

The disagreement is that they are claiming $41.5 Billion in "Losses". This number is ridiculous. I usually buy games, but if I'm looking for something obscure I can't find in stores, I download it. The easiest way to download an obscure game is to torrent a complete romset for the system in question. I have tens of thousands of games I have never played and would never buy, just to get a handful of games I would buy but can't. I am personally responsible for several million dollars of "Losses" as they calculate them, but I can guarantee they didn't actually lose a single dollar of the money I would have spent on games without piracy.

Re:Why so much disagreement with the figure?

[black3d]

I undestand perfectly. If you'd actually read the post instead of going on a superiority crusade, you would have read that I was expressly making the point that a download does not equal a purchase, and that the article authors weren't making that point either. The ORIGINAL ARTICLE, not "Gamasutra's opinion on the original article", is about the retail value of pirated copies. Ie, if you make an illegal copy of a $100 game, if that game was a legal copy, would be worth $100 to the copyright holder. The article doesn't even try to make the claim that downloaders would ever purchase the game, that's purely a spin that the western gaming sites reviewing the article have tried to put on it in order to discredit it. It's using values as a measure of scale of piracy, because telling people "800,000,000 copies" means absolutely nothing. It's about the scale of the piracy, not it's value.

As for 390:1 downloads:purchases, the point isn't that 390 people would have purchased it, at all. Again, reading isn't your forte. The remark was on the scale of piracy. MW2 was the best-sold game in Aus this year. And there were almost 400 copies of it downloaded for every copy sold. SCALE. OF. PIRACY.

Don't worry - you're not alone. Nearly every idiot on this thread has been making arguments against statements that the original article never said. Instead, debating against comments made by commentators who never knew what they were talking about in the first place.

This puts me off buying games at all

[Anonymous Coward]

With the DRM, the criminalization of their customers, and the big fat lies like this one, I don't see why I would want to give these people money at all.

I'd rather play the old games I already and actually own (not rent), than feed this devolution of the business.

Re:This puts me off buying games at all

[kz45]

"With the DRM, the criminalization of their customers, and the big fat lies like this one, I don't see why I would want to give these people money at all."

DRM is only a result of mass pirating...not the other way around. If you want to blame someone for this, blame many of the people on this forum who have no problem downloading and sharing software that they didn't buy.

Re:This puts me off buying games at all

[kz45]

DRM is only a result of mass pirating...not the other way around. If you want to blame someone for this, blame many of the people on this forum who have no problem downloading and sharing software that they didn't buy.

Re:This puts me off buying games at all

[KarlIsNotMyName]

The stricter the DRM, the more reason to get a pirated version than a legit one, because it will be more user friendly.

DRM only prevents large scale piracy until someone cracks it. Heavy DRM doesn't make more people buy something. Those that wouldn't buy in any case, wait. Maybe even some that would buy also wait, because they might prefer to buy it but use the cracked version for reduced hassle.

Trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

Let them starve.

Second hand sales hurt publishers MORE than piracy

[mykos]

You can't prove that a pirate was willing to buy a game so you can't prove you actually lost anything, but Gamestop flaunts their second hand sales to their stockholders, so you know exactly how much people were willing to pay. But now instead of the publishers getting money and making more games, it goes to Gamestop so they can make more...money.

Re:Second hand sales hurt publishers MORE than pir

[Psaakyrn]

Interestingly, it also shows the price point people are willing to buy games. I don't know what is the usual price second-hand sales are usually sold at (being in one of those countries which does NOT have a significant second hand sale market), but I'd think publishers would have a lot more profit selling goods at 2nd hand prices.

Of cause there's the point of packaging, but that's what online distribution is for.

Yeah, again.

[euyis]

Another study claims money that wasn't made yet can be lost. Better stop downloading pirated games and don't buy them either. Surely the game companies will be grateful because the nonexistent losses are now gone!

Re:Yeah, again.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is kind of what I did. My last two game purchases - Unreal Tournament 3 and Supreme Commander 2 - left me with so much distaste, especially in comparison to their excellent predecessors, that I decided to stop getting new games. (UT3 dynamics feels like running in molasses, and SupCom2 axed the economic angle and concentrated on fighting. If I wanted to fight all the time I could play one of the zillion console oriented RTSes for 12-year-olds with ADHD.)

I'm pretty happy with the stuff I already have (all of which was, as a matter of fact, bought new in a brick&mortar store). I don't see enough improvement in the existing games to even bother pirating, much less buying.

In other news, Foxconn employees get 113e/month

[master_p]

I was shocked this morning to read that Foxconn employees are paid 113 euros per month.

It might seem irrelevant to this discussion, but it is not: the global elite is pushing for bigger profits, either through studies that claim loss from piracy or from other means.

I hope /. readers don't get the bait that the global elite ix losing any money. They don't; they are filthy rich as a result of exploiting people in 3rd world countries. Don't make them a favor and think that piracy hurts them; it does not. It simply doesn't make their wallets extra-ultra-humongously fat.

This puts me off buying games at all

[KarlIsNotMyName]

With the DRM, the criminalization of their customers, and the big fat lies like this one, I don't see why I would want to give these people money at all.

I'd rather play my old games that I actually own than feed this devolution of the business.

(NB: dupe comment because I posted the previous one "Anonymously", and it's apparently invisible without a parent)

Re:Second hand sales hurt publishers MORE than pir

[KDR_11k]

Gamestop sells 'em at 5$/€ below the regular retail price. I think people who accept that discount will always buy used, no matter how low the regular price goes (since GS will always undercut it).

Well, I got it

[SmallFurryCreature]

Well, that is because they gave it me.

With kind regards,

The banking and automotive industry.

Re:Well, I got it

[Anonymous Coward]

this made me LOL.

then it made me COL (cry out loud).

Re:Well, I got it

[the3stars]

Thats not funny, its just depressing.

Then there are people like me that buy hardware

[dbIII]

I wouldn't have bought four Nintendo DS's if I hadn't been able to get a device that let me run anything I wanted on the things.
I also feel no remorse at all in showing small children how to circumvent copyright on those devices.

A study by a business group?

[soporific16]

WTF people, a business group releases a study and we all get to waste our time shooting down a ridiculously absurd figure regarding piracy for what, sport? It seems anyone can release a study these days and it will get examined by every nerd on the planet! Obviously not all studies, only ones that support the existence of an economic system that is splintering under the weight of its internal contradictions, viz the attempt to turn digital content into private property. Will you all PLEASE all get an anti-capitalist consciousness from somewhere, anywhere! -- this FOG you all seem to live in is driving me nuts!

Re:A study by a business group?

[Psaakyrn]

Come on, it's fun! It's like trolling, except no one complains!

let us sue the Gaming Industry

[kubitus]

for lost time, productivity loss, loss in morale, etc...

These numbers are clearly bogus

[Rogerborg]

Because if they were true, then ipso facto, we be wrong. Since that's unpossible, the figures must be a filthy lie. So-called facts must not be allowed to interfere with our principled objection to rewarding creators for their work. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Re:These numbers are clearly bogus

[Myopic]

Hmmm. While I commend you on coming to the correct conclusion, your logic in getting there is very poor. Try a little harder next time and I think you can do better.

Here's how it's calculated...

[durrr]

I wrote a really good version of Hello World 2.0, it was so great in fact that i tried to market it as really fucking expensive enterprise version of hello world; I put the price at $80 billion billion.
Despite the excellent software quality no one bought it, but as my sister pirated it to see what i was raving about i've suffered losses of more than the entire earth GDP of the last 20 milennia or so. And you dare to say software piracy is okay!

Mmmm. B S

[morbingoodkid]

There is a few comments on here about free advertising and I can honestly say that of the games that I have bought none of them would have been bought if it was not for the fact that I played them before either on a friends computer or a demo version (I can not publicly admit that I actually downloaded games illegally :-) ) But the fact is that downloads grow the games market. I'm actually very interested in seeing what the excuse is going to be in a couple of years for bad sales ... Cutting of your nose to spite your face is not a good policy. If you are a smart games publisher you keep your mouth shut and allow the games industry to spend millions copy righting and preventing copying. Once they have done that you publish games with open copyright similar to the freedoms we have today and simply kill the competitions. Ssshhh..

All the money in the world.

[IBitOBear]

Consider the fourth option where these numbers are just freaking made up by people who don't care to use statistics correctly.

If, for perspective of scale, you consider that this the entire national debit of the US went up from 9 to 12 trillion USD, or 3,000 billion USD, and this claim is covers 45 billion USD, that would mean that the loss claimed by this study is 1.5% of the increase of the US national debit. And this isn't for all "content", nor all software, nor all video games, but just the _portable_ video games. And not the hardware either. Just the software part. So if we say that for every person who just has to have a DS there are 10 who had to have a PS/3, and for every one who had a PS/3, there were 10 who wanted to watch movies or use software in general, then the entire unadjusted dollar increase in the US national debit would be overshadowed by "content".

Yea, that's a "straw man" if I were going to attack it, but lets just skip that. The above was for perspective on the magnitude of the bald-face claim.

Now, when you consider everything that people can and must spend money on, "entertainment" is nothing compared to food and shelter and food and medicine and food and education and food and insurance so on. (did I mention food?) In 2007 there were 116,011,000 "households" in the us. If the US were to shoulder the burden of paying for all these "lost sales" each household would have to pony up 50 thousand ($50,000) above whatever they already spent on, well everything, including "portable games" they actually bought. That's a full working adult making a very reasonable, or even "nice" living added to each household in the US _just_ to pay for the portable game software.

Heck, there are six billion people on the planet. To recover the sales these people "lost", e.g. 45 billion just in portable gaming software, and we spread that out to every single person uniformly, regardless of their ability to own or use a portable gaming device, everybody has to go by an $8 bargain-bin super mario cartridge.

And they each have to do it while still spending 100% of the money they are already spending to live and do something other than play dominoes with their cartridge (surely there are not 6 billion used DS units available so these people can actually run the content...).

Redirecting that kind of money into the phantom sales scenario needed to back up these numbers literally flies in the face of economic reason. Food would have to come free from space aliens every day for the rest of the economy to support this pipe dream "lost sales" figure.

That is, in the same sense that "if pigs could fly, bacon would be super expensive" it may well be true that if everything these people dream of happened, and each possible download represented a lost full price sale, well then sure, with those "ifs", these numbers work. But without those preposterous ifs, the results are ridiculous.

Insupportable, criminally ridiculous claims should be met with thrown stones and brandished pitchforks. Until that happy day when people really think about what these numbers would _require_ as a founding assumption, we will be sucking swill from the teat of political fantasy.

There exists no mathematical world where the portable gaming industry could have "lost $45 billion 2010-valued-USD to piracy".

Its like asking what would happen if _you_ had all the money in the world. (hint: whatever it was you had, it would be useless). You can model and dream about the scenario all you want, but it has no foundation in possible reality.

Re:All the money in the world.

[djdavetrouble]

Freaking mod this guy up for understanding how to lie with statistics!

Re:All the money in the world.

[coastwalker]

Agreed, $45 Billion is absurd and should be resoundingly mocked as the ignorant lie that it is. Sadly it appears that politicians worldwide are being duped by similar lies into absurd content protection legislation to the benefit of no one, least of all the content providers. Sometimes I think that all politicians should be made to take tests in statistics and critical thinking before we allow them anywhere near the legislature.

Re:All the money in the world.

[NoSleepDemon]

How did you come up with the $50,000 per household to recover the "lost sales"? I lost you there

Re:All the money in the world.

[Myopic]

Redirecting that kind of money into the phantom sales scenario needed to back up these numbers literally flies in the face of economic reason.

Not literally.

Otherwise, great post.

I'm a pirate, here is why:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a poor university student.

DRM, DRM, DRM, DRM i will NEVER buy a DRM protected game. Will they work in 10 years? 20, 30, 40?
Constant internet connection is required to play Ubisoft games, c'mon... Will their servers be up and running forever?

Windows... Microsoft breaks your games every few years by releasing a new version of winbl0wz which does not include the library runtimes required to run old games.

Signup required to play the game.
I do have a few retail games.
Half-life 2 is an good example, i bougt the game when it came out a few years back, i'm unable to play it today... why? Because in order to play the game (in singleplayer) you must install STEAM and assign the game to your steam profile, right? Install steam, choose user\pass and check the remember me box. Now 6 years later I have a new email account and i forgot my steam user\pass. I contacted STEAM and they are unwilling to help me. THEY stole MY game.
I've also forgot my password for Red Alert 3, so i cannot play it online.
A few weeks ago when i wanted to play half-life 2 i had to DOWNLOAD A PIRATE COPY in order to workaround my forgotten user\pass problem.

It's more easy to install and play pirated games.

It's more easy to watch pirated movies, no IF YOU STEAL YOU GOTO JAIL warnings followed by 10 minutes of trailers.

Re:I'm a pirate, here is why:

[Anonymous Coward]

Now 6 years later I have a new email account and i forgot my steam user\pass. I contacted STEAM and they are unwilling to help me. THEY stole MY game.

You went from "I forgot my password" to "they stole my game".

Sounds like you are just an idiot.

Re:I'm a pirate, here is why:

[Anonymous Coward]

In this specific case, this defense does not work, it`s about handheld games, not PC games.
There is no DRM on it.
But i feel your pain because i am an university student too.

Re:I'm a pirate, here is why:

[Anonymous Coward]

See this is an interesting thing I always see as a trend in comments to anything with piracy.

The general theme of "It is easier for me to pirate than to go the legal route". And I do agree. It is often easier to utilize a lot of available knowledge in obtaining the applications, the computer know-how, and a little work into obtaining some media in exactly the format you want.

On the flip side, with no effort, you could get the same product but fail to get the format and features.

In other words - people choose to WORK in order to "play the system" to get the content they want in a way that works for them. This I think is most interesting and is always the part that makes me scratch my head when I read about the next anti-piracy campaigns by some content studio.

I really don't believe that all piracy is because of cost. If you read through the comments on this page and any other article, you find more people complaining about usability of the legal product than you find people saying prices are too high. Sure, some piracy is absolutely about cost - that's where one has to realize a lot of folks just collect content for the "fun" of it, and actually don't consume much of it.

My point is - look at how far Netflix instant watch has come in the past few years. Imagine if you could watch any movie, any time thru Netflix. Netflix is very popular and those people get it. Its easy, its (for the most part) in a format that conforms to the general computing public, and they are making sure you don't have to spend a lot of cash or effort into allowing you to watch that content on your television. Eventually, as more movie studios sign on, that product will reduce piracy I believe.

If there was more services like that - and the content studios embraced them rather than ignoring them, I really think piracy would really curb itself for the simple fact that no one should have to put so much effort just to have their content in a usable format. I think pirates would pay for content if the trade off of ease of use is there - or at least definitely the most casual piraters (which probably make up the real "lost" sales [see point about collecting vs consuming]

Re:I'm a pirate, here is why:

[Anonymous Coward]

So... let me get this straight:

You bought a game that requires an account, complete with user name and password. You chose "remember password" so ironically enough you wouldn't have to remember it. Of course, time goes by and you forgot your password, which can be retrieved through your email address. However, you closed out that email address without checking if your Steam account depended on it. And somehow that's Valve's fault?

I'm not a huge fan of DRM, and I've been trying to avoid Steam for the longest time, but I'm finding it hard to sympathize with you. This could all have been avoided with just a little due diligence on your part; it's called a data backup plan (and yes, I consider your accounts' user/pass to be data). Worse, the only workaround you thought possible was to download a pirated copy of the game you effectively misplaced, when the more noble workaround would be to own up to your mistake and buy the game again. Yeah, yeah, we here at Slashdot hate buying the same data twice, or even once for that matter, but we also hate when people can't or won't own up to their mistake.

Re:I'm a pirate, here is why:

[tepples]

it`s about handheld games, not PC games. There is no DRM on it.

PSN-exclusive PSP games and DSiWare games have DRM much like Steam's.

Re:I'm a pirate, here is why:

[mcgrew]

Microsoft breaks your games every few years by releasing a new version of winbl0wz which does not include the library runtimes required to run old games.

You can get around this by putting Linux on it multi-boot. With that, you can set up several different Windows partitions, and when the boot menu comes up you can choose the version of Windows to boot. Bonus points for doing your surfing in Linux without worrying about viruses.

It's sad that the legal version is inferior to the illegal version; kind of like tobacco and pot.

Re:I'm a pirate, here is why:

[geekoid]

I"'ve gone through 3 email accounts since I installed steam and never had a problem.

Don't blame DRM for your stupidity.

Re:I'm a pirate, here is why:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more easy to watch pirated movies, no IF YOU STEAL YOU GOTO JAIL warnings followed by 10 minutes of trailers.

The thing about those trailers is that you can fast-forward through them. No, you can't skip them but crank that FF up to 11 and you'll be at the menu in two seconds.

 

Re:I'm a pirate, here is why:

[B Nesson]

You think that's bad, I lost my copy of the D&D Player's Handbook, and when I sent a letter to Wizards of the Coast, they wouldn't send me a free replacement copy!

The nerve of these companies, expecting us to take care of our shit after we pay for it!

Re:I'm a pirate, here is why:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, um, the (original) DS didn't *have* any DRM. This whiny argument has fuckall to do with the issue at hand. It's absolutely NOT more easy to install and play pirated games on portable devices, and by claiming that as your justification you're shooting yourself in the foot.

While it's certainly true that the losses are overstated, it's depressing that slashdot lines up to eagerly yell "STEALING IS GOOD!" in comment after comment after comment, and nobody seems to care in the slightest about the massive hordes of people leeching off the hard work of the few and dragging down the system for everybody...

I dispute the acurracy of this study

[Danieljury3]

If the spent so much time and effort doing this study they could have surely come up with a more accurate figure than 25% for japan. $41.5 billion is little more than a large random guess.

Re:Second hand sales hurt publishers MORE than pir

[PhilHibbs]

You think you know their business better than they do? If they would make more money selling cheaper, then why don't they? Are they stupid?

quite right old chap

[Anonymous Coward]

its not depriving someone of the use of or value of some item, and so is not theft/stealing of software, because copyright infringement is not stealing. now you can argue whether it is stealing money, and what many here are stating is that they feel that it is not stealing money as money would (to a very significant extent) never have been spent on the software in any case. this is the statistic that we really need to determine, to quantify this difference. also a complete analysis of the potential positive value of copyright infringement, to the copyright holder, should be taken into account. for instance it is well known that microsoft has happily tolerated copyright infringement of their operating systems over their history, as the value of having a larger market share is greater than allowing someone to possibly choose from the competition. then there is the free advertising that musicians, other artists, and copyright holders, obtain through copyright infringers. there are also other ways that copyright infringement benifits the copyright holder. often what is sought is a differentiated response, where certain hub individuals have a greater influence and stronger social connections, this might intersect with the set of people who are more like to have the technical proficiency to circumvent drm. in certain situations the copyright holder knowingly benefit from copyright infringement, or greater leniency in the presence of drm. such as when a game publisher releases patches sometime after a release removing drm such as the requirement to have the dvd in the drive or to be authenticated online, etc. now this is the smart thing to do, and it shows _recognition_ that from the consideration of purely maximizing profit, some degree of leniency and provision of copyright infringement is beneficial. so while publicly the MAFIA loudly protest that they economy is suffering so much that draconian laws are required, their members show that privately they recognize and acknowledge the benefit to be harnessed from copyright infringement, and it cannot be both ways. so their actions betray the truth, that they pragmatically make more by harnessing copyright infringement than if it was completely eliminated.

i propose that we think hard about a falsifiable way of measuring the difference between the amount consumed when something is obtained at zero cost vs the amount when its not. there would exist psychological studies into this human dynamic, it would be interesting to see if they apply to the situation of copyright infringement.

Re:quite right old chap

[kz45]

"its not depriving someone of the use of or value of some item, and so is not theft/stealing of software, because copyright infringement is not stealing. "

When someone takes all of your personal info and takes out loans and ruins your credit. We call it identity theft, yet nothing is physically stolen. Should we rename it to identity infringement?

I read an article recently about someone that installed a skimmer on an ATM machine. He was getting copies of debit card numbers and also taking money from those accounts. The accounts are just numbers that represent value, similar to software. Would we not call this theft?

"for instance it is well known that microsoft has happily tolerated copyright infringement of their operating systems over their history, as the value of having a larger market share is greater than allowing someone to possibly choose from the competition."

Is that kind of like saying we should look into the positive aspects of rape? (hey, she might have enjoyed it). Microsoft is one of the largest software companies in the world. They might be able to take a loss in revenue due to piracy. The smaller companies are a different story.

"then there is the free advertising that musicians, other artists, and copyright holders, obtain through copyright infringers."

Free Advertising. Right. So those copyright infringers tell all of their friends how they got something for free and where to get it (or they will give it to them). I'm sure this has many benefits to a company trying to sell legitimate software.

often what is sought is a differentiated response, where certain hub individuals have a greater influence and stronger social connections, this might intersect with the set of people who are more like to have the technical proficiency to circumvent drm.

"in certain situations the copyright holder knowingly benefit from copyright infringement, or greater leniency in the presence of drm. such as when a game publisher releases patches sometime after a release removing drm such as the requirement to have the dvd in the drive or to be authenticated online, etc. now this is the smart thing to do, and it shows _recognition_ that from the consideration of purely maximizing profit, some degree of leniency and provision of copyright infringement is beneficial. so while publicly the MAFIA loudly protest that they economy is suffering so much that draconian laws are required, their members show that privately they recognize and acknowledge the benefit to be harnessed from copyright infringement, and it cannot be both ways. so their actions betray the truth, that they pragmatically make more by harnessing copyright infringement than if it was completely eliminated."

How is it really helping the RIAA? It's really only hurting consumers in the long-run. Before piracy, if something wasn't making any money, companies would know that their product must not be good and they need to make changes. Now, they don't know if it's due to piracy or a bad product (song, software, game).

"i propose that we think hard about a falsifiable way of measuring the difference between the amount consumed when something is obtained at zero cost vs the amount when its not. there would exist psychological studies into this human dynamic, it would be interesting to see if they apply to the situation of copyright infringement."

If something is free, it's going to get downloaded more than if it costs money. What will this prove?

Why even bother with outrageous numbers?

[exallon]

I am just smiling when I see report after report from the interest organisations. I am sure the first major publisher that embraces the "new" audience will be this centuries huge winner.

IYHDI-YWHBI kind of study

[MistrX]

My guess is that it's one of those 'If you hadn't downloaded it, you would have bought it' kind of study.
I have spend so much energy in this subject that all that I have left to say about this matter is: 'This study is silly'.

Yes because

[Anonymous Coward]

Warez sites have not been known to start their counters way higher then 0

Local Version, Very Local Proves ZERO Piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Decided to run my own study. Checked all computers (11), checked shelves and under rug - found ZERO pirated, downloaded, stolen, lifted games, music and/or movies. Used this to extrapolate to other 6,000,000,000 on planet. Believe this PROVES there are no losses and that the entire problem is a figment of the imagination (or maybe a way to continue employment).

Ta!

Is true, theres 80000 billions lost!

[Tei]

The people that piracy, DONT BUY GAMES, is that hard to understand?
Wen you see 99 downloads, is because 1 piracy download 99 games, and 10 honest gamers, buy 10 games.

The people that piracy, don't want to buy games, thats why piracy games. Maybe have a ethic like that: "If you can steal something, or get it for free, but you choose to pay, you are a idiot, and you are a bad person, you fail at life". But even if MAGIC operate here, and you make so the piracy people want to pay for games, will NOT buy these 99 games. The typical game consumer buy 4 games at year, you can't turn the pirates into people that buy 900 games at year. Is stupid.
Creating the expectations that the game industry has lost 900 sales / pirate, is creating false expectations. If you are into the industry, and and you buy into this type of stupid studys, YOU are a idiot too.

Faulty assumption

[Drakkenmensch]

It's always interesting to see how the companies automatically assume that someone who wasn't taking it for free from a download site would certainly be buying it otherwise. A large contingent of pirates fit in the "I'm getting it for free or not at all" category, which makes their figures take a huge dive.

Re:Faulty assumption

[DragonTHC]

agreed. just because they're playing it doesn't mean it's a loss.

Won't Someone Please Think of the Children?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if all of that money actually went to feeding poor starving orphans around the world? And the video game mafia have the nerve to say they should have gotten the money instead?

Since the money would have to come from somewhere, that would mean....that they would be taking the food directly out of the mouths of starving children!!!

And In Other News...

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who make clothing report shoplifting has caused them eleventy-five kajillion whing-wangs in sales losses. Expect prices on clothing to rise thanks to the result of this totally objective and completely neutral study which was not made by the people who profit off sales of clothing at all. Honest. We swear. Srsly.

Wolfire's analysis of piracy

[AceJohnny]

I suggest that from now on, articles about far-out piracy number thrown out by special-interest should include a link to Wolfire's excellent analysis of video game piracy. Choice quote:

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.

14 billion?

[Combatso]

We're not PROVING it.. we are just CLAIMING it!

and we are reporting that the Beaverton flood has killed 100 billion people. We havent verified that, we are only REPORTING it.

Japan! - Piracy Study?? HA

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a couple of years, but the last time I was in Japan, Brick and Mortar shops had catalogs of Music, Movies, Software, that they would duplicate for you on the spot and sell at great prices.

Orders of Magnitude

[Anonymous Coward]

"I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit, I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail."

Gotta catch 'em all

[denis-The-menace]

RE: "They just want to pay a reasonable price for a game,..."

When I was a teenager I had friends that had hundreds of games for their Commodore 64.
I ask one of them if they had played all of them.
He told me he barely played any and that he spent most of his computer time copying the games themselves.
That's when I realized that for some, copying games is "The Game". Collecting them, sorting them in alphabetical order, showing them off to your friends, trading with your friends and strangers, talking about the difficulty of copying some games. Nobody would pay for any of this but just "having them" was the thrill. The fact that it was "bad to copy" just adds to it.

In the end it's like pokemon: Gotta catch 'em all.

The companies should worry more about the guys who only copy one or 2 games and play the FSCK out of them. THOSE are the REAL lost sales.

Re:Gotta catch 'em all

[__aasqbs9791]

More fun than Farmville.

Re:Gotta catch 'em all

[geekoid]

Assuming they would otherwise pay for them.

Re:Gotta catch 'em all

[TangoMargarine]

Farmville is free! Those communist bastards, BURN THEM ALL! America!

Re:Gotta catch 'em all

[Kitkoan]

RE: "They just want to pay a reasonable price for a game,..."

When I was a teenager I had friends that had hundreds of games for their Commodore 64. I ask one of them if they had played all of them. He told me he barely played any and that he spent most of his computer time copying the games themselves. That's when I realized that for some, copying games is "The Game". Collecting them, sorting them in alphabetical order, showing them off to your friends, trading with your friends and strangers, talking about the difficulty of copying some games. Nobody would pay for any of this but just "having them" was the thrill. The fact that it was "bad to copy" just adds to it.

In the end it's like pokemon: Gotta catch 'em all.

The companies should worry more about the guys who only copy one or 2 games and play the FSCK out of them. THOSE are the REAL lost sales.

Like collecting baseball cards or stamps, just virtual. Its not about using them, it's about being able to display them.

Re:Gotta catch 'em all

[__aasqbs9791]

Free? It costs the most precious thing of all: Time! You never get those hours back.

Re:Gotta catch 'em all

[Anonymous Coward]

I was one of them ... for the longest time while at university (a little over a decade ago) ... I loved my super fast free internet connection and my hobby was accumulating games, CAD packages, Math packages, anything of value ... never installed more than a quarter of it .... and then just to try it out or claim some level of knowledge for a resume.

Wi-Fi dumper for DS

[tepples]

However, I still download the ROMs since it's far easier to do so than to dump my own cart (which AFAIK requires some kind of slot 2 device

As I understand it, the new technique involves starting the sender on a DS and receiver on a nearby PC, hot-swapping from the flash card to the Game Card, and taking a few minutes to send the ROM through Wi-Fi.

that I have no interest in buying).

You can't play Game Boy Advance homebrew without a SLOT-2 device.

Pirated games != lost sales

[blankoboy]

If I download 100+ Nintendo DS or Sony PSP games, this does not equal 100 lost sales. The same applies to music, movies and anything else. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just smoking a wad of rolled up bills.

My Sweet Lord

[tepples]

Ultimately, since infringement requires intent

Since when? I thought Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music eliminated any requirement for mens rea in civil copyright infringement cases.

But I pirate and I buy\

[SmallFurryCreature]

But I do pirate and I do buy. So where does that fit? I don't buy from companies that screw me anymore. EA, die already. Bethseda, get stuffed with your horse armor that needs a credit card. Turbine/Code Masters, same thing (latest Lotro expansion).

Sometimes I make an exception, for Bioware but I pirated Mass Effect 2 because the DLC for Dragon Age sucked donkey balls (which I did buy).

Frankly the game industry has managed to make piracy the only way to tell them that you don't like their business practices anymore. Nice game, lousy sales force. So how do you fight back? By hoping that the company goes bankrupt and the creative people start over under smarter management.

Here is a simple hint game makers everywhere: DO NOT SCREW WITH YOUR PAYING CUSTOMER OR HE WILL NOT PAY YOU.

No export for you

[tepples]

When somebody is pirating, say, iPhone games that cost $1.99 to buy [...] We're talking about a pathetic cheapskate.

Or we're talking about users in countries where the App Store does not operate. I don't know much about geographic limitations on Apple's App Store, but Google Checkout isn't available in a lot of countries that have Android phones, which means only $0.00 apps show up in Android Market. DSi Shop is region locked as well.

Re:No export for you

[Quirkz]

Or we're talking about users in countries where the App Store does not operate.

This is very true. In college, I heard some techno compilations from Japan that I badly wanted to get my hands on. I found the web site for the company that put out those compilations and wrote them multiple times. They never even responded. After about a year of trying I gave up and downloaded the songs from Napster. Not quite the same thing, but close. Sometimes willing buyers can't buy, and while the eventual download might be a lost sale, it's lost through the company's fault, and not mine.

I am Rich

[Nukenbar]

I pirated I am Rich for my iPhone, so I guess I'm responsible for about $1k of this.

Where has all the money gone then?

[Anonymous Coward]

For those figures to be real, all those people that pirated the games must have had enough money to buy the games instead. So where has all that money gne? Did all those pirates invest the money in the stock market or real estate? Did They buy more harware? Perhaps they donated it to charity. Maybe they spent the money on other entertainment, like hookers (which would be better for the local economy anyway)

The people have chosen to break these windows

[tepples]

The people, through their elected representatives, have chosen to break these windows by expanding the exclusive rights granted to authors, ostensibly "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

CESA stands for Crazy rEtards and Stupid A**holes.

[TechProbCC]

The guys at CESA are just stupid. Their numbers are so far off, that it is ridiculous. I think for them to measure money lost to priacy in this way is bullsh*t. Like come on, it's obvious that not all downloads could have been purchases, about 5% could have been. So maybe they lost 2 billion. But wait! Their numbers are, at best, uneducated guesses. They only guessed the numbers for Japan, and guessed how that compared to the world. So obviously they don't know what they're saying at all. To top it off, piracy is free advertising. Yah, maybe I'll pirate a game for the PC and never buy it, but there are a few that I liked and bought the console version, or bought the console version and pirated a version for my laptop, to take on trips. Either way, lots of the downloads are copies, either being downloaded twice (bad torrent), downloaded by someone who has or will buy the game, or count as free advertising for similar games, which is an acceptable expense.

All that really matters...

[Red_Chaos1]

...is that despite all the wild claims of lost revenue, the *made* revenue continues to be more than enough to R/D new hand-helds and continue the dev of new games for both older and newer hand-held systems. I think that speaks much more loudly than these retarded arm waiving FUD campaigns about piracy. Clearly piracy isn't hurting anyone that bad, clearly business is more than good enough to continue being a market worth creating for.

Misleading title...

[mmalove]

I came to this thread expecting a story about 41 billion dollars worth of DS games being taken at gunpoint on the high seas.

Here's the easy debunking question for the gaming industry: if 41 billion dollars was truely lost, where did it go? What did those crazy kids spend it on, if not your video games?

This is of course, a ludicrous question, because the downloaders never had the 41 billion dollars to spend. This isn't a loss, it isn't even an opportunity. It's the gaming industry burying it's head in the sand to the true reason sales are down: a lack of innovation and sequel after sequel that the next generation is getting tired of.

Re:Misleading title...

[geekoid]

Unless you were born priors to about 1700, you had no reason to be mislead by the headline. Using the term 'piracy' to mean copying and distributing material you didn't create is over 300 years old.

The 'name' war is never one you can win, and it always hurts your cause.

Who's got those money instead?

[pmontra]

If the gaming industry really lost those 41 billions and assuming that they didn't go entirely into savings, which other industries earned those money instead? Whatever they were the overall economy should have benefited of those expenses.

However my assumption is almost nobody got them because people pirating games don't want or don't have money to spend so those losses are purely hypothetical. I'm pretty sure that if we sum up all the potential losses of all industries due to piracy (fashion, cosmetics, pharma, movies, songs, games) we end up with a figure greater than the GDP of their customer base.

You think that's bad.

[shadowrat]

Imagine the loss due to the number of people who never purchased OR pirated the games. Imagine how much income is lost to the game industry due to lack of game consoles and iphones in developing countries! Imagine how much money has been lost because we haven't found a way to sell game consoles to polar bears!

Our planet's economy is practically BLEEDING money because alien civilizations never buy ANYTHING from us!

Licensing is a mess, too

[phorm]

I ordered a copy of a DVD series. The series was created in Japan, ordered from a different country, and shipped to Canada.
What I got came shipped in a nice little DVD box, with nice DVD silkscreen, and a nice little hologram stuck to the box proclaiming it as being legit.

However, the content is pretty bad. On some discs, you can see a faint scan-line moving through the background, as happens when you copy through a cruddy analog connection. The subtitles are absolutely horrid, and inconsistent. The spelling varies between discs on things that should be consistent (names of characters) and often is just outright wrong or uses terrible grammar. The quality of the subs rivals some of the worst fansub jobs I've seen. The tracking/skipping is also completely messed. Every episode has an intro, content, and an ending. Sometimes pushing skip-forward on the intro will go to the content of the episode, then the ending, and other times it just skips right to the next episode.

So I've contacted the producing company, trying to find a decent way to verify what a "legit" copy would be. In Japan the series is produced by "Sunrise," which seems to be part of Namco. They have a US distributor for dealing with N American licensing issues. In trying to find the distributor for Malaysia (place where the damn thing came from), the US company said "we dunno who that would be" and the Japanese branch just didn't reply

So I say to the media companies. Go F*** yourselves. If you can't be bothered to help a dedicated customer in avoiding "piracy" and tracking a legit copy of your merch, but would rather go harass downloaders and what not, then screw off. I've seen tons of malls etc that sell nothing but pirated DVD's, games, music, yet they're happily churning out burns for a profit - essentially screwing both the producer and the consumer - while the media companies are milking Joe Average with lawsuits for piracy.

Feeling bad for...who?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Did the developers get paid adequately? Did the graphic artists? Musicians? Marketers? Storyliners? Testers?
2) Was there anyone that actually put *value* into the product that went unpaid?

If you answered "no" to these questions, then...who is it, exactly, that "lost" money?
If investors lose money on a project, it's their own fault for investing in a bad project. The games with highest piracy rates are probably the most profitable anyways, due to the project's success. The same could be said of music. So I'm not seeing any actual human being to feel sorry for because they lost money due to piracy.

Stats not taken into account

[Anonymous Coward]

You will notice they didn't bother to take into account the number of consoles sold to people who were willing to buy the console only because they could get huge numbers of games for free instead of spending hundreds of bucks on just a hand full of games. These people (and I personally know quite a large number of them) would have never purchased the consoles if they had to buy games.

Not all are exclusive

[tepples]

Decent examples, but not all are PSP exclusive.

GTA: Chinatown Wars

That one was on DS and iPhone too.

Lumines

Also on GBA.

Re:Not all are exclusive

[Pojut]

That one was on DS and iPhone too.

True, but as far as the control scheme and graphics are concerned, the version on the PSP is by far the superior one, hence why I included it :)

Also on GBA.

True, but that is a home-brew clone, not a full retail port.

Wrong

[geekoid]

Wouldn't be the first time that happened.

However, if steam released anything that could resemble and asset in anyway, they would get into a lot of trouble. When you are going out of business and show up in bankruptcy court, the judge looks at your activities , and will want to know why you gave away your key asset before going into bankruptcy. It could end up meaning the the owners private assets get seize to help pay the debts. Really anybody who's name is on anything the resembles controlling an asset.

Re:Wrong

[crossmr]

What asset would they be giving away? There was no plan to sell the unlocked exes. Valve makes no additional money from the product being locked.

FUD

[Envy Life]

I agree with the parent. $41.5 Billion is fictitious number...a political ploy for purposes of FUD. it's a number that governments will be concerned with, and have an incentive to step in, whereas, say, $41.5 million is just a cost of doing business. People still have an incentive to write books even though all books are available for free in libraries.

It's also important to reiterate that the "10% users who account for 90% of piracy" download many times more games than they would have otherwised purchased... and they don't have time to play them all anyhow.

DS and PSP piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was computer games or PS3 or xbox combined I might consider the figure before dismissing it as absurd but DS and PSP..really? This goes beyond disbelief into just making shit up and throwing it on the wall.

Vendors get lazy, produce shit or don't invest in new platforms and the result is noone buys so out of concern for their shareholders divert what little R&D money they have left to lobby lawmakers to hang downloaders by the neck until their dead.

Sure you can buy flash carts and download all games ever made for several generations of Nintendo consoles into a single cart but most PPL who have these systems are hardly l337 hax0rs (DS?!?!! really?) and wouldn't even know where to start even if they cared enough to try.

Uber l337's downloaders grab everything just because they have nothing better to do. Cart sizes are small so why not just download all games ever made and store them on a flash cart.

What we need is a 9 parameter per platform Drake equation for piracy to provide data points to reduce guesswork and hapazard estimates with a standardized system.

AVC * NGD * CCF * PGD * EMU * FDF * PWP * PCA * SHF

AVC = Average new in box retail cost to purchase any cart for the specific platform of any kind.

NGD = Total number of downloads

NMS = Cost correction factor to account for very popular downloads that cost much more or less than average.

PGD = Percentage of downloads that are good/usable

EMU = Percentage of downloaders who do not and would not own the platform and are instead using emulation software to play

FDF = Friend distribution factor - off grid, sneakernet distribution to locals (>1) (This DOES NOT include re-uploading and subsequent downloads which is included in NGD)

PGG = Percentage of games downloaded the downloader plays for any meaningful amount of time and therefore ever had any chance of buying.

PWP = Percentage of games downloader would have seriously considered purchasing if piracy was not an option.

PCA = Percentage who could reasonably afford to make the purchase in the first place - (kids with no jobs, kids who are grounded, kids who have parents who don't want their kids to play games all day)

SHF = Second hand factor - cost adjustment based on people who pirate the game that would have purchased or traded second hand from a friend, consignment shop or rented for a short period of time.

41 B$ losses? Really?

[Stavr0]

Wow. That's really tragic. Go ahead and declare that as lost revenue on your corporate income tax.

What's that? The IRS doesn't accept that as lost revenue?

Neither do we.

Justification for piracy?

[kahri]

So these numbers are totally bogus even at first glance. I find it ridiculous companies claim such excessive damages when based on the most flawed assumptions. Piracy is a reality. Game/media designers need to deal with it, but "deal with" doesn't equate to trying to thwart piracy to the point of restrictive DRM schemes and inconvenience of the customer. At the same time, looking at the music industry, I am all for better legislation concerning intellectual property that reflects such realities so companies can stop coming up with excuses to blackmail the little guy.

However, I don't really understand the moral justification of the "pirate" in downloading their games/songs/movies/whatever. That person may or may not have paid for it in the first place, so their consumption of the product is not necessarily a lost sale, sure. Yet, I have not heard a convincing argument justifying this person's -right- to consume the product at all. If they are unable or unwilling to pay for it, why should they be able to enjoy it gratis? This mindset isn't visible in any other industry--that if you can't afford the product, since you're not a lost sale, you have the right to consume it anyways? If a person does not want to share their idea, be it embodied in a game or song or whatever, unless shared for some profit, what gives you the right to say hey, I can't afford it anyways but I feel the need to enjoy it so I'm taking it? I mean, you can't go to a restaurant, select an item, then decide you don't like it and forfeit your obligation to pay; you can't just leave without giving any compensation simply because you did not enjoy it if there was no problem with it otherwise. Though this does apply to a physical object, the premise is similar.

I am genuinely interested in how people can justify this, as I myself cannot. Would love a response!

Piracy != Loss

[Antisyzygy]

I dont understand why someone would equate a pirated download as a sales loss. There is no cost in replicating data other than the bandwidth, so there is minimal if any cost to the industry. The reason people pirate are due to convenience and having limited money. I would wager maybe 50 percent of people who pirate any one item would pay for it if they couldn't pirate it, and I would also say that its probably a safe bet that its less than that.

Nothing good to play though, dead argument...

[Anonymous Coward]

All sides have some variant of hype blinders on regarding this issue. Let me start off by clarifying my gaming habits and buying habits. I bought a PSP at US launch, and a DS a year after the US launch. I never pirated a game on either system, but have hacked for legitimate home-brew purposes, and could have if I had wanted to, but didn't. I actually gave away the PSP to a friend of mine who bought a PS3, with the stipulation that if a good game were to come out I would borrow it back for as long as I wanted. That was 2 years ago and so far I have never asked for it back. Before I gave it away, it litterally sat in a drawer for 2 years, unplayable. The games are simply terrible unless you want to carry around an ackward/slow loading PS2 system.

The DS I gave to my niece who loved Nintendogs, and have since replaced the gifted DS with a new DSi. Again, I have a flash cart for the DS but have never pirated a game. There is nothing I have seen that makes me want to go into the game store to buy something, the last game I bought was Zelda, and as I have nothing to play on it, I loaned the system and all of my games to a friend who has had it for several months now. I'm not missing anything.

Now here's the thing, after all that. The games just aren't that appealing. There are no games that I would feel the burning desire to carry with me at all times. And even though the systems are portable, unless I'm going to be on an airplane or train for a long while, I don't ever bother bringing these devices with me anywhere. This is where a Smartphone will eventually replace the handheld system once someone finally figures out the ultimate configuration.

So in the end, I've seen a LOT of games that I would check out for 5 - 10 minutes, just to see what they were all about, but am certain that I would buy less than 5% of those and don't even feel the need to check everything out as I have a good eye for deciding whats worth playing based off of videos and user reviews. If these companies want to increase sales, they will figure out how to release a long battery life, amazing all in one smart phone that doubles as the best portable gaming machine AND simply release more/better games, at more affordable pricing. I couldn't even afford to get into a console PS3/360 with accessories and games neither in $$ or in time if I wanted to right now, and the sadder fact is, that I don't want to, for any reason.

Give me the occasional, amazing PC game experience, casual PC games, and an awesome on the go portable gaming experience that is PC like, built into something like an Android/open source/Flash smart phone and maybe you'll start to see more of my cashflow revert back to gaming sales. Again, I didn't copy anything here, but I have all of the hardware and there is nothing that screams "I have to play this!" so the fact is, both machines are just sitting there, doing nothing for me. Also, I haven't heard of too many people that pirate ANYTHING if they could really afford it (meaning, they could easily walk into a store, drop $300 on a a month or two worth of rich entertainment and not even cause a dent in their bankroll", people in those positions don't pirate things. So really, this is just a scapegoat excuse for what is really a currently poor experience on the portable console front.

whoops...

[IBitOBear]

... look how easy it is to screw up when you are using imaginary numbers in fantasy settings to demonstrate nonsense. It's really quite easy to drop a few zeros... (my bad... math fail. 8-)