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

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: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!