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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."
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
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?
Indeed, I'd call it $41.5 billion in free advertising for your games.
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.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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.
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.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
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.
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.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It's just made up numbers and made up words, told by the princelings of lies and falsehoods.
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!
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.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Well, that is because they gave it me.
With kind regards,
The banking and automotive industry.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
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.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
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...
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
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.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.