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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."
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.
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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.
Qxe4
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.
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.
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.
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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: "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.
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