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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."
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.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.