PC has Piracy Rate of 93-95%

MOH · 27-08-2012 8:20pm

C14N wrote: »

Maybe but do you really think many people don't finish the download?

Depending on the size of it, yes. I'd imagine quite a lot of people who weren't particularly interested in the game might start torrenting it but move on to something else before it finished.

gizmo wrote: »

It would still decrease the number of downloaded copies thus eliminating the piracy excuse for lower than expected sales.

C14N wrote: »

I don't follow. How does not buying increase the piracy rate? I never had any interest in the last 3 Call of Dutys so I didn't buy them, how could this increase the number of people torrenting it?

It's not increasing the number of torrents, it's increasing the ratio of torrents to legit sales.
Pulling figures out of my ass, if you've got a game that would sell 50,000 copies and have 450,000 people pirate it (90% piracy rate). 10,000 people are put off buying it by yet another level of rubbish DRM, and walk away instead of pirating it. That's only decreasing the legit sales, the piracy is unchanged, so now the 'piracy rate' is nearly 92%.

Even if 10% of the pirates are only pirating it because of the DRM, and they walk away instead of pirating it, piracy rate is still gone up to over 91%.

Piracy rate is a meaningless headline-grabbing statistic. Lost sales is the only figure that matters, and that's a far, far lower figure.

I'd love to see publishers release some other figures, like number of day-zero sales versus number of customers unable to play the game on day zero due to bugs, overloaded servers, or other technical issues.

Azza · 27-08-2012 9:12pm

I would agree totally that the actually number of lost sales is far lower than the number of pirated games. But even if it far lower, its still a massive problem.

The Witcher 2 developers CD Project estimated back in November that the Witcher 2 had been pirated 4.5 million times. It had at the time sold 1 million.

If just 1% of those pirates purchased the game at say €30.00 CD Project would of made additional €1.35 million in revenue.

MOH wrote:

I'd love to see publishers release some other figures, like number of day-zero sales versus number of customers unable to play the game on day zero due to bugs, overloaded servers, or other technical issues.

Why would you believe there figures on that when you don't believe their figures on piracy rates? Would you believe them if the said the numbers where low?

Turtwig · 27-08-2012 9:24pm

Does anyone have any independent figures on Piracy?

I'm always sceptical of publisher estimates.
(For anyone who's got five mins to spare a good TED talk on the piracy loss calculations.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0

Azza · 27-08-2012 9:38pm

Go to file sharing websites and view for yourself.

Turtwig · 27-08-2012 10:18pm

Azza wrote: »

Go to file sharing websites and view for yourself.

I wouldn't really regard a file sharing site as being impartial or independent.

SeantheMan · 27-08-2012 11:23pm

Don't think it was posted here, maybe as he didn't want to shamelessly promote -

But Arcade and Retro did a "piracy special" podcast this week, worth a listen

http://arcadeandretro.com/arcade-and-retro-podcast-episode-11-piracy-special/

gizmo · 28-08-2012 12:01am

Jernal wrote: »

Does anyone have any independent figures on Piracy?

Well there's the figures from Torrentfreak that have been posted a few times. I hardly think they're going to exaggerate the figures for the benefit of publishers. All they're doing is counting up the number of seeders across all available public sites so if anything, the number is smaller than it should be.

Azza wrote: »

The Witcher 2 developers CD Project estimated back in November that the Witcher 2 had been pirated 4.5 million times. It had at the time sold 1 million.

It's actually worse than that, as of July this year the entire series had sold a little over 4m copies across both the PC and 360.

blatantrereg · 28-08-2012 12:53am

I think piracy rates are higher in a lot of countries than they are in Ireland - and they are high in Ireland. It could easily be that high. It's true that people pirate plenty of games they wouldn't buy. Also plenty of people buy games they pirate, if they like them enough.

MOH · 28-08-2012 12:59am

Azza wrote: »

I would agree totally that the actually number of lost sales is far lower than the number of pirated games. But even if it far lower, its still a massive problem.

The Witcher 2 developers CD Project estimated back in November that the Witcher 2 had been pirated 4.5 million times. It had at the time sold 1 million.

If just 1% of those pirates purchased the game at say €30.00 CD Project would of made additional €1.35 million in revenue.

That's true. And the same could be said of any other heavily pirated game.
The problem is that the money's not there for that argument to apply to every game.
There's a finite amount of disposable income spent on games. There's a lot of expensive titles vying for that cash. If piracy were somehow wiped out tomorrow, it's probable that the amount spent on games overall would increase somewhat, but not dramatically.
But even if the amount spent on games somehow (?) doubled overnight, of the 93% who currently pirate, only another 7% would actually buy the game. The other 86% would just never play it. And realistically, what kind of extra spend are you actually going to get? 10%?

Whatever about motivations for pirating overall, crappy DRM *does* drive people to piracy. And once they've started, it's easier to find justifications, valid or not, to continue. So they start spending their money elsewhere, and the overall cash spent on games is reduced. So even if you do somehow wipe out piracy, you've to convince these people to bring their cash back to your industry again.

Why would you believe there figures on that when you don't believe their figures on piracy rates? Would you believe them if the said the numbers where low?

Fair point. But I'd at least like to see them acknowledge that DRM and overloaded servers prevent some legitimate customers from playing the game they've paid for, problems pirates may not face, instead of constantly focusing on themselves and ignoring customers.

MOH · 28-08-2012 2:04am

Sorry for the double post, but I went looking to see could I find any figures to back up my ramblings. This article is two years old, and the study it refers to is behind a paywall, but taking the article content as a basis:
$25.3 billion spent on games in the US in 2010, across all platforms.
$4.15 billion spent on PC games.

I'm not sure what a AAA title costs in the US, but I'm taking a ballpark figure of $60. That gives us a total of just under 70 million units, for the US.

Add in the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands and Belgium and you've got 120 million units altogether ($7.2 billion). That's probably the majority of the Western gaming world, and that's for all PC games.
Problem is, I've no idea how much of that cash is going on the big names.
Even if it's half of it, that's 60 million units.

So 60 million units total, split between all the big name games each year.
That's your finite cash market.

Obviously, there's a few assumptions there! And that's only over 6 countries, but the biggest markets are included.
But that's the scale you're looking at.
Wiping out piracy isn't going to magically generate an additional 800 million units and $93 billion dollars in revenue.

Azza · 28-08-2012 9:35am

MOH wrote:

There's a finite amount of disposable income spent on games. There's a lot of expensive titles vying for that cash. If piracy were somehow wiped out tomorrow, it's probable that the amount spent on games overall would increase somewhat, but not dramatically.

That could make the difference for a game developer on the breadline.

MOH wrote:

But even if the amount spent on games somehow (?) doubled overnight, of the 93% who currently pirate, only another 7% would actually buy the game. The other 86% would just never play it. And realistically, what kind of extra spend are you actually going to get? 10%?

That extra 7% is a doubling of your revenue.

MOH wrote:

Whatever about motivations for pirating overall, crappy DRM *does* drive people to piracy. And once they've started, it's easier to find justifications, valid or not, to continue. So they start spending their money elsewhere, and the overall cash spent on games is reduced. So even if you do somehow wipe out piracy, you've to convince these people to bring their cash back to your industry again.

People already have trucks loads of reasons for pirating. The game is too expensive, the game is too short, I want to see if it runs on my PC, there was no demo, I didn't like the developers last game so I want to try it to see if I like it, I'll buy it later when its on sale. I don't like the genre normally but I wanna try it, its a crappy console port etc.

Mark Hamill · 28-08-2012 10:53am

gizmo wrote: »

All they're doing is counting up the number of seeders across all available public sites so if anything, the number is smaller than it should be.

Really? I was always under the impression that torrent files just point at seeders, so, basically, if you have the same torrent file on two sites with ten seeders reported on each site, you only have ten seeders overall (not twenty), as both files are pointing to the same seeders.

gizmo · 28-08-2012 11:12am

Mark Hamill wrote: »

Really? I was always under the impression that torrent files just point at seeders, so, basically, if you have the same torrent file on two sites with ten seeders reported on each site, you only have ten seeders overall (not twenty), as both files are pointing to the same seeders.

I'd imagine they'll be counting up the seeders per tracker rather than per actual torrent.

The reason I say it'd be smaller by the way is because they're only counting public sites, so neither private torrent sites nor newsgroups will be included.

Overheal · 28-08-2012 12:57pm

i love this from my email today:

It’s Pirateable generously DRM-free and it’s only $9.99!
Soon to be available on major distribution sites: Steam, Desura, Gamestop, OnLive, Mac App Store, etc.
Platforms: Windows and Mac

re: Miner Wars Arena

gizmo · 28-08-2012 1:35pm

Overheal wrote: »

i love this from my email today:

re: Miner Wars Arena

You left out the fact that it needs a persistent internet connection to play the single player portion. :pac:

C14N · 28-08-2012 2:00pm

MOH wrote: »

There's a finite amount of disposable income spent on games. There's a lot of expensive titles vying for that cash. If piracy were somehow wiped out tomorrow, it's probable that the amount spent on games overall would increase somewhat, but not dramatically.
But even if the amount spent on games somehow (?) doubled overnight, of the 93% who currently pirate, only another 7% would actually buy the game. The other 86% would just never play it. And realistically, what kind of extra spend are you actually going to get? 10%?

This is all just assumption though. Not everyone is gaming on a budget, I would say very few gamers are saying to themselves "I have €XYZ to spend on games this year so I need to make it count".

We don't know how many of those people would have bought the game otherwise. You can guess it would be 10% but there's really no more basis for that assertation than there is for the devs to assume most of those people would have bought it.

It's also not a black and white case of "well they didn't have €60 to spend on it anyway so there's no lost revenue" (even though €60 would be an usually high price for the special edition of a PC game, virtually unheard of for a standard edition). Maybe they didn't have €60 or didn't want to spend that but maybe they would have bought it a year later when it's €20 or in a Steam sale when it's €10. We have no idea how many of the people this applies to and while pirates and netizens will try to say it's under 10%, that's no more based in fact than the publishers who might say the majority would have coughed up for the game.

Manic Moran · 29-08-2012 5:22am

Skerries wrote: »

Ubisoft's CEO Yves Guillemot has revealed that the percentage of people who pay in free-to-play games is roughly the same as those who buy boxed games (approximately 5-7%)

On PC it's only around five to seven per cent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it's only about five to seven per cent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated. It's around a 93-95 per cent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-03-19-world-of-tanks-monthly-profits-hitting-double-digit-millions