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Posted: **2010-05-06 02:52pm**

Wolfire Blog

A nice excerpt.

iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones) [2] This immediately struck me as odd -- I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking'. I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct -- only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. [3] World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries -- but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated?

The answer is simple -- the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales. If you'd like to see an example with math, read the following paragraph. If word problems make your eyes glaze over, then I advise you to skip it.

I highly recommend reading the article. Well worth the read. Its more to do with movie and game downloading. Music piracy has always been a bit different.

Ars Technica reports it as well

Posted: **2010-05-06 03:16pm**

The GAO report debunking piracy estimates is a bit more thorough about it. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... -bogus.ars

Posted: **2010-05-06 04:30pm**

I like how, despite being virtually impossible to pirate for a few weeks, Assasin's Creed 2 has failed to become the best selling PC game in history, wich, if the sales-lost-to-piracy figures were true, should have happened.

It turns out sales were on par to other similar titles despite the unbeatable DRM scheme. If I were in charge of Ubisoft's budget, I'd be making very uncomfortable questions about the point of spending so much money and pissing so many customers for absolutely no gain.

Posted: **2010-05-06 04:32pm**

It'll be spun that negative publicity around the DRM distorted sales and sticking with it will eventually see returns.

No, this doesn't make sense... but it makes BoardSense.

Posted: **2010-05-06 05:31pm**

Stark wrote:It'll be spun that negative publicity around the DRM distorted sales and sticking with it will eventually see returns.

No, this doesn't make sense... but it makes BoardSense.

Quite. I also wouldn't be surprised that the DRM thing is also used as a tool to impress shareholders or something.

Think about it. Once some ambitious manager somehow sees the figures and thinks "this is what will get me on top!" without trying to really understand the numbers. This is an agenda that can make him look clever, have data to back up his claim and make others look foolish. For whatever reason, this works for him and every other manager, and developer, jumps on this. Soon everyone finds this a convinent excuse to go away from PC gaming in favour of consoles (chosen for other reasons that are less marketing-friendly).

Posted: **2010-05-06 09:11pm**

It makes sense that software developers would inflate statistics like this. I mean, look at the auto companies going to Washington demanding billion dollar bail outs while the company CEO still flies everywhere on his Private Jet. Private developers love making their lives look a lot harder and tragic than they really are.

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Piracy Figures are more fluff and less fact

Piracy Figures are more fluff and less fact

Re: Piracy Figures are more fluff and less fact

Re: Piracy Figures are more fluff and less fact

Re: Piracy Figures are more fluff and less fact

Re: Piracy Figures are more fluff and less fact

Re: Piracy Figures are more fluff and less fact