9 ms·

Punch Club has been pirated over 1M times

91 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

dang 11y ago
Url changed from http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/game-dev-reveals-correlation-between-a-translation-and-a-regions-piracy/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/game-dev-reveals-corre..., which points to this.
- pavornyoh 11y ago
  Thanks Dang :).
voltagex_ 11y ago
I wonder if Google Play allows pricing segmentation per area. I'm seeing a $6.55AUD game, which is higher than most, although if it frees me from any kind of IAP I'd consider it.
- benologist 11y ago
  Prices can be manually entered per country or calculated from a base price in your account currency. In either case it does not change again until the developer updates it.
yannyu 11y ago
Whose idea was it to have the 2 initial pie graphs switch colors? It makes it look like there's some sort of inverse relationship between pirating and purchasing on a given platform, when in fact it's roughly the same proportion of pirates and purchasers on mobile and PC. http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/revenue-split-1.png?fit=446%2C327 http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/re... http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/pirated-splits.png?fit=446%2C327 http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/pi...
- Rumudiez 11y ago
  Their analysis doesn't match up with the pie graphs either until you look up pricing. Punch Club costs $9.99 on Steam but only $4.99 on iOS, so the volume of sales in terms of units sold realizes about a 50/50 split between PC and mobile legitimate players, rather than the implied 70/30 indicated by revenue. NOW their analysis makes sense (more PC pirates than mobile). If the colors of the graph actually matched I would have just assumed their text was wrong! ...unless, of course, the piracy chart is in the same relative terms of cost and instead portrays _lost_ revenue...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
_lce0 11y ago
> The most interesting conclusion though is Localization and its impact. Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
ginko 11y ago
So from the charts it seems like mobile gamers are actually (slightly) more likely to pirate than PC gamers. Also I would be interested how the Windows:Mac:Linux split actually looks.
- sluggg 11y ago
  It seems that Android users are very likely to pirate while IOS users are not. I think the numbers were something like 12 pirated copies for every Android version sold and 2 to 1 for IOS.
  - mschuster91 11y ago
    > It seems that Android users are very likely to pirate while IOS users are not. Yeah because no one actually jailbreaks their device anymore... it's just hard and risky, and on Android all you need is to install the apk file.
legohead 11y ago
Getting some insight from the pirates would be interesting. If a pirate is detected, pop up a quick radio selection box: Thank you for playing the game. I noticed you pirated it and would like to know why (you can still play the game): * I can't afford the price * My parents wont let me buy games * I want to try the game free first * I believe games should be free * My computer is old and I don't know if it can play this game etc.. We did this on our site when someone downvotes our content, and it gave us valuable feedback.
- dublinben 11y ago
  It's not surprising that Brazil, Russia, and China top the list for pirate users. This game is probably very expensive for users in those countries, if they are even able to easily pay for it.
  - modoc 11y ago
    shrug those are also the countries that tend to account for the most spam delivery attempts, SSH brute force attempts, etc.... on my server. So it may be something beyond just cost..
    - pjlegato 11y ago
      Yes. The idea of "intellectual property" as such is nonexistent (and widely considered absurd) in those countries' cultures, combined with a pretty high level of technical sophistication among the general populace.
    - Grue3 11y ago
      Poor economy drives people to crime? Shocking!
  - Veratyr 11y ago
    > if they are even able to easily pay for it I think this is something a lot of people don't realise but online payment systems in China and Russia are near completely different (and isolated) from ours. China doesn't do Visa, doesn't do Mastercard, doesn't do AMEX, doesn't do PayPal. Try buying something from a Chinese website like Taobao or Baidu. They use things like Alipay which are linked to their local payment systems. I don't think Chinese CAN buy independent games like this.
tristanj 11y ago
Similar situation happened with Monument Valley, a game that hit #1 on app store and won a 2014 Apple Design award. The devs tweeted that only 5% of Android players paid for the app. On iOS, 40% paid [1]. Later they released some sales numbers that show only 2.4m sales but 10m+ installs, implying that the majority of their installs weren't paid for. [2] [1] Hit mobile game Monument Valley and piracy: ‘Only 5%’ of Android players paid for it https://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-bad-says-monument-valley-producer-qa/ https://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-ba... [2] Monument Valley in Numbers http://blog.monumentvalleygame.com/blog/2015/1/15/monument-valley-in-numbers http://blog.monumentvalleygame.com/blog/2015/1/15/monument-v...
- spacehome 11y ago
  I'm sorry, but the Monument Valley iOS piracy numbers from Dan Gray quoted in that article are positively nonsense. > It’s impossible for us to track that data. The only thing we can do is, two bits of data: One, how many purchases we have and, two, how many installs we’ve got. And we just leave people to draw conclusions from that as they wish, because we can’t clarify any further than that. Once you purchase an app on an iTunes account, you can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into. So the fact that Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases is 100% consistent with zero piracy, and with the fact that as people replace their devices they want to redownload the apps with the greatest replay value. This is not some weird trick that Apple overlooked, either. They clearly want the user to believe that the apps and the data are tied to the account rather than the phone, because new hardware sales are where they make the lion's share of their profit. (I thought his numbers were bogus, which is what motivated me to read the article. In recent years, jailbreaking iOS devices, which is a prerequisite for pirating apps, has become increasingly bothersome and decreasingly useful. So the thought that there were this many jailbreakers didn't coincide with my model of the world.)
  - tristanj 11y ago
    > You can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into ... So Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases No, it doesn't work like that. Android and iOS installs are separate, if you buy it through one app store it doesn't transfer to the other. Combining the Android and iOS numbers together to reduce that ratio is dishonest. Just looking at Android, the installs to purchases ratio works out to 20 to 1 ... do you seriously believe that can be explained through multiple installs? C'mon. Read through the OP article as well. He also a encountered significant amount of mobile piracy, specifically on Android. There is widespread mobile piracy going on, arguing about installs-to-purchases ratios does nothing to hide it.
odinduty 11y ago
The tables in the "Top pirated countries on PC, Portuguese Localization Launch Day" section would make much more sense if they were about the % of pirates instead of raw numbers...
xixi77 11y ago
Ugh, do I see what I think I see, and there is a pie chart of piracy ratios in different countries (that is, a pie chart of numbers that do not add up to 1)?!
- prawn 11y ago
  I thought this was going to be a joke: pie + ratio = pirate.
joshschreuder 11y ago
On a similar note, here's what the devs of Game Dev Tycoon did with pirates of their game. http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/ http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624727 Interesting article that after reading it made me go out and buy the game (so a solid marketing effort too!)
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  These sorts of things are silly revenge fantasies at best, they are just as easily cracked and removed as any drm features.
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    That's not the point.
    - throwaway2048 11y ago
      If its shown to be ineffective what is the point exactly?
      - kbenson 11y ago
        I think the point is that unless evidence is shown otherwise, there's little reason to believe that a significant portion of the people that pirated it got his purposefully seeded cracked version, as it was prior to it being possibly cracked otherwise, and there's little incentive for some cracking team to crack it if it appears it has already been done. That is, it's not that it's hard to work around his change, but that many people that could or would have done so may not have known it was needed. Of course, I'm sure that situation didn't persist.
    - deelowe 11y ago
      For a dose of reality, I recommend browsing r/piracy. The mental gymnastics people go through to justify their actions is mind boggling.
kazagistar 11y ago
Pie charts are terrible http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013...
- matt_heimer 11y ago
  It doesn't help that in the first two (side-by-side) pie charts they swap the colors.
andrewclunn 11y ago
So localize in English, German, and French (maybe Spanish) and don't bother with an Android version, good to know.
- kbenson 11y ago
  If you are interested in profit, the number of pirated copies is entirely irrelevant. The only metric that matters in that case is the cost of supplying the game for that demographic and how much money is expected to be made. This is the same whether it's a language or marketplace. For example, if it costs you $100,000 to supply and Android version, but you expect to make $1,000,000 event after all the (assumed) piracy, it still makes sense to release for Android.
  - andrewclunn 11y ago
    No because having an easily pirated version out there might otherwise cut into sales. I mean it's why a shoe store wouldn't simply give away unsold merchandise because then they're dramatically reduced the demand for shoes.
    - kbenson 11y ago
      You should read my statement again. If the choice is whether to sell in a market or not, and you care about making a profit, the bottom line is whether at the end of the day you made more money than it cost to serve that market. Full stop. This is not about allowing or disallowing piracy in a market you are already serving. In your analogy, it's like a shoe store opening a shop in China even though they strongly suspect if the shoes become popular knock-offs will pop up fairly quickly. The question of whether it's worth opening the store in China is answered by whether in the end they can make a profit.
spacehome 11y ago
How do they calculate the number of times it's been pirated? > We take overall amount of activations minus legit sales per platform minus 10% (to offset for people who activated a legit copy on more than 1 device). An assumption of 10% multiple device activations is begging the original question. Pirating on Windows, Mac, and Android is pretty easy, but on iOS it requires jailbreaking, which is pretty limiting these days. I doubt his piracy numbers are anywhere near what he's claiming.
- stordoff 11y ago
  Is a reason given for the 10% figure? (I looked in the article but didn't see anything) I can easily see the figure being much higher (e.g., for PC: laptop+desktop, for iOS: iPhone+iPad)
kbenson 11y ago
Since in these breakdowns they invariably seem to be using stats collection from the games themselves, I would love to see how many of the pirated copies progress past the fist X% of the game, or continue playing beyond 24-48 hours, whatever the devs would consider around the mark for what they would consider releasing a demo for. Not that I think all the people that pirate are just demoing, but I think without question many more people pirate than are actual sales, and those that stop early lone are the type of people that probably wouldn't have generated many sales anyway, possibly stopping after the demo if there was one or not have bought it at all. When these discussions are housed in terms of making enough money to continue, and loss of revenue, ignoring that aspect is ignoring a large part of the picture (even if it's still morally valid).
- monk_e_boy 11y ago
  A lot of people collect games like they are pokemon. My mate has a ton of games on steam that he's not even played. Plus a lot of those games are being pirated by kids who don't have bank accounts and/or are not mature enough to realise that pirating hurts people. If a friend asks another friend 'do you want a copy of <game>' they just say yes and that's the end of the thought process. The 'does this affect anyone' doesn't enter their heads. (source: teacher)
  - kbenson 11y ago
    > A lot of people collect games like they are pokemon. My mate has a ton of games on steam that he's not even played. I have 558 games on Steam. Almost exclusively from Humble Bundle orders, I've installed and played maybe 30-40, and that's because I've made a concerted effort the last year or so. I have another 100+ on GOG.com, mostly titles from my childhood and teen years I've convinced myself I'll some day have time to pick up and finally complete. I can relate. > Plus a lot of those games are being pirated by kids who don't have bank accounts and/or are not mature enough to realize that pirating hurts people. Yes, that was me. The vast majority I never played beyond trying out to see if I liked them (thus my original question). The few that I didn't buy that I did pirate and liked? Well, see the GOG.com note above (but a lot of those are ones I bought twice, or in that case of M&M II or some of the Ultima Series, 3+ times...). Edit: A portion that was supposed to be offset as a quote wasn't.
pklausler 11y ago
An amusing incongruity from the article: "Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate." Yet the article is primarily about piracy problems with Portuguese, surely the most westernly language in Europe.
- brotherjerky 11y ago
  Assuming you weren't making a joke, the article clearly states that the piracy is coming from Brazil, not Portugal.
  - kristianp 11y ago
    Still, it's ambiguous whether the article recommends that Portugese localisation should still be done despite the piracy from Brazil, or whether other western european languages should be done excluding Portugese.
    - gst 11y ago
      There's no harm of translating something into Portugese: If you translate there will be some piracy from Brazil, but if you don't translate users from Brazil won't buy your game at all.
    - nrb 11y ago
      He is clearly referring to German and French.
milkey_mouse 11y ago
It sucks that we live in a world where people decide whether to translate a game into a language, making it accessible for a country, based on how many people from that country will steal it.
speeder 11y ago
I would like to point out that Brazil currently is facing a extremely hard crisis, where people can't afford even food. Don't expect people to pay for entertainment here right now. EDIT: why the downvotes? What I said is entirely facts, to help explain the massive amount of piracy in Brazil.
- thiagof 11y ago
  You are exaggerating.
  - speeder 11y ago
    I am? Where I live at least, and considering my personal situation, it is no exaggeration. I doubt that most of the population in a 5km radius within me can afford to buy several games, or even only one game. I know lots of people (including family members) that are having a diet almost entirely based on potatoes, because anything else is too expensive. EDIT: some hard data, freely available on IBGE site, I got that data in february, so now it might be slightly different: Average wage on last ten years rose 44%, inflation was 78%, and food prices inflation was 124%
  - sdenton4 11y ago
    Seriously, they're on the verge of overthrowing the president because of a combination of corruption and the terrible economic situation. Overthrows are waaaay more likely to happen when there's a food shortage; I don't doubt the poster on this one.
alexandercrohde 11y ago
The one thing that really doesn't resonate with me is the undertone of bitterness. First, I bought Punch Club on steam, and enjoyed it. But I think the assumption that's easy to make is "Look at all the money I would have made if people didn't pirate." It's not that simple. Some people who pirate would never have bought it in the first place.
- aaron695 11y ago
  > undertone of bitterness. I didn't read this at all. Just the facts and thoughts on solutions.
  - danielbarla 11y ago
    I think it depends on what angle you're looking at it from. The article does kind of read as: "hey look, we could have made 5x more sales if we'd been smarter about piracy". Not everyone agrees with this, and I think this argument is unhealthy in general. I'd wager that if you made piracy completely impossible, most of the current pirates - who tend to hail from regions where the international pricing is prohibitive - would simply opt out of buying it. This may even have a negative effect by limiting the viral advertising indie hits like Punch Club have ("hey, what game is that on your phone", etc). This is not to defend the act of piracy as such, but I think if someone wants to have a productive "facts and solutions" discussion, they should frame it differently.
    - soup10 11y ago
      This is an idiotic wager. People are only pirating because they want to play the game. Of course some percentage them would of bought it if they couldn't easily get it for free. The marketing effect doesn't make up for thousands of lost sales. Piracy has completely wiped out music sales, the only reason it hasn't wiped out games yet is because of anti-piracy measures.
pmontra 11y ago
If they pirate your game and play it AND if they wouldn't have bought it anyway, you should be happy because they're not giving money to your competitors: they don't have the time for it because they're playing your game. It didn't cost you anything but you're gaining something. Obviously people plays several games at the same time, still this reasoning works and in many markets. If they are happy enough with your pirated games, music, videos, clothes, bags they won't buy your competitors products. If your sales are higher than theirs, pirates are helping you to starve your competitors.
- izym 11y ago
  I honestly don't think game developers are interested in starving other game developers.
scotty79 11y ago
The only interesting question in this is how many would they sell if 1.5 mil people wouldn't pirate it. Unfortunately no-one knows hence the silly debacle. I'd bet they'd be amazingly happy if it turned out that each 0.5 mil of pirates translates to 100 k in sales.

91 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

dang 11y ago

Url changed from http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/game-dev-reveals-correlation-between-a-translation-and-a-regions-piracy/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/game-dev-reveals-corre..., which points to this.

pavornyoh 11y ago
Thanks Dang :).

voltagex_ 11y ago

I wonder if Google Play allows pricing segmentation per area. I'm seeing a $6.55AUD game, which is higher than most, although if it frees me from any kind of IAP I'd consider it.

benologist 11y ago
Prices can be manually entered per country or calculated from a base price in your account currency. In either case it does not change again until the developer updates it.

yannyu 11y ago

Whose idea was it to have the 2 initial pie graphs switch colors? It makes it look like there's some sort of inverse relationship between pirating and purchasing on a given platform, when in fact it's roughly the same proportion of pirates and purchasers on mobile and PC. http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/revenue-split-1.png?fit=446%2C327 http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/re... http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/pirated-splits.png?fit=446%2C327 http://i0.wp.com/tinybuild.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/pi...

Rumudiez 11y ago
Their analysis doesn't match up with the pie graphs either until you look up pricing. Punch Club costs $9.99 on Steam but only $4.99 on iOS, so the volume of sales in terms of units sold realizes about a 50/50 split between PC and mobile legitimate players, rather than the implied 70/30 indicated by revenue. NOW their analysis makes sense (more PC pirates than mobile). If the colors of the graph actually matched I would have just assumed their text was wrong! ...unless, of course, the piracy chart is in the same relative terms of cost and instead portrays _lost_ revenue...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

_lce0 11y ago

> The most interesting conclusion though is Localization and its impact. Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

ginko 11y ago

So from the charts it seems like mobile gamers are actually (slightly) more likely to pirate than PC gamers. Also I would be interested how the Windows:Mac:Linux split actually looks.

sluggg 11y ago
It seems that Android users are very likely to pirate while IOS users are not. I think the numbers were something like 12 pirated copies for every Android version sold and 2 to 1 for IOS.
- mschuster91 11y ago
  > It seems that Android users are very likely to pirate while IOS users are not. Yeah because no one actually jailbreaks their device anymore... it's just hard and risky, and on Android all you need is to install the apk file.

legohead 11y ago

Getting some insight from the pirates would be interesting. If a pirate is detected, pop up a quick radio selection box: Thank you for playing the game. I noticed you pirated it and would like to know why (you can still play the game): * I can't afford the price * My parents wont let me buy games * I want to try the game free first * I believe games should be free * My computer is old and I don't know if it can play this game etc.. We did this on our site when someone downvotes our content, and it gave us valuable feedback.

dublinben 11y ago
It's not surprising that Brazil, Russia, and China top the list for pirate users. This game is probably very expensive for users in those countries, if they are even able to easily pay for it.
- modoc 11y ago
  shrug those are also the countries that tend to account for the most spam delivery attempts, SSH brute force attempts, etc.... on my server. So it may be something beyond just cost..
  - pjlegato 11y ago
    Yes. The idea of "intellectual property" as such is nonexistent (and widely considered absurd) in those countries' cultures, combined with a pretty high level of technical sophistication among the general populace.
  - Grue3 11y ago
    Poor economy drives people to crime? Shocking!
- Veratyr 11y ago
  > if they are even able to easily pay for it I think this is something a lot of people don't realise but online payment systems in China and Russia are near completely different (and isolated) from ours. China doesn't do Visa, doesn't do Mastercard, doesn't do AMEX, doesn't do PayPal. Try buying something from a Chinese website like Taobao or Baidu. They use things like Alipay which are linked to their local payment systems. I don't think Chinese CAN buy independent games like this.

tristanj 11y ago

Similar situation happened with Monument Valley, a game that hit #1 on app store and won a 2014 Apple Design award. The devs tweeted that only 5% of Android players paid for the app. On iOS, 40% paid [1]. Later they released some sales numbers that show only 2.4m sales but 10m+ installs, implying that the majority of their installs weren't paid for. [2] [1] Hit mobile game Monument Valley and piracy: ‘Only 5%’ of Android players paid for it https://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-bad-says-monument-valley-producer-qa/ https://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-ba... [2] Monument Valley in Numbers http://blog.monumentvalleygame.com/blog/2015/1/15/monument-valley-in-numbers http://blog.monumentvalleygame.com/blog/2015/1/15/monument-v...

spacehome 11y ago
I'm sorry, but the Monument Valley iOS piracy numbers from Dan Gray quoted in that article are positively nonsense. > It’s impossible for us to track that data. The only thing we can do is, two bits of data: One, how many purchases we have and, two, how many installs we’ve got. And we just leave people to draw conclusions from that as they wish, because we can’t clarify any further than that. Once you purchase an app on an iTunes account, you can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into. So the fact that Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases is 100% consistent with zero piracy, and with the fact that as people replace their devices they want to redownload the apps with the greatest replay value. This is not some weird trick that Apple overlooked, either. They clearly want the user to believe that the apps and the data are tied to the account rather than the phone, because new hardware sales are where they make the lion's share of their profit. (I thought his numbers were bogus, which is what motivated me to read the article. In recent years, jailbreaking iOS devices, which is a prerequisite for pirating apps, has become increasingly bothersome and decreasingly useful. So the thought that there were this many jailbreakers didn't coincide with my model of the world.)
- tristanj 11y ago
  > You can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into ... So Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases No, it doesn't work like that. Android and iOS installs are separate, if you buy it through one app store it doesn't transfer to the other. Combining the Android and iOS numbers together to reduce that ratio is dishonest. Just looking at Android, the installs to purchases ratio works out to 20 to 1 ... do you seriously believe that can be explained through multiple installs? C'mon. Read through the OP article as well. He also a encountered significant amount of mobile piracy, specifically on Android. There is widespread mobile piracy going on, arguing about installs-to-purchases ratios does nothing to hide it.

odinduty 11y ago

The tables in the "Top pirated countries on PC, Portuguese Localization Launch Day" section would make much more sense if they were about the % of pirates instead of raw numbers...

xixi77 11y ago

Ugh, do I see what I think I see, and there is a pie chart of piracy ratios in different countries (that is, a pie chart of numbers that do not add up to 1)?!

prawn 11y ago
I thought this was going to be a joke: pie + ratio = pirate.

joshschreuder 11y ago

On a similar note, here's what the devs of Game Dev Tycoon did with pirates of their game. http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-pirates-play-a-game-development-simulator-and-then-go-bankrupt-because-of-piracy/ http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-... Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5624727 Interesting article that after reading it made me go out and buy the game (so a solid marketing effort too!)

throwaway2048 11y ago
These sorts of things are silly revenge fantasies at best, they are just as easily cracked and removed as any drm features.
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago
  That's not the point.
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    If its shown to be ineffective what is the point exactly?
    - kbenson 11y ago
      I think the point is that unless evidence is shown otherwise, there's little reason to believe that a significant portion of the people that pirated it got his purposefully seeded cracked version, as it was prior to it being possibly cracked otherwise, and there's little incentive for some cracking team to crack it if it appears it has already been done. That is, it's not that it's hard to work around his change, but that many people that could or would have done so may not have known it was needed. Of course, I'm sure that situation didn't persist.
  - deelowe 11y ago
    For a dose of reality, I recommend browsing r/piracy. The mental gymnastics people go through to justify their actions is mind boggling.

kazagistar 11y ago

Pie charts are terrible http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/pie-charts-are-the-worst-2013...

matt_heimer 11y ago
It doesn't help that in the first two (side-by-side) pie charts they swap the colors.

andrewclunn 11y ago

So localize in English, German, and French (maybe Spanish) and don't bother with an Android version, good to know.

kbenson 11y ago
If you are interested in profit, the number of pirated copies is entirely irrelevant. The only metric that matters in that case is the cost of supplying the game for that demographic and how much money is expected to be made. This is the same whether it's a language or marketplace. For example, if it costs you $100,000 to supply and Android version, but you expect to make $1,000,000 event after all the (assumed) piracy, it still makes sense to release for Android.
- andrewclunn 11y ago
  No because having an easily pirated version out there might otherwise cut into sales. I mean it's why a shoe store wouldn't simply give away unsold merchandise because then they're dramatically reduced the demand for shoes.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    You should read my statement again. If the choice is whether to sell in a market or not, and you care about making a profit, the bottom line is whether at the end of the day you made more money than it cost to serve that market. Full stop. This is not about allowing or disallowing piracy in a market you are already serving. In your analogy, it's like a shoe store opening a shop in China even though they strongly suspect if the shoes become popular knock-offs will pop up fairly quickly. The question of whether it's worth opening the store in China is answered by whether in the end they can make a profit.

spacehome 11y ago

How do they calculate the number of times it's been pirated? > We take overall amount of activations minus legit sales per platform minus 10% (to offset for people who activated a legit copy on more than 1 device). An assumption of 10% multiple device activations is begging the original question. Pirating on Windows, Mac, and Android is pretty easy, but on iOS it requires jailbreaking, which is pretty limiting these days. I doubt his piracy numbers are anywhere near what he's claiming.

stordoff 11y ago
Is a reason given for the 10% figure? (I looked in the article but didn't see anything) I can easily see the figure being much higher (e.g., for PC: laptop+desktop, for iOS: iPhone+iPad)

kbenson 11y ago

Since in these breakdowns they invariably seem to be using stats collection from the games themselves, I would love to see how many of the pirated copies progress past the fist X% of the game, or continue playing beyond 24-48 hours, whatever the devs would consider around the mark for what they would consider releasing a demo for. Not that I think all the people that pirate are just demoing, but I think without question many more people pirate than are actual sales, and those that stop early lone are the type of people that probably wouldn't have generated many sales anyway, possibly stopping after the demo if there was one or not have bought it at all. When these discussions are housed in terms of making enough money to continue, and loss of revenue, ignoring that aspect is ignoring a large part of the picture (even if it's still morally valid).

monk_e_boy 11y ago
A lot of people collect games like they are pokemon. My mate has a ton of games on steam that he's not even played. Plus a lot of those games are being pirated by kids who don't have bank accounts and/or are not mature enough to realise that pirating hurts people. If a friend asks another friend 'do you want a copy of <game>' they just say yes and that's the end of the thought process. The 'does this affect anyone' doesn't enter their heads. (source: teacher)
- kbenson 11y ago
  > A lot of people collect games like they are pokemon. My mate has a ton of games on steam that he's not even played. I have 558 games on Steam. Almost exclusively from Humble Bundle orders, I've installed and played maybe 30-40, and that's because I've made a concerted effort the last year or so. I have another 100+ on GOG.com, mostly titles from my childhood and teen years I've convinced myself I'll some day have time to pick up and finally complete. I can relate. > Plus a lot of those games are being pirated by kids who don't have bank accounts and/or are not mature enough to realize that pirating hurts people. Yes, that was me. The vast majority I never played beyond trying out to see if I liked them (thus my original question). The few that I didn't buy that I did pirate and liked? Well, see the GOG.com note above (but a lot of those are ones I bought twice, or in that case of M&M II or some of the Ultima Series, 3+ times...). Edit: A portion that was supposed to be offset as a quote wasn't.

pklausler 11y ago

An amusing incongruity from the article: "Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate." Yet the article is primarily about piracy problems with Portuguese, surely the most westernly language in Europe.

brotherjerky 11y ago
Assuming you weren't making a joke, the article clearly states that the piracy is coming from Brazil, not Portugal.
- kristianp 11y ago
  Still, it's ambiguous whether the article recommends that Portugese localisation should still be done despite the piracy from Brazil, or whether other western european languages should be done excluding Portugese.
  - gst 11y ago
    There's no harm of translating something into Portugese: If you translate there will be some piracy from Brazil, but if you don't translate users from Brazil won't buy your game at all.
  - nrb 11y ago
    He is clearly referring to German and French.

milkey_mouse 11y ago

It sucks that we live in a world where people decide whether to translate a game into a language, making it accessible for a country, based on how many people from that country will steal it.

speeder 11y ago

I would like to point out that Brazil currently is facing a extremely hard crisis, where people can't afford even food. Don't expect people to pay for entertainment here right now. EDIT: why the downvotes? What I said is entirely facts, to help explain the massive amount of piracy in Brazil.

thiagof 11y ago
You are exaggerating.
- speeder 11y ago
  I am? Where I live at least, and considering my personal situation, it is no exaggeration. I doubt that most of the population in a 5km radius within me can afford to buy several games, or even only one game. I know lots of people (including family members) that are having a diet almost entirely based on potatoes, because anything else is too expensive. EDIT: some hard data, freely available on IBGE site, I got that data in february, so now it might be slightly different: Average wage on last ten years rose 44%, inflation was 78%, and food prices inflation was 124%
- sdenton4 11y ago
  Seriously, they're on the verge of overthrowing the president because of a combination of corruption and the terrible economic situation. Overthrows are waaaay more likely to happen when there's a food shortage; I don't doubt the poster on this one.

alexandercrohde 11y ago

The one thing that really doesn't resonate with me is the undertone of bitterness. First, I bought Punch Club on steam, and enjoyed it. But I think the assumption that's easy to make is "Look at all the money I would have made if people didn't pirate." It's not that simple. Some people who pirate would never have bought it in the first place.

aaron695 11y ago
> undertone of bitterness. I didn't read this at all. Just the facts and thoughts on solutions.
- danielbarla 11y ago
  I think it depends on what angle you're looking at it from. The article does kind of read as: "hey look, we could have made 5x more sales if we'd been smarter about piracy". Not everyone agrees with this, and I think this argument is unhealthy in general. I'd wager that if you made piracy completely impossible, most of the current pirates - who tend to hail from regions where the international pricing is prohibitive - would simply opt out of buying it. This may even have a negative effect by limiting the viral advertising indie hits like Punch Club have ("hey, what game is that on your phone", etc). This is not to defend the act of piracy as such, but I think if someone wants to have a productive "facts and solutions" discussion, they should frame it differently.
  - soup10 11y ago
    This is an idiotic wager. People are only pirating because they want to play the game. Of course some percentage them would of bought it if they couldn't easily get it for free. The marketing effect doesn't make up for thousands of lost sales. Piracy has completely wiped out music sales, the only reason it hasn't wiped out games yet is because of anti-piracy measures.

pmontra 11y ago

If they pirate your game and play it AND if they wouldn't have bought it anyway, you should be happy because they're not giving money to your competitors: they don't have the time for it because they're playing your game. It didn't cost you anything but you're gaining something. Obviously people plays several games at the same time, still this reasoning works and in many markets. If they are happy enough with your pirated games, music, videos, clothes, bags they won't buy your competitors products. If your sales are higher than theirs, pirates are helping you to starve your competitors.

izym 11y ago
I honestly don't think game developers are interested in starving other game developers.

scotty79 11y ago

The only interesting question in this is how many would they sell if 1.5 mil people wouldn't pirate it. Unfortunately no-one knows hence the silly debacle. I'd bet they'd be amazingly happy if it turned out that each 0.5 mil of pirates translates to 100 k in sales.