# Pirates steal 1.4 billion in booty, yaaarrr!



## Gromit (Jan 24, 2011)

According to the gaming industry they are losing 1.4 billion in sales through piracy.

I love arguments like these as they are utter tosh.

The people who buy pirate games don't have 1.4 billion to spend therefore they'd never ever would have had those sales even if piracy was 0%.

If i buy 50 pirated games at £3 then thats £150 I would have spend. Thats how much the industry has lost. Not the £1750 it would have cost me to buy them from a shop when i don't have £1750 in my pocket for games.

So by my reasoning the industry hasn't lost 1.4 billion but more like 1.1 million.

Please note that I have never bought a pirated game but I still object to industries making these sorts of claims.


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## Ranbay (Jan 24, 2011)

I have never bought a pirate video game.....



I download them all


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 24, 2011)

it not as crazy as it seems thats only a few million games pirated


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## rover07 (Jan 24, 2011)

What are the figures for the Gaming industry robbing gamers by producing shit/boring unplayable games?


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 24, 2011)

rover07 said:


> What are the figures for the Gaming industry robbing gamers by producing shit/boring unplayable games?


 
let me get the sales figures for kane and lynch 2


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## agricola (Jan 24, 2011)

damnit I thought this was another eve thread


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## YouSir (Jan 24, 2011)

Shippou-Sensei said:


> it not as crazy as it seems thats only a few million games pirated


 
Yes it is, the number of pirated games could be ten times that and it doesn't mean that people would otherwise have paid for them. And, on past experience, if they had they'd have been deeply disappointed by most of the recent crop.


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## Monkeygrinder's Organ (Jan 24, 2011)

Presumably that's based on the full price as well. Does anyone actually pay that ever? I do buy most of the games I get but I've never paid anywhere near the supposed retail price.


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## Kid_Eternity (Jan 24, 2011)

rover07 said:


> What are the figures for the Gaming industry robbing gamers by producing shit/boring unplayable games?


 
Indeed.


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## pk (Jan 25, 2011)

I'm feeling bad about not paying Radiohead yet for "In Rainbows" now


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 25, 2011)

YouSir said:


> Yes it is, the number of pirated games could be ten times that and it doesn't mean that people would otherwise have paid for them. And, on past experience, if they had they'd have been deeply disappointed by most of the recent crop.


 
it's an unknown factor  but  i can imagine that worldwide there may well  have been a loss of sales  nearing a few million units

yeah  the loss of sales  may be partly to do with the trend in gaming to produce lacklustre titles  or titles with crappy drm  but  that doesn't mean the number are total bullshit 

although 1.4 billion does seem high


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## kabbes (Jan 25, 2011)

Shippou-Sensei said:


> it's an unknown factor  but  i can imagine that worldwide there may well  have been a loss of sales  nearing a few million units
> 
> yeah  the loss of sales  may be partly to do with the trend in gaming to produce lacklustre titles  or titles with crappy drm  but  that doesn't mean the number are total bullshit
> 
> although 1.4 billion does seem high


 

Indeed -- if they have lost the sales of a "few million units" then a loss of $1.4bn would imply that each game sale is worth about $1000.

Think "hundreds of millions" and you're more in the region of what they're claiming, I think.  Are they really losing hundreds of millions of actual, hard-cash _sales_?


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## stupid dogbot (Jan 25, 2011)

B0B2oo9 said:


> I have never bought a pirate video game.....
> 
> 
> 
> I download them all



And you are solely to blame.


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## Ranbay (Jan 25, 2011)

yeah i know


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## kabbes (Jan 25, 2011)

I've got to admit that other than the very rare DS R4 download (and not even that for a few years), I haven't pirated a game for over a decade.  It doesn't seem worth the effort.  As long as you don't have to get a game the MOMENT it comes out, you can get an amazing selection of 360, Wii or PS3 games for about a tenner.  And that'll give you 20+ hours of entertainment, which makes it good value compared with pretty much anything.

Set against that, the effort involved in pirating is really heavy.  And half the time they are trojan horses for all kinds of nasties in any case.  It's just not worth the hassle.


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## Idaho (Jan 25, 2011)

rover07 said:


> What are the figures for the Gaming industry robbing gamers by producing shit/boring unplayable games?


 
Hear hear!

I've got loads of pirated games. Most of which I don't play even though they are free - they are boring crap. Some are so bad I don't even bother downloading them. If I had to spend full price on games, I'd probably spend about £100 or so, and mostly get them second hand.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 25, 2011)

kabbes said:


> Indeed -- if they have lost the sales of a "few million units" then a loss of $1.4bn would imply that each game sale is worth about $1000.


 
i went on the assumption  that they were talking about triple a game sales  which  are marketed as $60 

140,000,000 / 60 = 2,333,333

wait... 140,000,000 is right for us billion right?


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 25, 2011)

as for me i don't pirate games but  i'm not a big gamer  

i still havn't played a lot of what i got on steam


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## kabbes (Jan 25, 2011)

Shippou-Sensei said:


> i went on the assumption  that they were talking about triple a game sales  which  are marketed as $60
> 
> 140,000,000 / 60 = 2,333,333
> 
> wait... 140,000,000 is right for us billion right?


 No, that's 140 million.

It's $1,400,000,000.


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## Ranbay (Jan 25, 2011)

kabbes said:


> I've got to admit that other than the very rare DS R4 download (and not even that for a few years), I haven't pirated a game for over a decade.  It doesn't seem worth the effort.  As long as you don't have to get a game the MOMENT it comes out, you can get an amazing selection of 360, Wii or PS3 games for about a tenner.  And that'll give you 20+ hours of entertainment, which makes it good value compared with pretty much anything.
> 
> Set against that, the effort involved in pirating is really heavy.  And half the time they are trojan horses for all kinds of nasties in any case.  It's just not worth the hassle.


 
not if you know what you are doing, i can get you a 1TB HDD with 485 wii games on it for £80, all you need is SD card to soft mod it... plug it in and your away.


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## kabbes (Jan 25, 2011)

It's the "know what you're doing" bit, though.  When I was a student, I had more time than money and that was fine.  Now my equation has swung the other way.  I don't mind spending a tenner for a game that will actually last me for three months!

It's funny too -- when I actually buy a game, I persist with it and complete it.  When I used to just download the latest game, I'd play it for an hour and then discard it.


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## Ranbay (Jan 25, 2011)

oh i agree, i did the PS3 the other month, cracked it and got 2TB worth of games running on it, tested them all, didn't fully play any of them.... I have a Jtag 360 that will run anything, but i have bought dead space 2 for my legit console this week as i support the games that i play online and fully etc.


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## stupid dogbot (Jan 25, 2011)

I dunno what it's like with the Xbox, but there's not much forthcoming on the PS3 that I'd be bothered about pirating even if I could, let alone buying.

LA Noire isn't out until May or so.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 25, 2011)

kabbes said:


> No, that's 140 million.
> 
> It's $1,400,000,000.


 ah... me and maths 

well  even going with that figure  and a more conservative $40  a game cost  that's still  35 million games pirated to get that figure 

now i dunno what time span they  are  using  but over a console generation it's not  that  unimaginable


still not  enough to justify some of the shit they do though   especially drm


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 25, 2011)

i found this to be a fairly balanced stance  put forward by people in the industry

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2653-Piracy


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## kabbes (Jan 26, 2011)

Shippou-Sensei said:


> ah... me and maths
> 
> well  even going with that figure  and a more conservative $40  a game cost  that's still  35 million games pirated to get that figure
> 
> ...



I'd be amazed if the conversion rate from games pirated to actual lost sales was as high as 10%.  Multiply your 35 million by 10 and you have to get at least a third of a billion games pirated.  A more realistic conversion rate of 1% would suggest that they are claiming 3.5 billion pirated games.

Or we could do it the other way round, start from the actual number of games pirated and convert that into TRUE lost sales figures.  So if there have been 250 million pirated games and a 1% conversion rate and an average sales figure of $40, you end up with $100m in lost sales.  I reckon the true loss of income is in this kind of order -- $50m to $250m.  And that's not a great deal when you compare it to the $1bn in sales that Call of Duty: Black Ops is reported to have made.

You also have to offset lost sales against continuing to reach your future customer base.  Pirating games for a few years as a kid kept me in the game and meant that I now spend a fair bit on them each year.  If they had lost me as a gamer during that period, I wouldn't be spending the money now.


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## mattie (Jan 26, 2011)

I think they've used similar accounting 'practices' as my tax returns.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 26, 2011)

damn...  the industry has some high numbers

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/107255-Piracy-Outpacing-Sales-by-4-1-Says-U-K-Game-Body



> U.K. Interactive Entertainment, the organization of U.K.-based videogame publishers, claims that for everyone one videogame sold in the country, four copies are pirated.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 26, 2011)

interesting case here too

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/new...ame-Dev-Credits-Piracy-for-Doubling-His-Sales


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## kabbes (Jan 26, 2011)

Shippou-Sensei said:


> damn...  the industry has some high numbers
> 
> http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/107255-Piracy-Outpacing-Sales-by-4-1-Says-U-K-Game-Body
> 
> ...


And, by implication, they are suggesting that the game sales of this country would _quintuple_ if only people would stop their nasty pirating.

Yeah, right.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 26, 2011)

to be fair to them they don't actually say  that... they never put a price on lost sales

but that's because you can't


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## kabbes (Jan 26, 2011)

Shippou-Sensei said:


> to be fair to them they don't actually say  that... they never put a price on lost sales
> 
> but that's because you can't


 


Gromit said:


> According to the gaming industry they are losing 1.4 billion in sales through piracy.


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## kained&able (Jan 26, 2011)

i tend to pirate pc games a lot less then everything else for some reason.

I have a few downloaded things but in the most part they have been bought.

No idea why.

dave


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## ruffneck23 (Jan 26, 2011)

i used to pirate loads, but been doing it less and less lately for some strange reason...


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## Ranbay (Jan 27, 2011)

I bought a real game yesterday, downloaded it the other week and had a blast on my chipped console, then saw it for £15 in the shops yesterday and picked it up for my legit console  that's a sale they wouldnt have got if i didnt download it lol


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 27, 2011)

kabbes said:


>


 


> We took a conservative position of saying if this is only 1:1 across all titles it would have a retail equivalent value of £1.45 billion," he told GamesIndustry. *"We did not say this was the loss to industry."*



my bolding


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## kabbes (Jan 27, 2011)

That's not fair, going to the source of the actual claim.  Boo.


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## Shippou-Sensei (Jan 27, 2011)

bwahhahahha


for me steam killed piracy so many games for under a tenner  and  no  need to hunt them down or mess about with cracks    

and for the hot new games  all i need to do is wait a year  or  untill a sale


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## Lo Siento. (Jan 27, 2011)

it's all bollocks anyway. My disposable income doesn't change because piracy exists or doesn't exist. I have a certain amount of money to spend on non-essentials, if it doesn't go on dvds (the main thing I download is films), it goes on trips to the cinema or clothes or something else I want and have to pay for. Some part of the economy gets it off me, somehow.


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