Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately

[wraggster]

An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting:
"iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). 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. 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."

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/0...ore-Accurately

[VampDude]

The iPhone i flawed, because there is not an unhackable DRM on the content meaning one person can buy an app then share it with over a thousand other users.

[John Vattic]

are there any video games these days worth pirating?

:thumbup:

[JushinLiger]

Mr Vattic has a very valid point. DS games are, on average, poor. There are exceptions otherwise I wouldn't have kept my DS for so long.

[PoorKingz]

are there any video games these days worth pirating?

:thumbup:

Maybe PSP or even some DS games, not for iPhone though. Why pirate a game that only cost a few bucks?

[Eviltaco64]

are there any video games these days worth pirating?

:thumbup:

Yes: