The True Cost of Game Piracy: 20% of Revenue, According To a New Study
- Reference: 0175228795
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/10/10/1846211/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study
- Source link:
The [2]study , published in Entertainment Computing, found cracks appearing in the first week after release led to 20% revenue loss, dropping to 5% for cracks after six weeks. Volckmann used Steam user reviews and player counts as proxies for sales data.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1875952124002532?dgcid=author#fn9
Your friendly neighborhood Spyware-man. (Score:2)
In the modern age, pirating software is not fun, easy, or safe for the run-of-the-mill gamer. To make it work, you have to find a reputable and stable supplier of illegal goods, which doesn't exist. It's like trying to find a dependable and trustworthy crack whore. So I am skeptical that fully one in five people who would otherwise pay seventy dollars for something are instead putting in the regular effort to maintain the Underworld Connections that allow them to avoid it.
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This study shows that when a crack lands game sales drop by about 20%, and the methodology looks pretty solid. So how do you explain the observed sales decline?
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Maybe piracy is easier than I imagine. Or maybe more people are willing to tolerate the inevitable chlamydia in exchange for a bargain. Or, hell, maybe that crack whore really liked you.
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I tried to determine what the methodology actually was, and since I don't have an Elsevier... subscription?... and don't know where to obtain a pirated copy of the PDF, and also since I'm not a professional statistician, I have a hard time knowing whether the methodology was good or not. (I must say that I am a little suspicious of the impartiality of an anti-piracy paper published on Elsevier--weren't they the ones that killed that Swartz kid?)
But the Ars Technica article does say that "a Denuvo-protecte
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Name a game that hasn't been cracked. I'd posit that it's the natural pattern of sales for products like this and they're conflating correlation and causation.
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According to the article, the study doesn't actually have sales data. The author estimates it based on player count and review count. TOTALLY SPECIOUS!
In all cases there is an ongoing decline in these numbers. And while we might see something that looks like a not-so-smooth dip, we don't really have any way to compare that to how big the dip would have been if the crack had not become available. It's another assumption.
There is also no way to see whether the dip is compensated-for by slower decline furt
Abandonware is pretty safe (Score:2)
There's lots of well-maintained websites that have good selections of abandoned games. Stuff that would cost you insane amounts on the secondary market for what's probably a drink coaster anyway.
The problem is gamers playing old games aren't blowing money on DLC in new games. It's just as much about controlling your access to all forms of media and culture as it is anything else.
Uh (Score:2)
"As time goes on, revenue goes down"
Yeah that applies to... Everything in media / entertainment. Sales drop week over week whether there's a crack or not.
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> "As time goes on, revenue goes down"
> Yeah that applies to... Everything in media / entertainment. Sales drop week over week whether there's a crack or not.
Sure... except the whole point is that this study examined the difference in decline with and without a crack, and it found that sales drop about 20% more when a crack becomes available.
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>> "As time goes on, revenue goes down"
>> Yeah that applies to... Everything in media / entertainment. Sales drop week over week whether there's a crack or not.
> Sure... except the whole point is that this study examined the difference in decline with and without a crack, and it found that sales drop about 20% more when a crack becomes available.
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article and I don't plan on doing so. How do they control for the actual quality of the game? Do they see sales decline faster when a crack is released for shitty games vs games that are highly rated by players?
Some piracy is avoidable (Score:2)
Some piracy is avoidable. It is performed only if reliable and convenient. Some people will buy if it is not so.
Some piracy is unavoidable, some people will never buy.
Why worry about the people who will never be your customers, focus on those you can get. Apply measure to make piracy unreliable or require more technical capabilities that the average user can muster up. I've been see such behavior for 40 years, it's pretty consistent. If you can't break the protection without the assistance of your CS
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Or people just don't bother buying the product. Starforce and Denuvo were things that did reduce piracy, but they also killed sales. All the while, GOG with zero DRM is turning a decent profit, and Steam isn't doing too shabby with their relative basic DRM.
Consoles are another item. Yes, they are 100% secure from piracy, and in good economic times, people will pay a scalper 2-3 times as much for a console as they go normally, not to mention pony up for all the microtransactions, mystery boxes, gachas, sk
Ironically, without piracy (Score:1)
I can't tell how on earth they managed they arrived at that conclusion. Neither the formal abstract nor the Ars article make it clear what methods estimate "20% loss"
We get a completely useless [1]graphic [arstechnica.net] that clearly just reflects the author's model for income-loss, but no real world data. Real data doesn't make neat little lines with sudden cut-offs like that.
The snippets of methodology that science direct determines us plebs are allowed to read don't even hint as to how that number was figured.
To be hones
[1] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/denuvostudy2-2048x1048.jpg
Photoshop (Score:2)
Let's be honest. Without piracy, Adobe Photoshop would not have such a foothold in the industry. Most people who learned how to use it early on pirated it and it was through that free education that allowed it to make its mark.
Just like a drug dealer. Give a little bit of it away to get them hooked and once they're hooked, you get them on the come back.
It literally cost nothing to Adobe for the pirates to do their dirty work. If anything it just made the software seem more "cool" because it was "copy protec
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Well, now we know you pirated it. I certainly did not, and I don't see any evidence for your assertions. Also, Photoshop was the only game in town for forever, so I don't believe your story for a moment.
20% of nothing is nothing (Score:2, Interesting)
They're not taking money from these companies because the pirates weren't going to buy the product in the first place.
Itâ(TM)s a flawed study with poor assumptions (Score:2)
They see on average that when a crack becomes widely public, sales drop by up to 19%. That is a tiny amount of income because the vast majority of sales already happen and the sales volume has significantly dropped.
The 20% cost figure comes from the assumption that the same parentage of people would pirate the software in the early stages of release. These are the people who buy it immediately.
They assume the number of people pirating the game will increase significantly if it happens sooner
so you're telling me (Score:2)
warez, gamez, etc is still a thing?
The people who use cracked software probably wouldn't pay for it if they had to. In my experience as a person who had a "Russian hacker" roommate 20 years ago, they want stuff they can't afford, so they steal it. They're never going to shell out the money to buy it, because they don't respect work/workers/the work put in by developers, artists and others who make the games possible.
They also use the excuse that they're not a corporate user and they're not making millions o
Wrong comparisons (Score:3)
Comparing revenue before and after DRM is cracked is a flawed (and self-serving) analysis.
it doesn't count reduced sales to customers who refuse to mess with the risk of DRM fucking up their OS installs
it counts so-called anomalies in sales after the initial launch; game sales are notorious for dropping precipitously after the initial few days for many reasons, including freshness, review feedback, other games or products releasing and competing for attention
it doesn't have any way of measuring customers who didn't buy at the offered price because it was a little too high, vs people who simply routinely pirate everything because they were never a potential customer at all
it doesn't have any way of measuring any increase in sales after customers learn of the game after seeing some hype from pirate players
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I think the point was comparing time to crack and how that impacts lost sales, but the article is poorly written and not entirely available.
If this is true, this would be in agreement with the "drm-lite" approach of locking new releases behind scummy unaudited encrypted performance robbing software but only for a few weeks. We've seen this approach from companies like Bethesda in the past with their NeoDoom releases - they know real fans won't tolerate this garbage but still don't want to lose too much of
Nonsense (Score:2)
I guess they didn't count Steam and online games.
From the cited study (Score:2)
> ...but there is little justification to employ Denuvo long-term
I would buy a lot more game once Denuvo removed.
Piracy is stealing from ships (Score:2)
They should really come up with a different term to talk about unaproved sharing.
That's nothing compared to (Score:3)
That seems pretty small compared to the physical, mental, social and economic loss that could be attributed to people playing their games in general.
19% of revenue on average (Score:3)
Article says 19% - why change it to 20% on the headline?
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Also, it's not the true cost.
It's the cost of privacy on a new cracked game.
Presumably the cost of zero friction piracy (not needing to find the crack) would be a little more.
But also the true cost, as in what it actually costs, is lower because not all games are cracked in the first week.
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You can't just look at a download of a cracked game and assume lost sale. I've downloaded cracked copies of stuff I legally purchased because the DRM was not working or otherwise killing performance. There's also any cases where the pirate copy is downloaded by someone in a country where the product isn't being sold for whatever reason or the version sold there is heavily censored by the government.
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Also, many people using pirated stuff would never pay a dime for it either because they can't afford it or consider it not worth.
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Yeah, +20% maybe. People who pirate the game often buy it later unless it sucks.
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> Yeah, +20% maybe. People who pirate the game often buy it later unless it sucks.
For a long time I used a cracked version of an audio editing program. Then the company lowered the price from $499 to $99 with no reduction of features or functionality. I immediately bought a copy.
The entire software industry is full of shit. Sell a good product at a fair price and people will buy it. No need for DRM.
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Also, many people using pirated stuff would never pay a dime for it either because they can't afford it or consider it not worth.
If you can't afford it yet pirate it, you're stealing it because if you could have afforded it you would have paid for it. The only way to know if it's not worth it is to pirate it, thus losing the sale.
There's always an excuse.
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Or pirate it and once you've established it's worth the money (and you now have the money) buy it.
Just saying, there are rarely hard-wired reasons why the right thing can't happen by various routes but the industry as a business thinks in terms of a predictable relationship between input effort and output results. Short term wins are rarely precursors to long-term wins. Leaving your customer feeling trapped into one way to subscribe to the experience you provide does not make a lifelong willing customer.
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And some would never pay a time for it because if they can't download game A cracked, they'll download game B instead.
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Or you want to try-before-you-buy - because you can't trust reviews -big-budget productions realise it's a challenge which does not correlate with the amount of money you throw at the task, to make something which is genuinely perceived as a quality experience - whereas, there's a very strong correlation between a response generated by paid-for reviews
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Or you want to try-before-you-buy - because you can't trust reviews - big-budget productions realise it's a challenge which does not correlate with the amount of money you throw at the task, to make something which is perceived as a quality experience - whereas, there's a very strong correlation between a response generated by paid-for reviews ....and the amount of financial inducement for the reviews
Apparently you're supposed to read the preview not just press the but
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I think the best measure would be to compare the demand curve over time for a game that gets cracked to the standard demand decay calculated based on recent history of comparable games.
If there's a measurable increase in the difference at the time of the crack release, there's your reasonable estimate of lost sales.
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I've often wondered if game and movie studios make their products available to download sites - once on there, the implication is that someone thinks the game/movie is worth pirating which adds a certain intangible additional value.
Of course I'm sure, in such a position, one would not want to come-forward and be seen to be making use of free advertising / hosting. Piracy is bad tm.
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I spent $150 on Jedi: Survivor, trying to get Steam Achievement notifications and DLC outfits to work without glitching.
What I wound up with was a precision timing focused game with abysmal frame rates spoiling the experience, Steam Platform features that still don't work, and a 16:10 monitor that cuts off the sides of the screen if I don't use a 16:9 letterboxed resolution. We're at the end of Moore's Law, and this game was "rushed" to avoid Disney's licensing costs, sacrificing respect for the systems o
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I know you can't look at downloads to check.
The true cost is less than 19% since that's the cost to the subset of games cracked within 1 week, and other games seem to only lose 5%.
Presumably the upper bounds is actually over 19% though since cracked within a week is some level of friction that free for all would have less friction.
This of course assumes the study is accurate, but it seems like a good faith effort to find true costs was made (and it's less than 19%).
The problem is you're playing old games (Score:2)
When you could be buying DLC in new games.
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It's also not the "true" cost because the methods used to calculate it are based on proxy data, not actual sales figures.
Usually when people talk about "true cost" they're talking about something other than dollars. Like "the true cost of piracy is the all the sailors with missing limbs and eyes, yarrrr"
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This is all just an excuse. Denuvo DRM is very expensive. It can easily cost $250,000 or more for a single game. Instead, use that money to lower the price of your game, and you'll sell more copies.
There are some people who will never buy your game. If they can't crack the DRM then they just won't buy it. They are not your target audience. Stop worrying about them.
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> Also, it's not the true cost.
It's irrelevant as the point is presumably to show there's external pressure to increase prices / make it easier for the lawmakers to persuade themselves that accepting bribes to encourage them to create new ways to enslave people using legalese and technology is actually in the public good.
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Piracy is largely a distribution problem. A game that sells for $20 USD, might only sell for 5 in Brazil. If you ask $20USD world wide, then anyone outside the US, who in their currency might see it as like like a weeks pay rather than like a half hours of pay.