CESA calculates gaming industry losses due to portable piracy

Neither does Wii or 360 though. I think it is just because PSP and DS are mainly auto cracked. Meaning you essentially plug and play. This means any cheap idiot can start downloading in seconds (just like the iphone jail braking). Wii and 360 take a bit more skill.

i thought the 360 needs the games to be burned to a disc... but then again, i'm not into the scene at all, especially since i don't have one, so i'm probably wrong.

the problem is... they did a study conducting the downloads of illegal games. Yes, you could argue that if I download a copy of GTAVII, they would be down $60. The problem is, if I didn't download that copy, I still wouldn't have bought it and they still would be down. Only difference is, next time they release a new game, I wouldn't have played the old one so I wouldn't be hooked enough to buy any of their games. Alternately, I would borrow from a friend instead when he's done. even if they prevent the piracy, most of them are still games that I wouldn't have bought in the first place.

They're assuming that all of the games that were downloaded illegally, would have been purchased if the option for piracy wasn't there.

Pirates probably download much more, moreso because they can, than because they really want to play each game that they've downloaded.

I love it when people say "I'm downloading this PC game just to try it out". So if you do indeed like the game, then you'll spend the time uninstalling it, deleting the isos off your computer and you'll drive to the store and pay $50 bones on it? No, you'll probably keep playing it and claim that DRM is bad.

0_0 For reals? 6000? Damn man, pirates don't fuk around.

which is why they said "rough" estimate. which, to the best of my knowledge, translate to "somewhere close to but not exactly". smh

I guess some poeple are missing the point here
If you want to pirate only one game, you are perhaps better off having to download 6000.
The figure could be 6000 times smaller. ($69 million?) rather smaller

And even then, the whole 'its not stolen money' argument....

@ HPJ

once again, i repeat. "rough estimate" not "exact estimate". it doesn't matter if it would 6000 times smaller or 6000 times bigger. the fact remains that it is a "rough estimate". unless I'm miss understanding the meaning of "rough estimate". i don't know, joystiq poster's you tell me. am i miss understand he meaning of the word "rough estimate"?

Gennosuke-sama, if your definition of rough estimate can be out 600,000% I would rather not have it.

Hahaha Draco that made my day, that is why i love coming to joystiq

Did you guys know you can ignore to download parts of a torrent?

But why would you if you're pirating anyway?

Wow, really? No one's said it? Ok....

IT'S OVER SIX THOUSAND!!!!!!!!

Well even if you only want one of the games, you steal stole all 6000 so that is what they are calculating. If you stole a Ferrari filled with diamonds and gold just because you just wanted the car then you still stole the diamonds and gold along with it.

Sure practically you only wanted the one or two games but the industry is serious on cracking down on pirates so they account for all that they can so that they can punish pirates as much as they can.

@maemikemae
That would be a valid argument, if the company actually lost something when you made a copy of their game.
The best a illegal copy of a game will cause is a lost sale, copying something that you will never use, and therefor never buy, is nothing. The game company is not sitting there with less copies to sell, as there is a infinite supply of copies available.

Steeling a car filled with diamonds, will make the owner of that car have one less car and one set of diamonds less. This is not the case when you make a copy of something.

Created the Cell Processor for one.

The difference is for the PS3 you either need to use blank blu-rays which cost around 20$, or you you can put it on the hard drive which takes up over 50 gbs. All that and most people do it on 360 because it's apparently much easier.

I'm confused, what's your point?

It's like me saying what has the Xbox360 done for the Xbox? I don't know? Is this some trick question?

I think Newegg has Blu-ray discs for $2 each. A burner is $250.

Disc based-game piracy on the PS3 seems like it's near 0%. The only "piracy" you can do on it is the PSN stuff, where you can game share the DLC and PSN games with 4 other PS3s.

once again the only thing that keeps piracy away from the ps3 are blue ray burners, they are not cheap enough yet, wait two more years and then we´ll see how pirate-proof is the ps3....also once again i think this is more a "let´s scary everybody here with huge numbers " than reality, it´s true you can get all the games of nds... do you really believe that somebody is going to play and finish over 6000 games??? not even with the whole life of all the people that is writing here. Many of those pirate roms are keep as a collection, just to say: look! i have them all... I remember a guy who claimed to have over one million albums on mp3 format, when he was asked if he has heard the songs he said: not once. So is that REALLY a lost??? when a game is not played or when you get a game that is from japan and you can´t get it anyway else is that really piracy??? i think they are exploding once again with paranoia... but at least today it was the nds and the psp, instead of the p.c.........

The lack of ps3 piracy has nothing to do with the media. There's just no way to get the ps3 to play bd-r media yet. Same way that modding a 360 does nothing but allow non-official Microsoft discs to work.

Once that's figured out, you'll see a lot more of it.

My blu ray burner was 135 at microcenter and they have 5 pack blu ray for $10. and BD-RE for 6.99. the prices are cheap enough people just havent found out yet

it´s possible to download images for the ps3 and play them directly from the hd, the thing is that is not very popular the idea of downloading a game and the deleting it because you don´t have a place to keep it (burn it)
blue rays might be cheap in the usa but remember that the rest of the world is not the same, here in mexico a blu ray burner costs more than 300 dollars, and each blue ray disc is more than 15 or sometimes 20 bucks....
and that argument that modding a 360 does nothing but allow non-official Microsoft discs to work and that´s it. Well once again somebody is not really informed or people wants to hide the true, i have a friend who has a modded xbox, the new systems work so good that he is able to play games on xbox live and he has NEVER been banned, the only restriction is that you should not try to play online with a game that is not officially released, but right now the xbox is as pirated as the ps when the first mod chip was created, of course microsoft doesn´t want it to look like that, but the reality is completely different.

@hunter

"it´s possible to download images for the ps3 and play them directly from the hd, the thing is that is not very popular the idea of downloading a game and the deleting it because you don´t have a place to keep it (burn it)"


No, it's not.

Yes, but only a very small minority do that.

Actually a large majority of people do it because they can. Same as music. People download an album for a single thinking they'll get to the rest of the tracks but never do.

Same for DS/PSP games. They're so small, might as well stockpile and what seems interesting. The fact that it takes significantly less time to download a game then it does to actually play through it, and you got a crazy insane backlog.

So my guess is that their numbers are purely based off of downloads, and don't take any account of "demo", "collection", or "archive" download games not actually hurting sales. It's easy so people do it. Doesn't mean that they play them or intended on buying.

That's true. I Just met a forumite the other day who hasn't even begun to play ME 2, and it isn't because he didn't buy it (or "get it", or whatever). A working person's life is so busy there's not really all that time to finish all the games (let alone a single, actually).

Instead of downloads and exaggerating it to justify their stupid DRM methods, they should factor in the age group that actually HAVE all the time to play all those games (around 22-minus), the group that can afford it, the demographic that would buy it, blablabla all that (there are more factors to consider to be accurate).

I use to download Wii games when I had a chipped Wii, but like Punkrawk said, I mostly just downloaded them because I could. I never really got around to playing any Wii games other than SMG because I was constantly playing games I'd paid for on other systems. They can't really be counted as lost sales since I basically queued them up because they were there and never played them.

@ Alive

You're completely right. Most people who pirate wouldn't buy one tenth or even one percent of the stuff they steal. These numbers are complete bullshit. Yes piracy is bad. Really bad. But equating these downloads to a monetary value and saying "this is how much we lost" is just ridiculous.

Either way, I'm pretty sure the 3DS and/or PSP are gonna have built in 3G and are gonna require you to connect online before you play a game, just like that Ubisoft DRM thing. Either through Wi-Fi, 3G, USB, Bluetooth, etc. If anything even close to that happens I probably wont ever end up buying either of them.

That's exactly what makes all this bullshit. Game sales are up, not down. More games are being sold than ever. Sure, pirating was harder in the days of NES, SNES, etc. but sales weren't as strong as they are today. If pirating really was the bane of the industry the numbers would be different.

People like to point towards piracy for the PSP woes, but what about the Wii, 360, and DS? Then look at the PS3, which isn't pirated and is a multimedia king, but yet sales all around are lackluster. People like to say that PC gaming was hurt badly, but the funny thing is that as soon as publishers wanted to believe that - like in the case of the PSP, they stopped supporting it and thus created a snowball effect. However, if any platform CAN blame piracy it could be the PC if it weren't for their B.S DRM. Which I feel pushed people towards it in the late 90s, early 2k.

Anyhow, as stated, a downloaded game is not a lost sale. Probably 50-75% of what's pirated could be a lost sale, but also many people pirate games they wouldn't otherwise buy. And it's not like pirating a movie, you have to buy something to pirate on consoles and handhelds, so of course there'll be more downloads, it makes people secure their investment. Instead of them only consuming what they would actually buy.

Piracy needs to be ignored, quite frankly. DRM and other control measures have shown to fail time and time again. So all companies do is waste OUR time and THEIR money on bullshit schemes that do nothing but hurt their image. (Look at what they're doing to Blu-Rays now. Fricking pointless DRM) Hell, the most effective tool is one that they don't do anymore and that's marketing awareness. I actually think it would work better today than it did in the past. If there were a bigger stigma against piracy there would be less of it since you'd lose the social aspect of it.

What people want to do with software is irrelevant to bullsh*t figures like this. Software companies and even some politicians seem to beileve that pirating software literally creates money out of thin air...money that should belong to them. It's convenient, but sadly fictitious.

Some people pirate DS games to see if the games are any good. That’s down to Nintendo for not doing demos.

You can get demo's through the Wii.. and everybody has one of those somewhere...

But if even 10% of those would have been solid purchases, that equates to over 4 billion dollars, which is more than you could shake a stick at.

True. But I'd be very surprised if the number of sales lost to illegal downloads is anywhere NEAR 10%. I'd be surprised if it were even in the neighborhood of 0.1%.

Mlahey that's on the nail.

I mean they're basically saying that if piracy miraculously ceased tomorrow entirely, there'd suddenly be a $41.7 billion increase in sales. Seriously?

"Holy crap" indeed Joystiq. Holy Crap. What utter idiocy.

Agreed. I've never pirated a product I would've otherwise purchased if it wasn't available illicitly. If I think something is worth buying, then I buy it.

Of course, the real dilemma is that there can never be an accurate study done to determine how much money is actually lost. It's just not possible. All that these pseudo-scientific studies do is prompt more and more restrictive DRM from scared producers, when in reality the impact of piracy is a great deal less than the $41.7 billion stated above.

Much truth in this comment,It's like a Japanese-only games,they put all these crazy piracy figures,but the game was only avalaible in Japan!,if you don't live there and don't have a way to import,you have to pirate.

Im sure they don't take each game's price into account either. IE - Patapon was $20 at launch. They probably do a general MSRP price for each game ($40 for PSP, $35 for DS due to first party games). That obviously doesn't reflect the numbers lost accurately. Then there's also the part where people buy used or bargain bin titles for a fraction of retail.

"Nonavailability of the product"
Especially in Ukraine. Xbox's aren't officially sold. Modified ones are. All Xbox 360 games on shelves are pirated. Microsoft's position: we won't enter the market until piracy goes down. They are basically forcing us to pirate (I don't, I'm going to do the honorable thing and buy a PS3), and so creating a deadlock.

@Cloud_ST
Even if the game in question is translated into english and is eventually sold outside of Japan, there's still a delay that will cause the most dedicated fans to pirate the game, even though they will undoubtedly buy it when it comes out.
Take, for example, Pokemon Heart Gold and Soul Silver. They came out in Japan months before they were released in the US, so people who really cared about the game got a pirated copy until they could get their hands on the real thing.

"rough estimate" not "exact estimate". seriously people, READ!