CESA calculates gaming industry losses due to portable piracy

Ok here we go again:

I in no way condone piracy - software pirates may rank far below international terrorists on the villainy scale, but they are still opportunist scumbags, no doubt about it.

But...

Simply adding up the number of downloads from piracy sites and blindly assuming every single download is a lost sale? No way. Only a fraction of those downloads would be a genuine loss. Think about it: Software pirates download hundreds, sometimes even thousands of games and movies each year. There is no way they could afford to buy all of those, especially considering that most piracy takes place in the poorer regions of the world.

Also, there is a rather good chance that some of the piracy is actually to demo the product before buying, when no actual demo is available. I know several people who do this on a regular basis. Included in this group would be those who simply download a crack after buying the product to get around annoying DRM.

There have been studies done on the iPhone which shows that 80% of the software downloads for it were pirated, but only 10% of all iphones would be able to play the pirated content (jailbroken). That means, that a very small part of the "customer" base is downloading huge quantities of pirated content, and there is no way people like that would ever have bought the product anyway.

So stop the false accusations. Down with piracy, yes, but don't lie just to get your message out.

Would the pirates have bought the games if they couldn't pirate them? I think many wouldn't. So it isn't how much the gaming industry *lost*, its how much they just didn't make.

I can't blame them for trying to figure out what they're losing to piracy but there really isn't any way to tell. Like others have said, the # of downloads doesn't equal the # of lost sales, but the actual # could be higher or lower. I know someone that has recently been burning copies of Wii games for all of their Wii owning friends and family. Now I'm sure these friends and family members wouldn't have purchased all of the games they got for free but I do know they were planning on buying some games, like SMG2. So the pirate only downloaded the games once, but he's caused several others not to buy.

41 billion huh?

So at about 30 dollars per game, that's 1.366 billion games.

And that is believable how?

I still believe that video game prices are the biggest culprit. What these companies need to realize is that prices that go upwards of $60 is a lot to shell out on one product for the average person. Here in Canada, new DS games cost $40 and new PSP $45. Now what if you spent that money and then found out that the game sucks or that you don't like the game(even despite having a demo because a demo is not representative of the full game)? That's basically $40 down the drain, so buying games is a pretty big investment.

You cut launch prices of PSP and DS games by half, and I bet that, if the game gets good reviews, launch sales will more than double.

Well some commenters mentioned this earlier and i will say it again. Most pirates are not from countries were Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft sell official products. So really, if our countries do not exist for them, i can not fathom how they lose money from us.

Oh yeah, piracy sucks!

I wonder if the car industry tries to tell shareholders that sales would be higher if people weren't stealing cars, because all those people that steal cars would of course by one otherwise.

Who's the real thief? The one who can't afford 40$ DS games or the one who sell DS games at 40$?

I agree that every pirated game doesn't equate to a lost sale but the argument that some pirate because they couldn't afford to buy it is wrong. So if I can't afford to buy milk, its ok to go to my local grocery store and steal a gallon?

No software association benefits from saying they are making money hand over fist. They want sympathy, not to encourage more theft.

I am convinced that if you added up the amount of money the entire software industry makes, and the amount of money the entire software industry claims that it loses, it would be a number that exceeds the possible wealth of all human beings that use software.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

What should really be upsetting us all is how shit like this is used to confuse and mislead the general public. A lot of things have to change before things in this world will be right, that's for sure. F*&%.

This is poor reporting and parroting numbers that don't make sense. Every download is not a lost sale. The GAO was asked by the movie/ recording / game industry interests to look into their reports and give them credence. The nice way of putting is they did not agree with these studies.

You also have the fact that their solution of more restrictive copyright laws doesn't stop pirates and that the money made based around the legal exceptions to copyright make a great deal more money than that which the copyright 'protects'.

You can combat piracy by adding value to purchasing, not by making up fake numbers and yelling from a podium.