CESA: 5.2 million illegal downloads of Dissidia: Final Fantasy in Japan

Anyone know if these reports that have been flowing in, take into account the increase in PSP sales? I mean there is about a year and a half difference in time between the releases of Phantasy Star Portable and Phantasy Star Portable 2! If PSP sales increase, it would make for more systems to pirate on. They should also factor in the increase in ease and decreased risk involved in making piracy possible...I would assume the jump from hard-modding a PSP to Soft-modding would drive up piracy alone. Take away the fear of destroying the PSP or killing the warranty and you get more pirating! I don't know if it ties in, but the introduction of completely digital copies of games could also potentially increase these numbers.

These reports always seem to make it sound like more and more people are getting into the idea of pirating games...I on the other hand believe that the chunk of society willing to pirate remains constant! The only thing that changes is access and opportunity.

If you were a heroine addict and someone plopped you into a part of the world where there is nothing to abuse for hundreds of miles...Could you still use? Take the same situation and have a dealer on every corner and then things look different!

even if we stop buying the games on release date, do you really still think they would bring back PC's games? I don't think so, I can see the game no longer being on the shelves and we would only be able to find it used.

Fatal Frame 4 in Japan did just that. Which Nintendo published.

I doubt the sales of Zelda twilight princess are still super high since launch, but it's still there at full price on store shelves.

Most Nintendo games continue to sell well after release but not all, those ones, just disappear.

Plus, most Nintendo games rule, I don't mind buying full price for a really good game. Which I've already stated. *can't wait for Metroid Other M* YAHHHHHHH!

SONY,CESA
DEAL WITH IT

-the internet

Oh well, the game isn't very good anyway.

Not to mention that the UMD didn't work on CFW for a while, so the only option was to either rip your own UMD or download it.

Wow that's impressive, sounds excessive though..

It's only a matter of time until games start including "Don't Pirate Games!" messages at the beginning like movie theaters/DVDs.

The irony will be that if you do pirate the games, you won't have to see them, and only those who purchased the product end up suffering. Just like movies/DVDs.

So does this mean that they arn't going to make a Dissidia 2 ?

Cause I seem to remember a promise(threat) that the only way they would make a Dissidia 2 is if the first one sold like hotcakes.

Then again I still havn't bothered to pick up the first game ..... was tempting when it was on sale @ GS for like 19.99 but not quite tempting enough ..... OOoooh its down to 19.98 ..... but still not quite there =P

The results are far from accurate. As already stated, it doesn't deal with P2P but neither does it deal with Newsgroups and sites like megashare, rapid share etc.

With so many distrubution methods these reports really aren't worth it.

Perhaps reducing the price of digital distrubution would be a starting point (staring at all major companies here).

The question that should be answered though is: Was the Dissidia project a failure or a success? Did it make money, or did it not?

I often question whether those who pirate these games would have otherwise BOUGHT them if that was their only option. With these statistics that's what they are assuming here, which is ludicrous to me.

To me, I feel the pirate is FAR more likely to either rent the game, wait for a friend to get one to play theirs, or wait for the price to drop. I'd bet a very small minority of those who pirate would actually have bought the game at full price if that was the only option they had. Which means, in the end Dissidia's bottom line shouldn't have been hurt nearly as much as they are saying.

While piracy of PSP games is high in Japan, at the same time the sales for the PSP and PSP games are always at the top of the charts. I wonder what is going on over there. People buy the game and pirate it as a backup?

Perhaps it is increased sales of the PSP units but here is the thing, around the world there are 59 million different units out, that's almost as much as the 360 and PS3 combined. Yet launch games, like Wipeout Pure, have better first week sales than most that come out right now. I don't know if anyone pirated on the PSP back in the day that remembers when you needed GTA: LCS to access the flash of the system, but when that crack came out, it became the greatest game sold on the system, that was the spike for it. Same thing happened to Lumines, as soon as a crack got released it nearly doubled in units sold. Hell right now, when a big game comes out (Grand Tourismo as an example) there are 500k different seeds for it on demonoid, far more than day one sales. Those that don't think piracy effects the PSP are blind, that is what killed the Dreamcast, it's what's killing PC right now and it's what hurt the PSP so badly software wise. The lack of titles that you see are a completely direct result of it, it might not be you or any other decent pirates who supposedly pay for the game that they got for free afterwords, but the millions of people who don't know that much about tech or could care otherwise who have figured it out either through the internet or their friends, they are losing the software companies money. Then when you go to the European markets and even Japan, piracy is a huge blackmarket business over there, and the easier the system is accessible to it, the more likely it'll be effected.

I like how Joystiq posted this like we care.

More made up numbers on Piracy. Huzzah!

Actually, it would really be nice if Joystiq actually did some reporting on issues like this. This 'Study' is fairly ridiculous:

1. Every infringing download is counted as a lost sale
2. CESA took the numbers for Japanese handheld game piracy and multiplied it by four to get the worldwide numbers, because CESA "believes" Japan represents 1/4 of the market
3. Deviations in piracy levels in different world regions were not taken into account
4. Pricing for games per unauthorized copies were ALL based on the initial release price, not taking into account pricing fluctuations of games over time

Seriously, look at number 2...That is just totally made up all together.

Please, either don't post studies or present all the components involved.

Still doesn't address the gap between piracy and actual buying intent.

Whats the difference from stealing a game then stealing a TV. Are we debating that since a game is a digital object that it does not have the same qualities as stealing something physical as a TV. Digital objects like a game still have a cost to them for development. We know certain games can cost over 50 million or more just for the development of the game not including distribution, advertising etc. Are those cost not the same as the cost for a physical object like a TV.

A TV definitely has the physical components that have a cost but then it also have a RD cost, including the advertising etc.

I guess the point I am trying to make is that weather it's digital media or physical object, there is a cost in the development and creation of both. Piracy does hurt a company and a industry because those cost do not get recouped if the rate of piracy continue to escalate.

It appears that Piracy is becoming the norm where more and more people do it because they can, it's easy and there is no penalty. Excuses mean nothing because everyone has a excuse to do wrong when there is no penalty to worry about.

The key here is in the absents of piracy, people would find a reason to purchase the games they want instead of finding excuses to steal what they want. People would actually "SAVE" up money for those games like people do with physical objects they want but do not have the guts to just take.

I do not know about anyone else but the people I know that pirate digital media do not purchase it if they like it unless there is a component within the media that they cannot access unless they purchase it (multiplayer).

@Jeremy
I believe the reason such studies count each pirated copy as a lost sell is because the person who take the time to pirate a game is interested enough to go through the trouble of playing the game is a lost sell.

People trying to justify the piracy always try to make the distention that the person who pirated the game would not have purchase the game which cannot be determined. What can be determined is that by pirating the game, there is no incentive for that person to purchase the game because they have it.

I guess the figures should say potential lost of sells which of course would be more accurate.

Weather that person would have bought the game or not does not matter because that's way to subjective. In the absence of piracy the interested pirate would have to make two choices, either buy the game or not. With piracy, there is no choice, you have the item and there is nothing that is making you purchase the item no matter how good the quality of the item is but your own moral code and even then I would say most do not.

As Nelson would say: "HA HA".

. . . and 5.19 million copies of Dissidia deleted an hour later.

:)

(sorry, but Dissidia sucks)

thing I don't like about this is to say who didnt go buy the game after it came out? Sometimes people play a japanese version just to play it and then buy the US version so these stats arent really that high.