this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Companies spend far more on anti piracy for single-player games than they would make if all those stolen copies were legit sales. It's a power thing
People always say this, but has there ever been a good proof? Bear in mind, individuals are often not truthful when stating “I wouldn’t have bought it anyway”.
The closest I’ve seen was a sports game; since they release each year with updates, sales numbers are often steady and reliable. The year they added an antipiracy measure no one could breach, their sales jumped by a significant factor, supposedly because they had pirates now pressured into buying it. With a bit more time, I could find the article link.
Here's an article that ars just posted yesterday in fact about that.
Tldr some group states that piracy affects company's bottom lines by up to 20%. They also state that since game sales figures are almost never published, they had to derive a replacement by using reviews and active player count. To me that just kinda invalidates the whole thing because who the hell knows what the actual relationship is between those variables, and especially when it's making such a gargantuan claim that pirates are taking such large chunks of cash from developers pockets. If companies want to show they really are being hampered by piracy to such a degree, they should post their actual books and stop hiding key information.
I don't doubt plenty of pirates are doubting the legitimacy of those studies, if just for selfish "my entertainment relies on my not believing this" reasons.
That said, companies also don't have much to gain by winning internet arguments. Their exact sales data is often very valuable information - something they actively work to safeguard. Thus, you only get vague selective metrics when they want to show harm from pirates.