That is something that bothers me whenever I read about piracy and illegal streaming numbers. The companies make it sound like it all comes from the one region like America when it is much more of a worldwide thing. I'm not saying the high majority of these downloads are from outside North America but some of it definitely is.
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TorrentFreak's List of Most Pirated Games in 2011
- Thread starter Mr. Enigma
- Start date
That is something that bothers me whenever I read about piracy and illegal streaming numbers. The companies make it sound like it all comes from the one region like America when it is much more of a worldwide thing. I'm not saying the high majority of these downloads are from outside North America but some of it definitely is.
Hahahaha holy shit. Wow.
Riposte
Member
Ah! That must be. Completely confused as to why Skyrim and MW3 are not the top two.
EDIT: Could it be pirates are slowly losing interest in Call of Duty!? Dead franchise
Well, Battlefield and FIFA are both bigger sellers overall than Skyrim, and Battlefield 3 had huge press on the PC version while FIFA for the first time was as good on PC as consoles, so that part isn't too surprising.
Portal 2 being over Skyrim is more interesting, but Valve does have an incredibly large PC audience.
I would guess that Skyrim is probably like 6th though.
Prime Blue
Member
A pirated game does not equal a certain purchase, we don't know if these are full downloads or partial ones, and there are many people that own the game and have to download it because they can't rip it to play it on emulators/experiment with certain stuff. So at least the Wii numbers are completely unreliable and not representative of real piracy.
Those are only torrent numbers, right?
I guess today even more people pirate by using filehosters, since it's much safer for the one downloading the file...or are torrents still the most popular filesharing method?
So in reality, the number of pirated copies is even higher than listet here, right? Damn...
I guess today even more people pirate by using filehosters, since it's much safer for the one downloading the file...or are torrents still the most popular filesharing method?
So in reality, the number of pirated copies is even higher than listet here, right? Damn...
TheExplodingHead
Banned
I think if the Crysis 2 #'s prove anything, it's that a mass majority of pirated copies =/= sales. With almost any statistic like this it's blatantly obvious that a huge portion of people who pirated the game would/could not otherwise legitimately purchase the game. So in that sense I see little reason to even give much theory to these statistics. All it really boils down to is not what percentile of sales were lost, it's how upset can pubs/devs/fans get who rely on sales and participation in the system. The relation to a real world sale is neither here nor there.
BladeoftheImmortal
Member
Even nintendos pirated copies have legs.
CouchMaster
Member
So people spent $100+ on an overpriced accessory but they won't buy $30 game for it?
TheExplodingHead
Banned
The really staggering thing about it is that for the most part newsgroups/FXP/Top/misc scene (aka the REAL source of piracy) is never really taken into account in these statistics. They just seem to pick up the numbers where the releases trickle down i.e. torrents/p2p/direct dl/etc. So the numbers are actually even higher, and we're not even really talking about elusive private torrenting places, either.
So the number partial or total, are much higher in reality.
PjotrStroganov
Member
Portal 2 has had time to make those number as it was released earlier.
You would have to put games on the same releasedate to make a valid comparison. You could be right but these numbers don't necessarily tell us that.
B_Rik_Schitthaus
Banned
Even if the conversion to real sales would be 10%, that's 400 000 lost sales.
What makes me sick is that torrents is only a small portion of the stealing pie, usenet, rapid share etc. It's a problem. A big problem. Then add used games sales... I'm pulling the number out my ass but I'm guessing a loss of at least 10 million sales for some of those games.
Yeah, I think this is lost on the people who claim these numbers are blown out of proportion.
These numbers are symptomatic of a larger problem.
CecilRousso
Member
Hey EA Sports, look. There is a PC audience for your sports games. You were wrong!
CadetMahoney
Member
I'm guessing places like Brazil are heavy on the 360 pirates because high end PC components to experiment with their Crysis 2 benchmarks would be pretty out of the price range for most "scumbags" down them sides.
Import?
The Hermit
Member
me neither... it wasn't localized, so its more Nintendo's fault than anything.
Palette Swap
Member
Wasn't it this year Nintendo claimed they enforced region locks to fight piracy?
Actually, yes you can. My friend is playing a pirated BF3, uses Origin and Battlelog etc. with no problems. :|
bigtroyjon
Member
So if someone's budget doesn't allow them to buy a game, is it fine to pirate it since there is no other way to play something they want?
Wii is region locked?
Yes because every single one of us PC gamers are pirates and are guilty for Crysis 2 being pirated. Therefore we have nothing to complain about as a customer when a new game comes out in the series. Do you even know how much the first game sold?
Also, as already stated, the game got leaked way before it got released. I guess alot of people downloaded it then to try it out before buying it.
MurkyZebra2417
Member
Sad numbers, nothing more to say.
Nuclear Muffin
Banned
Reggie: There you go! Xenoblade already got its US release via download, now shut up and fuck off!
I guess you could say......*puts on sunglasses*......that Xenoblade is Nintendos most succesful attempt at downloadable games.
YYEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!
Starwolf_UK
Member
I almost want to make a joke about "not even pirates care about Skyward Sword..." but that only makes sense in the context of the UK performance of the game.
I'd say the fact the 360 requires you to purchase hardware and solder it into the system vs the Wii needing an SD card and following a step-by a step guide is as important as the online point.
It is difficult to read fully into it. I mean how many downloads would Xenoblade have gotten in the first place? That in itself is an unknown number.
On the other hand you can't help but feel that NOAs behavior helped create this problem. NCL will have to decide some time weather they want NOE and NOA to act independently, leading to wildly different game releases which seems like a waste of localisation resources (then again NOE having the policy of FIGS or bust will further strain their teams leading to more instances of no London life).
Over 100,000 downloads of the patch (source) from the official site (tomato thinks it was at least double).
If you're lucky they might Americanise the spellings. I personally hope they do not so you can feel what we usually have to put up with. Oh, I love how inconsistent NOE can be about it too.
The Faceless Master
Member
even pirates want... oh wait, never mind.
Broder Salsa
Banned
What surprises me the most is the amount of BF3 downloads. Seriously the campaign is average at best, it's the multiplayer where it's at.
The Faceless Master
Member
and anyone who can play the pirated version can play the legit import.
The industry rarely investigates the relation to piracy and sales. It's both a complex topic to talk about academically, but an easy topic to talk about to shareholders and fake confidence about. Those two together give a pretty strong incentive to not seriously investigate piracy and how it impacts different business models. The one time it's been done and reported with open methodology that I'm aware of was for a small indie game and their result was that when they introduced DRM to eliminate piracy, their baseline sales of the game increased by 0.01% of their previous piracy rates. Since their DRM cost them far in excess of that amount, they stopped paying for their DRM and subsequently made more money. Obviously the rates will be different per game, but even having their percentage hundreds of times higher for AAA hyped up games still ends us up with single digit percentages of pirated copies as lost sales, aka tens of thousands of lost sales for multi-million seller AAA titles.
IchigoSharingan
Member
Reggie's response:
Reggie: but pirated software does not equal sales! So there is still zero demand for JRPGS! Hah! Notmyproblembitch.gif
slaughterking
Member
Of course it was localized. They surely downloaded the European version here.
And if they have the equipment to play pirated games they definitely have the equipment to play import copies, too. There's no way you can justify that.
Nuclear Muffin
Banned
Surely that has to be a better solution than having NOE localising entire games from scratch when there already is a superior US localisation being made? (Hello Advance Wars
Wow those Crysis 2 numbersEven if it was 10% lost sales that's ~400k, 5% is ~200k, significant numbers for the PC market. Why pirate COD and BF3? are they playing on custom servers or something? I doubt anyone would pirate BF3 to play the single-player lol
People probably pirate BF3 to test performance
IchigoSharingan
Member
Yes you can. Spent all the money on PC components.....out of money!
There, that was quick.
paperboywriter
Member
and this is just torrentfreak.
no, it's torrents, all public trackers
Broder Salsa
Banned
Huh? Torrentfreak is not a tracker as far as I know and the numbers is a estimate from them, so they have no doubt gone through all the big trackers and also considered the smaller ones too.
But for over half a year the choice available was Crysis 2, not Battlefield.
I'd actually be REALLY interested to know how long each of those people played the game, it wouldn't surprise me if for its outlandish numbers that it actually wasn't seriously played by all but a few. Then there's the question of WHERE they lived, though that's more easily answerable. And... yeah, hoping the piracy rates (or imports to a lesser degree) don't mean sales are too low for Xenoblade.
plus a lot of people in private trackers and private ftp's that are popular in europe... of course, none of them would buy games usually.
