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Tiny Build's 'Punch Club' celebrates milestone of being pirated over 1,600,000 times.

M

Mushroomer25

Member
This crossed my inbox this morning, and thought it provided some interesting statistics into the realities of game piracy (especially regarding localization).

Today we celebrate Punch Club crossing 300,000 units sold – a huge milestone for tinyBuild and Lazy Bear Games. Being number geeks, we planted plenty of analytics into all versions of the game to figure out the exact numbers of… pirated copies of Punch Club. We even went further and decided to see how localization might impact piracy, and have some interesting regional stats.

Piracy is rampant on PC
With Punch Club, it’s evident that piracy runs rampant on PC. Note that I’m using the overall PC sales, including DRM-free versions and Steam key resellers. This also includes Mac and Linux versions, but let’s keep it simple and name it PC.

Quick-facts
Punch Club has been pirated 1.6 million times
1,137,000 times is for PC / Mac / Linux
514,000 times on Mobile
90% of mobile piracy is Android
Click to expand...

vPd5Z5F.png


We launched without Chinese or Portuguese. China (green graph) started growing on its own right after launch, they were pirating the English version with no problem.
Meanwhile as soon as we added Portuguese, Brazil (yellow) skyrockets in number of installs…. but not in number of sales. Brazil likes to pirate localized games.
Click to expand...

HzdJWoM.png


You can see Germany having the highest bought-rate, with United States and France following. We can definitely say localization into French and German paid off. However in absolute numbers it’s nothing.
Click to expand...

The obvious takeaway is that piracy is real and massive, but we all know this. Quick recap:
Punch Club appeared on torrents within hours of launch
For every sale on PC there are 4 pirates
For every Android sale there are 12 pirates
For every iOS sale there are 2 pirates
While it’s difficult to fight piracy — and most DRM-enforced ways are horrible for the paying customers — it’s hard to deny it has an impact. Looking back I believe what we should’ve done is enabled cross-platofrm saves on launch. This way people who pirate the PC version may have converted better into buyers on mobile or vice-versa.
Click to expand...

You should seriously localize your games for Western Europe
The most interesting conclusion though is Localization and its impact. Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate.
Click to expand...
 
X

Xater

Member
I just saw it as well. Interesting stuff and also very sad.

Germany having the lowest piracy rate made me wonder though if it really just is a case of localization.
 
D

DownGrader

Member
And, of course, my country is again in the shit list of software thieves :(

Great thought on how multi-platform launch can hurt potential pirates-to-buyers conversion.
 
O

oti

Banned
Germany, saving the industry one game at a time. You are welcome. Now go and buy some German games will ya!
 
BennyBlanco

BennyBlanco

aka IMurRIVAL69
I think people pirated this out of spite for a while because they wouldn't release the game until a "twitch plays punch club" run ended and it took a long time. It was already on torrent sites while this was happening.

FWIW the game is pretty good. Probably a better mobile game than a PC game.
 
C

Cowie

Member
Sort of a scary statistic, that having a portuguese language version /increased/ piracy. I'd hope nobody takes that to heart when making considerations about localizing games.
 
S

shotgunbob04

Member
Very cool breakdown. 1.6 mil pirated vs 300k bought. Insane.

I wonder what the amount of time played on average for people who bought the game is vs the average time played for pirate players.
 
H

Holygriever

Banned
Cowie said:
Sort of a scary statistic, that having a portuguese language version /increased/ piracy. I'd hope nobody takes that to heart when making considerations about localizing games.
Click to expand...

It spiked the piracy, but didn't affect the sales numbers in a negative way. So it's not like localizing to portuguese = making LESS money.

But eh, still horrible.
 
Sorc3r3r

Sorc3r3r

Member
Nahhh, the pirates wouldn't have bought the game nonetheless, instead with their precious work of expanding for free the user base encouraged game sales with a great word of mouth.
 
D

Dineren

Banned
BennyBlanco said:
I think people pirated this out of spite for a while because they wouldn't release the game until a "twitch plays punch club" run ended and it took a long time. It was already on torrent sites while this was happening.

FWIW the game is pretty good. Probably a better mobile game than a PC game.
Click to expand...

I heard there was a pretty terrible amount of grinding required. Was that ever adjusted? I've thought about buying it several times, but that always put me off. The GAF OT wasn't encouraging, but it hasn't had a post since January.
 
C

Corpekata

Banned
Looking at torrent sites, there's a lot of 1.1, 1.4, etc versions of the game out there. I would bet their numbers are inflated a bit by people updating their pirated copies.
 
Z

zephervack

Member
It's gonna take a long time to change the mentality of Brazil, Russia,etc. Software was out of reach for them for so long that piracy got ingrained, its just something you do if you have this hobby.

I'm glad nuveem and the like are paving the way though.
 
T

Tagyhag

Member
Honestly, I'm surprised it sold and was pirated that much, it's an ok game at best.

Hopefully they made a profit on it though.
 
BibiMaghoo

BibiMaghoo

Member
DownGrader said:
And, of course, my country is again in the shit list of software thieves :(
Click to expand...

For what it's worth, there are reasons for this to be the case, and it is not because a countries population had a meeting and decided to pirate everything.

Interesting though for sure.
 
N

Nzyme32

Member
Curious about how this varies vs the quality of the game (where some may be uncertain about a purchase and choose piracy instead) and the nature of the game if, for example, it is a game seeing constant iteration, where there are sizeable benefits to purchasing (eg Cities Skyline)
 
T

tearsintherain

Member
shotgunbob04 said:
Very cool breakdown. 1.6 mil pirated vs 300k bought. Insane.

I wonder what the amount of time played on average for people who bought the game is vs the average time played for pirate players.
Click to expand...

Thats the important stat missing, while its just anecdotal I think a lot of these pirates just download EVERYTHING and keep them like some sort of archive. What percentage of people who pirate actually play the game they pirate? No idea, but its nowhere near 100% just like nowhere near 100% of people who actually buy games even play them - but thats not that important, since the publisher/dev has gotten the money at that point.
 
M

Messofanego

Banned
I mean, I'd understand if there was rampant piracy in my home country of Pakistan or some Arabic countries where Steam isn't a thing, but doesn't Brazil have Steam? How are the prices, are they localised or exorbitant?
 
M

Maedhros

Member
synce said:
So poorer countries are more likely to pirate? Shocking statistics
Click to expand...

Haha

BTW, R$20 is very expensive for some. But in Brazil, it doesn't matter how much it costs... most people will always try to look for a free alternative, in this case, piracy.
 
F

funroll-loops

Member
Mushroomer25 said:
HzdJWoM.png
Click to expand...

This pie chart bothers me. It says it's listing percent per country, but the percentages appear to add up to 100% like a normal pie chart, which would suggest they're plotting some sort of relative percentage that probably doesn't exist. I can't figure out what it's saying. The percentages on the chart don't actually match what I calculated from the figures in the blog article. In any case it makes me a little suspicious about how much they actually understand about the rest of the data in that article.
 
J

Jarsonot

Member
funroll-loops said:
This pie chart bothers me. It says it's listing percent per country, but the percentages appear to add up to 100% like a normal pie chart, which would suggest they're plotting some sort of relative percentage that probably doesn't exist. I can't figure out what it's saying. The percentages on the chart don't actually match what I calculated from the figures in the blog article. In any case it makes me a little suspicious about how much they actually understand about the rest of the data in that article.
Click to expand...

It makes me suspicious of the data period. Do they understand how to collect meaningful data, or are they just grabbing whatever numbers and using those without any interpretation/allowances? Basically don't trust numbers unless you know how they got them. BUT: I haven't read the article yet, so maybe that's covered.
 
M

Mohasus

Member
Messofanego said:
I mean, I'd understand if there was rampant piracy in my home country of Pakistan or some Arabic countries where Steam isn't a thing, but doesn't Brazil have Steam? How are the prices, are they localised or exorbitant?
Click to expand...

It is just the mentality here. For example, Dark Souls III price just rose from 100 BRL to 250 BRL. 90% of the posters are saying that they are just going to pirate the game thanks to this.

The thing is, if they really had an intention of buying the game, they would have done so.
 
D

Durante

Member
Saucycarpdog said:
Ask Durante and some of the Vulkan fans, they seem to think Android is much easier to develop for so Apple must be using underhanded tactics to get game released first on iOS.
Click to expand...
Please quote the post where I say that, or don't use my fucking name. Thanks.
 
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