Sylverstone14
Member
I've only recently began to open my heart to the mobile games space, so waiting for Android versions of apps can be a real pain.
Now I know better.
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Tiny Build's 'Punch Club' celebrates milestone of being pirated over 1,600,000 times.
- Thread starter Mushroomer25
- Start date
I've only recently began to open my heart to the mobile games space, so waiting for Android versions of apps can be a real pain.
Now I know better.
I do wonder what you mean by that.
Am I a "piracy apologist" if I say that the number of times a game is illegally downloaded is meaningless? What matters is how often it is sold. That's it. Any statistically sound connection from the former to the latter is really hard to establish.
When enabling piracy on Android is as easy as unchecking a single box, it really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that android is not that much of a desired platform.
The userbase may be significantly higher than the one on iOS, but the profit is the same at best (with exception of those free-to-play heavy hitters)
The userbase may be significantly higher than the one on iOS, but the profit is the same at best (with exception of those free-to-play heavy hitters)
Messofanego
Banned
Those are quite the price hikes. Maybe there needs more awareness about supporting creators of games if you want further games from them.
Yep. I'm sure there's some data underlying the pie chart, but the title shows it does not mean what they think it means.
edit:
Yeah, good point. It reminds me of early Stardock, which took a relatively lax stance toward pirates. If I recall their argument was that rather than bemoaning piracy rates, companies should focus on games / genres that cater to legitimate consumers.
Most torrent sites aggregate statistics for downloads.
Some applications have embedded metrics that call home upon activity.
It is not. As someone who who works in data sciences for a living, I agree. The how it is collected is often the most important element.
One key to this analysis is the part where they localized to Brazil and sales were unaffected either way. This seems to suggest that piracy has little effect on sales.
Also, since we know piracy is rampant, you would expect that games that are not cracked months after release would have in characteristically high sales. I'm not really seeing the evidence for that.
Bits N Pieces
Member
UWP to the rescue . . . . .
Which German games do you mean?
Siedler and Football Simulator???
No thanks!
Germany is a third-world-game-country!
Crysis ruled Graphicistan for years.
Dreams-Visions
Member
My take-aways:
1.) US accounts for very little piracy over time (for at least this game)...but arguably the most in the earliest days?
2.) Russia, China, and Brazil appear to make up 50%-75% of all piracy totals after the initial wave and over time.
3.) Android users are filthy thieves. But seriously what the fuck are you guys doing? I'm sure it's not GAFers...so tell your friends to stop fucking stealing $5 games. The 5 of the first 10 links I see when I google "punch club android" are links to pirated copies of the game. I don't see stolen versions for iOS until I get to page 2 or 3.
1.) US accounts for very little piracy over time (for at least this game)...but arguably the most in the earliest days?
2.) Russia, China, and Brazil appear to make up 50%-75% of all piracy totals after the initial wave and over time.
3.) Android users are filthy thieves. But seriously what the fuck are you guys doing? I'm sure it's not GAFers...so tell your friends to stop fucking stealing $5 games. The 5 of the first 10 links I see when I google "punch club android" are links to pirated copies of the game. I don't see stolen versions for iOS until I get to page 2 or 3.
A Twisty Fluken
Member
"Look at how many times it was downloaded. Hard to deny it has an impact" is not a compelling argument at all for the impact of piracy.
UpDownLeftRight
Banned
I'm still seeing no evidence to support the idea that any of these people were going to purchase the game at all if they couldn't pirate it.
Graphics maybe, game, not so much!
Also Crytek is not in Germany anymore, because you just can't hold it here.
The State doesn't support like other Countries do, that's why everybody in the german industry only produces shovelware shit!
Cheat Code
Member
But pirates will buy the game afterwards!
Football Simulator? You mean Manager? That one doesn't even come out in Germany lol
Also, serious answer: Deponia Doomsday just came out
RecursiveFault
Banned
Statistics like these don't say too much, but it's fairly obvious that iOS piracy would be far less rampant. iOS' chokehold has pros and cons, but for a game developer, basically, it's a net positive.
Android you just flip a switch to allow you to install any apk, basically like Windows.
Jailbroken devices are all that can do it, to my knowledge.
Android you just flip a switch to allow you to install any apk, basically like Windows.
timmyp53
Member
LordRaptor
Member
They weren't that lax about piracy, they just fought it in a pretty clever way; the "v.1" editions of their games were generally DRM free, but all patches were only obtainable via the Impulse client.
Apart from the fact they were... not great... on releasing their v.1 versions bug free, they often had fairly extensive post launch updates, so pirates would generally have to download multiple versions of the same product to get the latest bugfixed feature add edition.
I imagine people who liked their products enough to want additional features and bugfixes eventually decided it was less hassle in the longterm to just buy the game.
What are you talking about? Crytek is still located in Germany with the HQ being in Frankfurt...
timmyp53
Member
It's really hard to implement drm for a mobile app. I wonder if the denuvo team has considered a light weight platform for app makers. The sheer number of apps released could be huge for them.
D
Deleted member 325805
Unconfirmed Member
I've never heard of this game.
Saucycarpdog
Member
Okay, I'm sorry. I knee jerked that time. My disagreement with you over your hate of Apple made me look like a fool.
Please don't start this. We already have had 15+ page threads on this very topic. And we really don't need more "All PC players are pirates" posts.
Camp Freddie
Member
Firstly:
Pirating a <£5 game?
Isn't that #TotallyNotFirstWorldProblems
I understand it in Brazil/Russia/China, but come on!
Secondly:
How are these stats gathered? I guess it's DRM free and the app automatically phones home to log into a user account or something.
I'm surprised that PC pirates don't block that stuff in their firewall, which would make the actual PC piracy rate even higher (gulp!) since you're only catching the dumb pirates who don't think "maybe I shouldn't allow a hacked .exe downloaded from some dodgy website to talk to unknown locations on the internet".
I hope the devs made some decent money despite the piracy.
Pirating a <£5 game?
Isn't that #TotallyNotFirstWorldProblems
I understand it in Brazil/Russia/China, but come on!
Secondly:
How are these stats gathered? I guess it's DRM free and the app automatically phones home to log into a user account or something.
I'm surprised that PC pirates don't block that stuff in their firewall, which would make the actual PC piracy rate even higher (gulp!) since you're only catching the dumb pirates who don't think "maybe I shouldn't allow a hacked .exe downloaded from some dodgy website to talk to unknown locations on the internet".
I hope the devs made some decent money despite the piracy.
Starwolf_UK
Member
For people asking "how did they get the numbers?", there is a whole article linked in the OP and to quote a part of it:
The graphs confused me at first as I was like "why does adding Portuguese boost Spanish piracy?" and then I noticed Spain is a duller shade of yellow.
http://tinybuild.com/punch-club-has-been-pirated-over-1-million-times said:
The graphs confused me at first as I was like "why does adding Portuguese boost Spanish piracy?" and then I noticed Spain is a duller shade of yellow.
Not all games fit into a demo model, there are doubts about how helpful demos are (are you more likely to put people off from a bad demo) and some might think these days that every game has a 2 hour demo thanks to the refund system.
Jacksinthe
Banned
While every game is different, this has been discussed to death with devs reporting sales take a dive day and date their games hit torrent sites. That doesn't mean 100% of pirates would buy, lol, no. That just means there is a correlation.
But, surely, it's coincidental.
Every time it happens.
With every game it happens to.
Coincidence and nothing more!
Its 2016. We can stop pretending a majority of pirates aren't shitbags who just flat out don't want to pay for games.
UcchedavÄda
Member
It would be interesting to see this data, but unfortunately the writer suffers from a bad case of not knowing how to actually present it, nor what to present.
Some of it is just outright incomprehensible, like the "% of people who bought the game instead of pirating per country", which obviously should not have been a pie-chart. For example, if we look at Germany, there 454 copies purchased, and 880 copies pirated, on the first day, based on activation numbers. This of course means that 34% of people who activated a copy did so using a non-pirated copy. But somehow the graph shows 46% .. what?
Some of it is just outright incomprehensible, like the "% of people who bought the game instead of pirating per country", which obviously should not have been a pie-chart. For example, if we look at Germany, there 454 copies purchased, and 880 copies pirated, on the first day, based on activation numbers. This of course means that 34% of people who activated a copy did so using a non-pirated copy. But somehow the graph shows 46% .. what?
RodrigoDorta
Member
If you paying in dollars, sure.
Brazil is going through one of the worse economic and political crises since the recession of 38.
In Brazil, the minimum wage is roughly 880,00 R$ wich translates into 243,00 USD. Luckily we have our own store fronts with translated prices, but, Punch Club on the BR steam costs 20 R$, representing 2.5% of their salary. A retail AAA game, like The Division, on Brazil costs 129,00 R$ ( PC version, console games are much more expensive) which is roughly 15% of the minimum wage.
Outside of relative pricing, there is cultural and historical reasons some people refuse to buy original games even if they can.
UcchedavÄda
Member
Where in the US is the minimum wage $15?
RodrigoDorta
Member
Ucchedavāda;198900386 said:
Sorry, bad sources. will edit the post.
Starwolf_UK
Member
Don't forget the data having two decimal places for no reasonUcchedavāda;198899268 said:
But the 46% is quite easy: (454*0.9)/(880)=0.464 as they say each purchased copy counts as 0.9 activated copies to account for valid purchases activating on multiple devices.
honestly 300k for such a crap "grind the game" its way too much of what it deserves
as for the 4 pirated vs 1 bought rate on PC its surprisingly low , especially when the big pubs like Boobisoft are claiming that 95% of there games are pirated copies
nkarafo
Member
Sure, people playing your game for free is unfair but i don't think if piracy didn't exist the game would sell 2 million units.... most of these downloads aren't lost sales. Pirates download anything in their path, whatever that is, even if they know they probably won't like it. Especially things that are very small to download. But when you buy something you actually choose before you pay.
Am I a piracy apologist when I say that someone downloading a game doesn't equal lost sale?
SmokedMeat
Gamer™
It must make a development team sick to their stomach to see so many owning their game illegally.
UcchedavÄda
Member
Yeah, that threw me off, too.Don't forget the data having two decimal places for no reason
That could at least explain the number they've obtained, but that number is something quite different from what the figure title describes ("% of people who bought the game instead of pirating per country"), in that it shows something like the number of legitimate copies purchased per pirated copy of the game. Or to rephrase, for every 100 copies of the game pirated in Germany, 46 copies were sold in that country.
Or rather, it shows 90% of that, considering that the 0.9 factor you multiplied by should already have been accounted for when they calculated the number of "Pirated" copies. It is not clear exactly how they calculated that number, but it seems to have been something like #Pirated = #Activations - #Sales * 1.1, based on the text. And I still don't understand why decided to put that in a pie-chart.
In short, it's a mess.
Profit being the same would probably make it just as desirable then, assuming development is of a similar difficulty to iOS.
If spending the time and money to localize a game doesn't correlate to an increase in sales, but instead an increase in piracy, that's money lost on localizing tho.
They said it was built into the game, so they don't really need to depend on trackers stats.
That's what I meant^^
DD seems nice, as far as it looks, but not my type of game, but I get your point, Germany is third world game developer country.
One decent game here and there, but overall, here in this country doesn't happen much.
Yeah, sorry, i got something mixed upped there.
My bad, carry on, nothing to see here.
Shame on me^^
rhophiehalul78
Member
Does that mean localizing a game increases its chance of piracy?
Caayn
Member
Outside of hardcore android fanboys/girls and folks out of touch with the inner workings of the industry I doubt it.
Sometimes I wonder why gamedevs even make paid apps for Android when they are fully aware of the horrible piracy numbers.
n64coder
Member
From the OP:
They're not using torrent statistics so I think their numbers are probably accurate.
Maybe the user mistook their exodus from Bavaria?