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, its evident that piracy runs rampant on PC. Note that Im using the overall PC sales, including DRM-free versions and Steam key resellers. This also includes Mac and Linux versions, but lets 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
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.
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 its nothing.
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 its difficult to fight piracy and most DRM-enforced ways are horrible for the paying customers its hard to deny it has an impact. Looking back I believe what we shouldve 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.
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.