Last month a report from Arxan Technologies, an applications security company, showed that gamers pirate almost as much as they legitimately pay for. Tru Optic research states that the total revenue lost to pirated games was approximately $74.1 billion in 2014 whilst the global video game industry only bought in $83.6 billion in revenue last year. It’s a shocking revelation and shows just how big of an impact piracy is having. It’s no wonder that we’ve seen companies try to counter this through DRM and new revenue models such as free to play and online subscriptions.

The number of pirated games is expected to rise this year as well with Arxan estimating that a total of 31,000 paid games will be hacked and made available to users for free. This is more than double the amount of games that were pirated in 2012. In fact Video games is now the second most pirated category ahead of Movies, TV shows, Music and Adult content in terms of revenue.

More at the link - http://gearnuke.com/video-game-piracy-rise-will-cost-industry-much-makes/

*sigh* Once again: piracy does not equal lost sales. Every person that pirates did not intend to buy. The vast, vast majority of them would never spend their money on the game, for one reason or another.

Demand for a product and demand for a paid product are two very different things.

False narrative, there's really no guarantee that a pirated game, would've been a sale, if piracy weren't possible.

Exactly

I've heard it argued that piracy is a matter of service as opposed to price, do any of you feel this way? For I've seen evidence to the contradictory such as when shows like breaking bad became one of the most pirated shows in history despite the entire series being available on netflix.

it could just be a potential sale, and most gamers who uses pirated games, won't buy a game, especially at $60. they might if it is around $5. but if there is an option for free, they would certainly just download it.

Very true, but also very false. 

It's clear that piracy doesn't actually cost the industry anything in real terms. 

But it's also clear that piracy does impact total sales. 

I know of many people that pirate shows and movies even if they're readily available on a streaming service just because they don't like video streaming. That's seriously it. They prefer having the actual files to playback in anyway they desire rather than being restricted to web players of one variety or another.

There is absolutely no way to prove that piracy actually impacts sales in any significant way, primarily due to the fact that there is no way to figure out the sales impact unless we create a world where piracy doesn't exist for comparison. Saying piracy impacts total sales in a significant way would imply that, in fact, many people that pirate would be sales if piracy just didn't exist for that product, which is a pretty hard argument to sell since it is so ridiculously hypothetical.

Disagree.  One could 'think' that, but with no real evidence to support it other than the amount of times a game is pirated, it's really only drawing a conclusion without the bare minimum of necessary facts.

I agree somewhat but if they didn't have the means to pirate the game and they really wanted it they'd buy it. I'm sure the total amount lost is exaggerated though.