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Forums - Sales Discussion - How much does piracy affect game sales?

Anyone know? How much did it affect game sales on Ps2, and how much is it currently affecting 360 game sales?



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It doesn't affect them much on consoles. On PC it's pretty bad.



See that a very tough question to answer. It's because no one really knows, alot of people can guess though. Pirates of games are very hard to track, and also some pirates actually buy the games at a later time. The game industry will tell you a high number so they can justify poor sales of crappy games. Pirates will tell you a low-ball number. Its all guess work with no real numbers.

All we do know is that it does effect game sales in some way. Some people even think that it helps to increase game sales. LOL



"Leap ignorantly to the defense of wealthy game company’s, who don't know or care about you!"

PSP is pretty bas as well....veryone I know that has a PSp doesn't get it for games, but for some sort of piracy



Just from personal experience, I know piracy has been very bad since the original PlayStation days. On Ps2/Xbox it was just as bad if not worst.

On 360 it probably isnt that bad for 2 reasons: a) people think it will get them banned from XBL, and b) people dont want to void the warranty incase they get RROD


I remember someone posting download stats from God of War for PSP and it showed almost 1 million ppl got the game off torrent sites. That's a HUGE amount of piracy and certainly hurt the game sales.



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In Asia it's crazy. The amount of Playstation and Dreamcast games I saw getting pirated in Thailand was ridiculous.



I personally believe that few games that are pirated by people would have been bought by those people if they didn't pirate it ... I don't mean that there aren't a lot of people who pirate games, just that if piracy wasn't possible most of the people who pirate those games would not buy most of the games they pirated.



@happy. I believe you are wrong. I believe people think this way: "Why spend money on the game when I can have it for free".

True. SOME games they pirate that they wouldnt have bought, but then they get so used to pirating all games that they never buy anything.



Badly, but hard to tell exactly how bad, because of course, having a pirate version of a game doesn't mean you would have bought it. When its free, people tend to grab all they can...



A lot



 

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