Piracy costs the industry $118 BILLION in damages (PSP leads the pack)

[nightsurge]

Vertigo-X said:

leo-j said:

well it's just the top 20 most downloaded japanese games.. so it likely goes beyond that in damage

Read the post above yours.

 

In addition to it, I believe there are folks who download games multiple times. Since it is so easy, there's really no reason not to. As Matt said, the sales lost to piracy could be as low as  1/10th of the number of downloads and the revenue lost even lower.

But once you download it, you can burn it to as many discs as you want without redownloading.  I know this happens quite frequently where friends will sell burnt games for like $3-5 so that the other person doesn't have to worry about downloading anything or maybe their internet isn't good enough.

So really they could be the exact opposite and be as high as 10x the revenue lost.  They probably about cancel out so that the estimates are pretty close to target.