By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
johntonsoup on 15 January 2008
Edit Thread
naznatips said:
guigr said:

I was working at a major publisher last year. There was around 5-7 times more pirates than legit users for PC games. Without piracy sales of existing games would increase 50-100% at least, that would mean WAY MORE PC exclusive games (and even more sales).

No surprise then than on NPD studies they find more core gamers on PC than consoles even in the states! (look at PC market share there!)

Anyway since I saw these stats I freaked and bought 8 PC games in as many months (4 full price and 4 budget)


That statistic is unbelievably wrong. You can get a rough idea of how many people are pirating a game by checking torrent trackers, where most are downloaded. The most people you'll ever see pirate a PC game is ~150K, which is a tiny percent of the game's sales. There will also be fake disc sales in China and Korea, but even those won't amount to anywhere near a large percentage of the total sales (Most Chinese and Koreans couldn't have afforded the game anyway). I don't know where you game up with such a BS stat, but that's completely untrue.


I agree with you that this statistic seems unlikely. However, I do feel compelled to point out that some percentage of people who torrent then distribute to their friends with either a direct file transfer or using burned disks. I obviously have no idea what the numbers are for this method but it could be significant.