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Slimebeast on 22 August 2012
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pezus said:
BenVTrigger said:
Alot of people are gonna call this out as not true but its likely a figure very close to this.

Simply go to any torrent site and see how many millions of downloads games get.

Hey I fully support PC gaming and understand why people pirate but if I was a developer I wouldnt go near th PC market with a 10 foot pole. As much as PC gamers try to downplay it Piracy is rampant and a huge problem.

And I pretty much agree with him F2P is the future of PC gaming

Millions? The only games that get pirated in the millions are games that sell in the millions.

You do know that most sites don't show how many total downloads there have been? ThePirateBay: Sleeping Dogs (most popular file): 3000 seeding and 5000 leeching. And that is a new release. 400 are seeding the 360 version btw and 700 leeching.

For the 93-95% to be even remotely true, downloads would have to be 10m+ per game with less than 1m sold. That just doesn't happen. So, that stat is taken deep from within someone's private behind. 

It is in that ballpark, 10:1 or even 20:1. I remember how they counted Bioshock pirated copies versus sales, and same with MW and Crysis and it was more than 10 pirated to 1 sale.

Just do the math yourself. You say Sleeping dogs has 5000 leetchers right now on Pirate Bay alone. If every leetcher takes around 3 hours on average to download the game, it means 40,000 people will have downloaded Sleeping Dogs in just 24 hours.

A rough guess, but let's assume Pirate Bay has about half of the torrent market. That means 80K downloaded Sleeping Dogs today. The torrent has been out for a few days already so you can't blame a first day spike, so in a week you'll have roughly 500K downloads and I even think I am lowballing here.

Now the question is how many first week sales will Sleeping Dogs on PC have? On consoles maybe 100K for PS360 each, which suggests around 20K physical copies for the PC version as tracked by VGC. With digital purchases we get perhaps 30K or 40k in total.

30-40K bought copies versus 500K pirated in one week. Do the math. That translates to 6-7% who pay, and 93-94% who pirate.

Guillemot is right.