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.

How are they getting the total numbers for losses though?  Are they using Yen then converting to dollars?   Cause when I use US dollars, Dissidia is $220M not $335.

How many coppys it sold?

Probably just shy of 2m iirc.

Thanks for the response. Good stuff.

Well, I don't have a clue about how many copyright lawsuits there have been in total, but what I initially said was due to a personal experience while in undergrad a few years back here in the USA. A record company had targeted our school for a copyright lawsuit sting of sorts. I do believe the school's ISP worked with the record label. (our dean contacted us all and said the school would comply with them) They sent out letters to students who had apparently infringed enough (I forget if there was a cutoff $ amount) threatening a lawsuit but offering a potential settlement. The letter included a code and the student would then log onto the website and type in the code to see the dollar amount and the amount that the company was willing to settle for. I saw a jpeg sample of a letter with blacked out info and at full res could make out the code under the blacking, so I plugged it in to see the numbers. If I remember correctly they were claiming a $6k damage from that particular individual and wanted a $3k settlement. I had heard [unverifiably] that they were doing this from college to college that had popped on on their radar.

To me, that seems like a plan that could work. It isn't profitable to target individuals who haven't done much. And it may be hard to target sites (particularly torrent sites). But if you nail a bunch of the worst offending college students all in one fell swoop while alerting the rest that this is going on and of the potential fallout of such actions, then you can have a form of behavior modification take place on at least a 4 year wide age group of consumers. It may not be the best financial decision for any company in the short term, but it seems like for all the recent buzz about piracy and some companies blaming their woes on it etc, that these companies would actually do something. It isn't free to track this sort of stuff, so if you aren't using this information then it's at least costing someone something.

This is why I laugh when people talk about the PSP needing a price cut. If Sony slashes its margins on the hardware, where are they going to make up that money, exactly?

It makes Apple's business model look pretty clever. Their take of software sales does little more than cover costs, while the margins on hardware are huge. It's the exact opposite of Sony's traditional strategy of subsidizing hardware, but it's much harder to rip off hardware than it is to rip off software.

Of course, the publishers still get burned by piracy on iOS games.

Wow, that sucks.  I'm sure the figures are overblown, but even at a fraction that's still huge for the limited number of games and sites that they actually reported on. 

When my wife worked for a game developer, she talked about how those designers would spend days and nights at the office, eating pizza from the night before for breakfast and not seeing their families because of the intense and rigorous schedules.  There were some designers who got really good royalties due to very popular titles.  But that was usually the exception.  When I applied there, one of their questions was "are you married?" because they discouraged people who were married from working there due to the schedules and lack of being able to return home many times, usually during crunch time.

Turnover was pretty high, as you can imagine.  I didn't get the job, for which my wife was VERY thankful.  I don't believe pirates, for whatever excuse they have, should take away the money that those people have worked so hard to earn. 

Tired of this bullshit I did the following:

1) I registered at a famous roms site.

2) Got to the DS section.

3) Carefully picked up a unpopular game (one that unlikely to change the download counter anytime soon).

4) Started downloading, the counter went up from 814 to 815.

5) Cancelled it and the counter is still at 815.

6) For fun I downloaded it again and cancelled it again (816)

That means that they track incomplete downloads.

Is it unfair to think that no one ever cancelled a 1 GB PSP game after 4 million downloads?