Now here is something really interesting. EU Commission’s report on the effect of piracy on the legitimate sales of video-games has found that piracy can actually benefit publishers. According to the report, piracy increases video-games sales by 24%.
This positive effect of illegal downloads and streams on the sales of games may be explained – as the report reads – by the industry being successful in converting illegal users to paying users.
“For games, the estimated effect of illegal online transactions on sales is positive – implying that illegal consumption leads to increased legal consumption. This positive effect of illegal downloads and streams on the sales of games may be explained by the industry being successful in converting illegal users to paying users. Tactics used by the industry include, for example, offering gameplay with extra bonuses or extra levels if consumers pay.”
Despite this report, we’ve seen numerous publishers using Denuvo – an anti-tamper tech that has actually a negative affect on PC sales as PC gamers refuse to buy games using it – and fighting back piracy.
It should also be noted that this a European report and as such we don’t know whether these findings apply to other regions and countries. Still, this report confirms what most of us already knew; that piracy can have a positive affect on a game’s sales (provided this is a good and not a bad game).
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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The EU commision hid the report for 2 years until Julia Reda, a MEP from the pirate party, published.
and there’s the predictable EU meddling which is why they need to be stopped.
Someone send a copy of this report to all those greedy swines of a publisher like EA and UBI.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/54850128fd67a097ef2af44a8bb78010014d20aef1095c78ae8901890586c492.jpg
So according to the quote piracy has nothing to do with the increase? ”the industry being successful ”, ”offering gameplay with extra bonuses or extra levels”.
”this report confirms what most of us already knew; that piracy can have a positive affect on a game’s sales”
How does not buying something increase its sales?
And btw this doesnt mean that piracy is ok and you should do it.
The point, I think, is that pirate access to a game can translate into sales down the road where no sale would have otherwise been made at all because the user would not have dabbled with the game.
I think that should send a message to publishers to have free access to games for a period, or a significant demo in the case of shorter games.
It also suggests something quite interesting about consumer psychology: consumers are more likely to retroactively spend money on something they’ve already enjoyed than they are simply to access something they may not enjoy at all.
I admit, I was sceptical of this. But we seemingly have numbers that support it (and the fact that it was repressed speaks volumes). The question is now what are videogame publishers going to do? Because stopping piracy doesn’t work anyway.
Yes I hope devs will see and understand this. But I also read that game demos actually decrease sales, at least with single player etc games where you may need multiple hours of game time to get it going. And with bad games obviously, but that’s fine.
”Because stopping piracy doesn’t work anyway”
Well denuvo has kept many games uncracked for months or even longer, which could lead people into buying the game instead? And when it’s cracked the game is already discounted. I wanted to try out the newest need for speed but couldn’t find a cracked torrent for multiple months and just forgot about it. That game needed a demo, an arcade racer can be terrible if the driving feel isn’t right for you.
At this point, isn’t it the exception (rather than the rule) that Denuvo gets broken quite quickly?
I’m not sure if having the protection causes people to purchase the game because it’s simply more convenient or not, just that Denuvo isn’t functioning in protecting a great deal of games out there from being freely distributed/playable.
I wouldn’t know, I had wanted to try a couple of games some time back and they weren’t cracked for the first few months.
because more people buy it if they can try it. On the other hand if it its uncracked, less people got a chance to try it and therefore dont buy it.
But how many will pirate it instead of buying versus the amount of people who will pirate and then buy the game? And ofc it’s different if the game is bought at $5 and not $50.
This study shows that the question is irrelevant, regardless of how many people don’t buy the game due to piracy, the people who buy the game because of piracy are obviously more numerous and end up negating any potential lost sales and even pushing the overall numbers into the positive.
Was that directly specified in the study? And if so, how can you measure such subjective things accurately? A ton of people say they wouldn’t have bought the game anyway, or didn’t like it that much, so there never was even a potential for buying? Even the people themselves can’t be sure always as there never was a situation where piracy wasn’t an option, and there is always a risk involved in buying stuff.
It’s not rocket science, if the overall effect is positive as shown in the study, then it means piracy created more legitimate sales than it prevented, there’s really not much way to spin it.
The vast majority of pirates dont buy games period. So there is your answer.
That’s been my experience.
Exactly. If people are going to pirate, most of the time they have no intention of buying BUT they may raise the mindshare of products that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten shared because they pirate + play games or movies and talk to others about it.
That’s wasn’t really my question. What I mean:
The loss of revenue from people that may buy the game but decide to pirate as it’s easy and to save money
vs
The gain of revenue from people that pirate but decide to buy the game afterwards.
Impossible to say for sure but I don’t think game revenues would go down if piracy didn’t exist due to this very specific comparison. Other factors are probably much more important.
>And btw this doesnt mean that piracy is ok and you should do it.
Too late. I started pirating because of you and when I get arrested I’m telling the President that you told me stealing was A-ok. I’m taking you down with me.
It’s quite obvious that those who can afford it, will buy the game if they download it and see that they like it and that it runs good. I’ve done this multiple times, even if I had to wait for big discounts on the game, but in the end I try to support the developers.
LMFAO
Are you really sitting there laughing hysterically? Because I don’t think you are…
Actually i was really laughing when i read this
Why so? I don’t get it?
Because piracy is pretty funny.
I’d love to see the sales pitch and numbers Denuvo uses to woo over developers. And, more importantly, how they reached those numbers.
I bet it’s very basic fearmongering like screenshots of torrent sites with the number of downloads and such, followed by screenshots of people complaining about Denuvo in scary sounding sites like “Dark Side of Gaming”.
We knew this for years. When megadownload closed down movie sales dropped because no one pirated movies early to recommend them to their buddies to watch in theaters.
I dont think the reason pc sales increase is the extra stuff they offer. I think its the fact that steam offers better service than piracy. Updates for example. In the past they didnt update with so many new stuff and so often.
As for denuvo, the games that use denuvo are not doing well sales wise. Could that be because people cant pirate them early to try them, or because of boycotts? Who knows. However the mafia 3 sales are weird. Seems people prefer to try out games before buying.
Precisely. Gabe Newell got it so very right back in 2011 when he stated in an interview,
“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.
…Prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become
[Steam’s] largest market in Europe.”
Digital distribution is definitely a disruptive phenomenon that’s changing how a lot of old school industry people are viewing consumer engagement. It can’t all be controlled.
I’m a content creator myself and know that my stuff gets pirated to hell and back but I don’t care.
Indeed. I don’t personally pirate games but there have been a handful of exceptions such as,
– OutRun 2006 Coast2Coast
Reason: What Newell termed a “service problem” because said old game was only ever released on disc so isn’t available to purchase on any digital storefront. It’s one of my favourite ever games so if Sega announced they were to release it on Steam then I’d buy it without question. I’ve already purchased the various iterations of OutRun 2 on PSP, original Xbox and PS3.
– Halo: Combat Evolved
Reason: What Newell termed a “service problem” because Microsoft haven’t bothered to make it easily available to purchase at any digital storefront. They also excluded PC gamers from being able to play Halo: The Master Chief Collection. I purchased said game and its sequel on original Xbox.
– various Wii U games
I own a Wii U and many games for it but have still pirated those same games to play on my PC using Cemu emulator because of the convenience factor plus they all look better on my PC than they do on the weak console hardware. If Nintendo launched a service on PC that allowed their console owners to play their purchased games displayed at the superior standards possible on PC then I’d happily pay to use it. So, again, the reason comes back to it being a “service problem”.
I pirate all the time, but not for the reasons POSs like Ubisoft might think. I regularly buy movies from Amazon but HATE their streaming video player, which sucks, so I “pirate” the 1080p/4K versions of those movies I’ve purchased and just watch them on VLC.
Since I started heavily using Steam 5-6 years ago, I’ve found no reason to pirate games anymore at all. Games are so cheap and if they don’t work, now I can just get a refund. Simple.
Good point, but steam refund only exists from like a year or two.
That’s fair. You’re still well within your time to try a product and determine whether it works or whether you like it or not. I’ve eaten sandwiches after they were in my fridge for a year and gave them glowing reviews while in the ER afterwards.
It is fair, but what i’m saying is that it didn’t exists 5/6 years ago
Oh, I misread your comment. I need to stop sniffing so much glue.
Lol, np
Latest PUBG news just for you!
– game has now surpassed 1.5 million concurrent users
– at one point it accounted for 10% of everyone on Steam
– sales now at 12 million units and still growing fast
Very fun, kid.
You’re welcome, boy.
Let’s not forget BluRay and DVD Zones… I sit with paid for blurays I can’t read on my Canadian PS4… God forbids one travels around the world and settles at different spots during his/her life…
Yep. I torrented the wonderful Star Wars Ep. IV Despecialised Edition by Harmy and co. Lucas and more latterly Disney had every chance over the years to release an ‘ultimate’ version of the original aka non-Special Edition iteration of said classic movie but they chose not to do so. They even stopped producing the DVD release of said original version of the movie to add insult to injury. Heck, they even made a complete mess of the remastered Special Edition iteration with the Blu-ray release.
I “pirate” old movies I used to own on DVD all the time. They already got my money so how I go about accessing the movie is up to me. I didn’t buy the physical media, I bought the content on the media, so, as far as I’m concerned, I own it.
I differ a little from you in that regard. Like yourself, I’ll torrent old movies which I already own because it’s not practical or easy to rip movies from formats including VHS, LaserDisc and DVD.
However, if an improved version of a movie is released then I’m okay with buying it. So if a movie I own on an old format is remastered for a 1080p Blu-ray Disc release then I’ve been happy to have bought such movies.
That said, even when I’ve purchased such movies in improved form on Blu-ray Disc I’ve still in some instances also torrented them so to have them available to me when away from home via my laptop PC which, as is normal nowadays, doesn’t have BRD-ROM player built-in. I like to own classic movies on disc so have little or no interest in buying downloads from iTunes and the like. If they think I’m going to buy a movie on Blu-ray Disc AND buy it again from iTunes or wherever then dream on! The download key should be provided with the purchase of Blu-ray Disc movies, in my opinion.
>However, if an improved version of a movie is released then I’m okay with buying it.
Good point.
Yeah, remastering movies, especially when done to the highest standards, costs a fair bit of money to do so I’m fine with rewarding them for that. I certainly don’t subscribe to the view that someone who bought a movie on VHS back in the 1980s is now entitled to receive the latest remastered version of it for free.
I have a strong suspicion that this benefit is inversely proportional to the marketing budget of the game and directly proportional to its quality, i.e. I wouldn’t be surprised if piracy actually does decrease sales for bad or mediocre games that rely on marketing hype to sell, but the average effect on all games ends up being positive.
Like i said mafia 3 sales are weird.
Iv been saying this for years.
numerous brain dead publishers you mean
those with a functional brain like CDPR realized that a long time ago
hell even crappy publishers like deep silver realized that DRM sucks
and ported their games to GOG aswell as steam (no denovu!)
it’s only the crappy long standing publishers like EA,activision, Ubisuck, microshaft, warner bros and the rest of the sCUM that insist that DRM is needed
That’s a pretty misleading title when you read the actual report. :V
Not to mention the 36% margin of error on said study.
It reads more llike correlation =! causation. Which we knew for a long time already.
36%?!? that’s freaking huge.
That alone is enough to discredit it. It’s barely better than a coin toss at that point.
I’d like to see this report and how they came up with their estimates. Otherwise, this means nothing to me. I can make estimates and publish them. That doesn’t make them right.
Of course. But big government and big corporations like MPAA hide all this data… in order to keep their bureaucracy going. They want to seem relevant in order to keep their comfortable high-paying jobs. They want to tell us that they are protecting us, meanwhile they are the enemies that are robbing all of us… from users to game develoipers, They have been raping us all for years.
Useless government officials and useless MPAA will continue to spin their fake middleman data so they can pretend to be relevant.
Of course it does! PCars 2 was cracked before some days, i downloaded it, i loved it, deleted it and i am gonna buy it 🙂 Since most companies doesn’t offer a demo…
as long as they are not ubisoft “all pc gamers are pirates”
in their cases their games are not worth buying
This is why I’ll never buy another Ubi game. Since I heard that, f##k them. My last Ubi game was Blood Dragon and it’ll be the last.
What happened to “Correlation does not imply causation”?
But everyone told me to take off my tinfoil hat because their blessed corporate daddies are only doing whats best for us!
“illegal consumption leads to increased legal consumption”
So piracy ultimately helps games to sell in greater numbers on PC than they otherwise would. Meanwhile many console gamers buy pre-owned games from high street stores which provides no financial reward whatsoever to devs and publishers unless they also purchase DLC.
So many console gamers damage the industry whereas PC gamers benefit the industry.
>Meanwhile many console gamers buy pre-owned games from high street stores which provides no financial reward whatsoever to devs and publishers unless they also purchase DLC.
YES. This. In the end, piracy and pre-owned games lead to the same thing: consumption of goods owned by a party that isn’t included at all in the transactions. But selling pre-owned games is legal and even lauded whereas sharing “piracy” is not.
Indeed. It’s kinda amusing that those ‘evil pirates’ on PC are better for the games industry than the pre-owned console game market is. It’s something I’ll definitely be pointing out to misinformed console fanboys who troll PC gamers for being good for nothing dirty pirates!
Buying used games is the same as buying stolen/pirated games. The publishers get zero. In their own way, console gamers are pirates, too.
well f**k the publishers honestly
if someone bought a hard-copy of a game and decided to pass that along to his nephew or sell it off Ebay, he is within his right
Piracy is just downloading (or as some people call it, Demoing)
a triple A game because demos are absent
though some people use piracy because they’re too poor or too cheap to pay for the software their downloading
but in video games, usually people who pirate a video game
end up buying if they liked it, when in used games
you already have the premium product just in a used box
Also, let’s not ignore the fact that many console gamers act all high and mighty in this regard simply because they don’t, in most instances, have the option to pirate their games. If they did have the option then we all know that some of them would do so.
Lest we forget the rampant piracy on consoles such as Nintendo DS, Sony PS1, Sony PS2, Sony PSP, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast and more.
Many console gamers would love to pirate their current-gen games so they’re only being salty with PC gamers due to being envious.
It’s just ignorance… which is why they’re console gamers to begin with. To intentionally pigeon-hole yourself into a closed ecosystem for the sake of perceived cost savings and convenience is something only dumb people would do, but there’s a lot of cheap, dumb people so MS and Sony have a large consumer base to pilfer from.
For me there is 1 game even if I’m going to pirate it that’s what im going to do i will do buy it Middle-earth: Shadow of War
First time the EU is useful. Thanks for proving what I’ve been saying for years.
COD 4, Left 4 Dead, Blazblue and Dead Island among others are games which I first owned as pirated copies, now they are part of my Steam library, also I bought the Starcraft Remaster when I play the pirated copy of the SC Broodwar on ICCUP for years. Just give me options of being part of the industry instead of trying to ripping me off with 60$ incomplete games with 1 day DLCs.
save money not buying some games..then have money for others lol
The Witcher 3 agrees. 🙂
I pirated a lot: movies, video-games, music, software. I didn’t had a very good internet connection so most of the movies I liked I copied them to dvd. All this until some years ago I started playing Assassin’s Creed and I bought them. I sensed that I should reward and show a form of my appreciation to the developers for the hard and passionate work they put in making the game. For a few games in the series I even bought two copies so I could have an extra missions. If there was a game I liked form a youtube trailer or friends recommandations I would buy it. This happened from two main reasons: I got a good starting salary at my job and the market globalization. I do believe that a game is good it would sell itself (I never played a turn based RPG like Divinity II Original Sin yet I love it). There are games I bought on my PC and my Xbox One.
Good as retail is hurting gaming anyway.
Just goes to show your lack of understanding how the gaming business works.
How?
Thats Corporate thinking.
What about people saving money buying second hand? What about the fact that Retail has its own rules and there is such thing as shelf space, so games get much cheaper very fast, sometimes in a week 50%, Paid 16$ for Teh Surge with shipping, brand new.
Digital has discounts but they seasonal, they dont have warehouses or shelf space, there is no need to discount games if they sell slow or take up shelf space or run a promotion.
If we go digital we will be stuck with full price games for months or until some holiday, it takes years to permanently discount digital games, they dont need to.
Games that go for 10-19GBP in stores like Amazon or base are full price digital.
Steam has almost full monopoly and they keep their pries full price until some yearly promo.
Im ok with all digital if they treat it as all digital, games will be 20$ cheaper from day one, because they dont have to pay for packages, transportation, store space, give cut to store owners and re-sellers.
But if they go all digital and keep the original price, they are the only ones wining, not we are.
same just like what am i thinking.