Study Claims Handheld Game Piracy Losses Top $41 Billion

[Andy Chalk]

Study Claims Handheld Game Piracy Losses Top $41 Billion

Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association [http://www.cesa.or.jp/english/] claims that piracy on handheld gaming systems has cost the international videogame industry more than $41 billion over the past half-decade.

When we talk game piracy, we usually talk about the PC, which is far and away the most vulnerable platform on the market. But according to the results of an investigation conducted by CESA, the portable gaming market is being hammered pretty badly too. The association said that between 2004 and June 2009, illegal game copying on the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP added up to a worldwide loss of $41.5 billion.

Researchers arrived at this number by searching for Japanese versions of the top 20 releases from 2004 to 2009 on the top 114 piracy sites around the world. The retail cost of the games and their ratio of sales were then factored in to determine the cost to the Japanese market; that figure was multiplied by four, "under the assumption that Japan accounts for 25 percent of the world's software market," to come up with the worldwide figure.

It's a huge number and comes with certain presumptions attached that will no doubt lead to complaints that it's grossly inflated. However, as CESA points out, the study didn't include peer-to-peer file sharing, meaning the real figure could be even higher. Bottom line? It's just about impossible to nail down how much the industry is actually losing to piracy but whatever the amount may be, it's a lot.

The study also made the interesting observation that the country hosting the most piracy sites is none other than the United States, with China coming in second. Between the two, they account for roughly 60 percent of all servers, leading at least one observer (that being me) to wonder if the U.S. will place itself on the U.S. Trade Representative's "Priority Watch List [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/98449-ESA-Wants-Canada-Kept-on-Piracy-Watch-List]."

Source: Andriasang [http://www.andriasang.com//e/blog/2010/06/04/cesa_piracy_report/]


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[dududf]

Statistic is bullshit.

Piracy=/= lost sales.
How do you know if the person was going to buy it in the first place? Didn't lose any money on someone who wouldn't have bought it anyways.
And what about the people who pirated it to try it then bought it?
You can't form a statistic on something that can't be measured.

 

[Woodsey]

Remember when pirates had boats, treasure and swords?

Now they're just c*nts.

 

[GiantRedButton]

If a kid gets an r4 and downloads 240 games, that doesn't mean he would buy them all if he had too.
People who pirate handheld games usually don't even play halve of them its just a 3mb download for a gba game.
So this number has no relation to actual losses whatsoever, they might as well have guessed.

 

[fix-the-spade]

The study also made the interesting observation that the country hosting the most piracy sites is none other than the United States,
So for all the bitching about Canadians, Europeans, Russians and everyone else stealing the food from good honest hardworking American mouths because we won't follow good honest American laws it was them all along.

Well, that's not stereotypically American, not at all.

 

[dududf]

The study also made the interesting observation that the country hosting the most piracy sites is none other than the United States,
So for all the bitching about Canadians, Europeans, Russians and everyone else stealing the food from good honest hardworking American mouths because we won't follow good honest American laws it was them all along.

Well, that's not stereotypically American, not at all.

To be fair, they could be referring to the percentage, and not the total amount.

 

[Zakarath]

Yeah, that statistic is BS.
...I think perhaps a better way to find out lost sales due to piracy would be to figure out what % of people actually pirate, and then see how much sales are lost by assuming that if they weren't pirating games, they would buy similar amounts of games to an average gamer (a game every few weeks or so?), and see how much those losses come to.
My guess is it would come to quite a bit less than $41B

 

[uppitycracker]

Those studies should include a survey, asking people "Would you have ever planned on paying money for this game, were you unable to pirate it?" As I know a lot of people tend to pirate stuff on the handhelds because they get the games bundled with a bunch of others.This is a horribly flawed way to gauge how much money is lost in sales, and clearly just a way to inflate those numbers to make it look like a bigger issue than it actually is.

 

[Terramax]

It is also revealed suckers who have to pay full RRP to play decade old videogames on the move (which they may already own) such as Chrono Cross/ Trigger have lost way more money.

Seriously, if companies are going to charge £40 to play a bloody snes game on the trot, I'm not surprised so many are pirating them.

 

[fenrizz]

Remember when pirates had boats, treasure and swords?

Now they're just c*nts.

I'd much prefer to meet a modern pirate though, except for maybe the Somali ones...


OT:
I call bullshit on this one.
A game downloaded does not equal a lost sale, by far.

 

[For.I.Am.Mad]

Yeah ok. Now they're just making shit up. Trying to guilt trip gamers into not pirating. 'Look how much money YOU stole. How could you? 41 billion *sniff* 41 billion gone. *sob*'

 

[ClunkiestTurtle]

to be perfectly honest the sole reason i brought a PSP and a DS was only and exclusively for their homebrew capabilities.

I don't really pirate games for them a lot as homebrew games are usually a lot more fun then proper games for the system which i always find try to be like normal console games and kinda suck because of it. But quite a few people i know brought them just because piracy is so easy on them, the rampant piracy of the software actually drives their hardware sales, if piracy was totally eliminated from them i reckon it would actually hurt them just as much....

 

[ItsAPaul]

Piracy = lost sales now? More like DRM = lost sales and pirates get stuff free since its the cool thing to do.

 

[John Funk]

To people claiming that not every download is a lost sale: That's true, but that's not the point. The fact that there's at LEAST $41bn of pirated software floating around out there is a staggering number. If even 10% of that was a lost sale, that's $4bn. That is a lot of money.

 

[Le_Lisra]

That's why you should sell cartriges on systems with no/few outside access.

 

[For.I.Am.Mad]

Yeah, yeah, staggering horrible criminal blah blah blah. The more I hear about it the less I care. Being somebody that doesn't pirate games at all.

I will say having lived with somebody with a modded console it is rather weird the sense of entitlement he had. It's like he got a kick out of screwing whatever company made whatever game.

 

[Skinny Razor]

To people claiming that not every download is a lost sale: That's true, but that's not the point. The fact that there's at LEAST $41bn of pirated software floating around out there is a staggering number. If even 10% of that was a lost sale, that's $4bn. That is a lot of money.

So what is the point? First, $41bn isn't a fact, just a rather half-assed cobbled-together number (assuming $40 a pop, that's 1,025,000,000 games). Second, if they're not saying this in some attempt to try and recoup that made-up figure, why bother saying anything at all?

In the end, morality of pirating aside, these folks are really living in a fantasy land if they believe that there's $41 billion floating around that they have some claim on.

 

[Cartographer]

To people claiming that not every download is a lost sale: That's true, but that's not the point. The fact that there's at LEAST $41bn of pirated software floating around out there is a staggering number. If even 10% of that was a lost sale, that's $4bn. That is a lot of money.

Not to put it bluntly, but the number may be 1%, 0.1%, 0.01%...
You get the drift, it's just as potentially significantly less as more.

Yes, the point is that there are a lot of copies of the games out there, but until they can actually tie piracy to lost sales (rather than tired, same-y game design, lacklustre marketing, terrible sequels, movie tie-ins etc.), is anyone going to care?

Lets be honest, DRM is the electronic equivalent of strip searching your customers as they leave the store because someone might be stealing from your warehouse, and IMO is far more to blame for lost sales ion recent years than straight piracy, since it is a (if not the most) significant cause of pirated software's wide distribution.