John Funk said:
It's true that not every download is a lost sale. While it's a safe bet that some of the pirates would have bought the game were there no other choice, there's no way of knowing how low (or high) that percentage would be.
Don't let this tired, worn-and-beaten line downplay the impact of piracy, though.
Yes, you can't prove a 1:1 ratio of "pirated copies" to "lost full-price sales." But I can't really say I've seen anyone make that claim. I've seen the claim
interpreted that way by those whom it suits at the moment, but no real claims of 1:1 loss.
I prefer to frame things in the terms that the opposition uses. People speak with their dollars, right? And if people are pirating, it's because the product didn't interest them, of course. This logic introduces an interesting principle: "You can measure a person's interest by how much they will spend," and the converse, "What a person spends is a reflection of their interest in the product."
So far so good. What that means is you
could say a person who buys the game on launch day "has expressed $60 worth of interest." A full price sale. On the other end of the spectrum would be someone who doesn't even give the game a second glance--they have expressed $0 worth of interest, so to speak.
Anyone who obtains and plays a copy of the game, then, has expressed an interest in the game amounting to greater than $0. This means that pirates represent people who are, in fact, interested in the game. Now, perhaps the interest isn't at the $60 level... but at $45, you'd probably grab quite a few. They'd have paid
something for it, even if just a dollar, were it not for the presence of an unauthorized "free version."
Now, in an age where we're acutely aware of piracy, we already
anticipate the existence of a "free copy." So it's easy for us to preemptively adjust our expectations of the game to the "Eh, not worth the money" setting--basically, you can't get an unbiased sample anymore. So we have to rely on what we know of basic human psychology: If you're not interested in something, you'll ignore it. If you're paying attention to it, you're interested (for good or ill).
Every downloaded copy should be treated as lost revenue. Not the loss of a full-price copy, of course, but lost revenue just the same. If that person would ever have picked it up on Steam for $0.75, then it's a loss.
Most people probably fall somewhere between $1 and $60 on the "what I could pay" spectrum. There is a period of time between A: Launch and B: The first batch of used sales. The time between A and B is a place where the publisher can still make a
lot of sales at even just a slightly-reduced price. The piracy factor effectively eliminates that period of time, and constitutes a substantial loss
beyond the losses it causes at launch.
The problem is bigger than we're being led to believe (by the same people using a strawman to tell us that publishers are
overestimating it).
