Intro
People talk about piracy all the time on the internet, but most of the time they only produce three sentence long opinion pieces either defending or attacking the practice. I have decided to get some cold hard facts, insofar as it is possible to get them, by analyzing a particular instance of piracy.
The Actual Thing
So, I'm currently looking at the original torrent for Mass Effect posted on Demonoid 3 years ago. Up till now, it has had 104120 completed downloads; let's round that to 100k for convenience's sake. What do we know?
We know that it was downloaded one hundred thousand times on Demonoid. We do not know whether the downloads belonged to unique users, or whether one person made use of the same torrent several times. We do not know what people did with the torrent afterwards. Did they install, keep, delete, use as an extended demo for purchase, outright pirate and laugh about it while walking by Gamestop? We also do not know how many people actually bought the game while downloading. We do not know how many people downloaded the torrent while already owning the game because they have lost discs, DDL service was slow or down, etc.
We must also keep in mind that the torrent is three years old. It would be nice to have a graph detailing the activity it's had over the years, but unfortunately, such features are unavailable. The torrent has no exact date at which it was posted, however from the comments page I can surmise that it was soon after launch. Of the 426 comments posted on the torrent, circa 350 were posted three years ago at the latest. That is an overwhelming majority of comments. So from this data, if we accept that torrent activity is correlated to comment number, the torrent has been gradually abandoned.
However, we have not considered alternative Mass Effect torrents on Demonoid and other sites (I can recally one private tracker having ME2 available before it was even launched - many happy people - now checking it, the torrent has been completed only several thousand times). We have not considered the game's DLC, or analyzed its correlation with ME, etc. As you can see, it is very difficult to extrapolate specific, meaningful data even having access to the torrent websites themselves. You would have to go for a long term research project where you probe and record and every IP using the torrent in order to verify that it is unique, and well, you get where this is going.
Now let me run a search on how many copies of ME were sold, which is when our torrent was most active (in point of fact, we can only narrow the most intense activity of the torrent to three years ago, but it is conceivable, and if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, that torrents, especially of such wide coverage games as ME, experience their peak at launch).
According to Gamespot 1.6 million copies were sold in the first six weeks, which is a fairly decent time frame for our torrent.
The article however does not report how many copies were sold for each platform, via either retail or digital, but if we assume that every download of Mass Effect equals a lost sale (an extreme and highly unlikely scenario), then this singular instance of piracy has cost Bioware a maximum of 16% of its profits from the sales of Mass Effect in the first six weeks.
Conclusions
16% is a significant but hardly crippling portion of income. Please note that this is one of the most popular torrents I have been able to find in years of usage, and therefore a distinct case. This is useful mostly to gleam some understanding into the extent of damage that piracy can cause.
Is it enough to drive a developer away? Epic blamed PC piracy for poor Gears of War sales on that platform, but even such a large number of lost sales could hardly be said to cripple a game which is expected to sell in the millions. In fact, Epic's own Cliffy B. has since released a number of statements (that I know of at least) as to why they chose to alienate the PC crowd, including the ludicrous claim that Gears did not "work" properly on the PC - it is so good a port that you would say it was developed for the PC to begin with.
N.B. It is notoriously difficult to get accurate data about video game sales. Publishers will only release "marketing" announcements, claiming their game has sold x millions of copies. Even so they will not always release the specifics, such as platforms and medium. It is not uncommon for digital sales to go completely ignored. You do not "ship" copies to Steam, for instance.
TL;DR: I have conducted an hour-long study of how an exceptionally popular torrent of ME1 can damage sales. Not as bad as you'd think. But we do not have nearly as much data as we need to draw definite conclusions.
People talk about piracy all the time on the internet, but most of the time they only produce three sentence long opinion pieces either defending or attacking the practice. I have decided to get some cold hard facts, insofar as it is possible to get them, by analyzing a particular instance of piracy.
The Actual Thing
So, I'm currently looking at the original torrent for Mass Effect posted on Demonoid 3 years ago. Up till now, it has had 104120 completed downloads; let's round that to 100k for convenience's sake. What do we know?
We know that it was downloaded one hundred thousand times on Demonoid. We do not know whether the downloads belonged to unique users, or whether one person made use of the same torrent several times. We do not know what people did with the torrent afterwards. Did they install, keep, delete, use as an extended demo for purchase, outright pirate and laugh about it while walking by Gamestop? We also do not know how many people actually bought the game while downloading. We do not know how many people downloaded the torrent while already owning the game because they have lost discs, DDL service was slow or down, etc.
We must also keep in mind that the torrent is three years old. It would be nice to have a graph detailing the activity it's had over the years, but unfortunately, such features are unavailable. The torrent has no exact date at which it was posted, however from the comments page I can surmise that it was soon after launch. Of the 426 comments posted on the torrent, circa 350 were posted three years ago at the latest. That is an overwhelming majority of comments. So from this data, if we accept that torrent activity is correlated to comment number, the torrent has been gradually abandoned.
However, we have not considered alternative Mass Effect torrents on Demonoid and other sites (I can recally one private tracker having ME2 available before it was even launched - many happy people - now checking it, the torrent has been completed only several thousand times). We have not considered the game's DLC, or analyzed its correlation with ME, etc. As you can see, it is very difficult to extrapolate specific, meaningful data even having access to the torrent websites themselves. You would have to go for a long term research project where you probe and record and every IP using the torrent in order to verify that it is unique, and well, you get where this is going.
Now let me run a search on how many copies of ME were sold, which is when our torrent was most active (in point of fact, we can only narrow the most intense activity of the torrent to three years ago, but it is conceivable, and if anecdotal evidence is to be believed, that torrents, especially of such wide coverage games as ME, experience their peak at launch).
According to Gamespot 1.6 million copies were sold in the first six weeks, which is a fairly decent time frame for our torrent.
The article however does not report how many copies were sold for each platform, via either retail or digital, but if we assume that every download of Mass Effect equals a lost sale (an extreme and highly unlikely scenario), then this singular instance of piracy has cost Bioware a maximum of 16% of its profits from the sales of Mass Effect in the first six weeks.
Conclusions
16% is a significant but hardly crippling portion of income. Please note that this is one of the most popular torrents I have been able to find in years of usage, and therefore a distinct case. This is useful mostly to gleam some understanding into the extent of damage that piracy can cause.
Is it enough to drive a developer away? Epic blamed PC piracy for poor Gears of War sales on that platform, but even such a large number of lost sales could hardly be said to cripple a game which is expected to sell in the millions. In fact, Epic's own Cliffy B. has since released a number of statements (that I know of at least) as to why they chose to alienate the PC crowd, including the ludicrous claim that Gears did not "work" properly on the PC - it is so good a port that you would say it was developed for the PC to begin with.
N.B. It is notoriously difficult to get accurate data about video game sales. Publishers will only release "marketing" announcements, claiming their game has sold x millions of copies. Even so they will not always release the specifics, such as platforms and medium. It is not uncommon for digital sales to go completely ignored. You do not "ship" copies to Steam, for instance.
TL;DR: I have conducted an hour-long study of how an exceptionally popular torrent of ME1 can damage sales. Not as bad as you'd think. But we do not have nearly as much data as we need to draw definite conclusions.
