But, in the age of Spotify, music piracy declines
The rate of games piracy is on the rise, according to new data.
Research firm Envisional says that illicit game downloads in the UK climbed 20 per cent over the last five years. It claims that “that the five top games of 2010” were illegally accessed online almost one million times.
None of the five titles were named, nor was the metric in how they were ranked.
Meanwhile, music albums saw a decrease in illegal downloads, though TV show and film piracy rocketed by as much as 30 per cent since 2006.
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No explanation was given for the drop in music piracy, though free and convenient music streaming services, such as Spotify, could be a key factor.
Earlier this year, trade group UKIE claimed that for every game that is sold, four will have been pirated. UKIE said these alleged lost sales cost the games industry £1 billion each year.
Will people stop rolling out the ridiculous equation of "1 copy stolen = 1 lost sale". I am in no way defending piracy but industries do themselves harm when they overstate these figures.
PS: "sold", not "soled"
There's a certain moral gap when it comes to piracy, stealing from the internet isn't exactly the same as stealing from a store. Of course it should be, but it isn't. The lenient laws relevant to computer usage are partly the cause for this and the common carelessness attitude to downloading software illegally.
Having to earn the consumer's support is the liberal way of solving this issue, the real question is is this the 'right' way?
How much have overall sales climed in the same period? e.g. The latest Call od Duty is selling millions more than ever.
Taking that into account, doesn't that mean the overall rate of piracy could actually be *LOWER*? 20% is fairly meaningless without sales figures to compare it to...
Want to stop piracy?
simple charge £10 for the Game,
not £38.50
It'd be interesting to see a study on what percentage of pirated games actually result in lost sales. There are those who would have bought had they not pirated, but there's also people who wanted to play before they buy and those who wanted to try a game out by 'renting' it essentially and would have never been a customer.
£1 billion each year might be a little alarmist on their part.
The argument that games should cost less, assumes that the number of sales is the measure of a games success.
Games may well sell more if they cost less, but sales is not the value you're trying to maximise, it's revenue. It doesn't matter if you sell 50 million copies if you don't break even, and given that the cost of game development is rising, breaking even is more and more difficult to do.
It's also worth pointing out that the price of games has been falling since the 90s, as prices haven't increased to account for inflation.
Not to mention that "it's too expensive" is a pretty shoddy excuse for stealing something.
As others have said, one pirated game does NOT equal one lost sale. And yes I suspect that piracy rates have actually stayed around the same level; the number of pirated games may rise but so do the paid-for figures.
Developers and publishers can numb the impact of piracy on their games by:
-Providing a demo before release
-Updating their game regularly so that pirated copies don't function/lack the new content
-NOT resorting to DRM
-Releasing it at a fair price
-Actually creating a great product that is worthy of a purchase, not a lazy remake of a previous title
These points won't stop piracy, however I'm sure they can reduce it.
Lagging Laws not really the issue, back in the bad old days before the internet and even computers people used to copy music/video tapes and share them with friends. I wouldn't say it was easier but was harder to police and no one did.
Really files sharing on the internet is starting to be policed and many ISPs will shut you down legally or not for torrenting.
One current problem with the £40 games industry is its using far too many developer on it, they need to work smarter not just throw people at the problems. The fact of the matter is £40 is not really enough to break even if not enough units are sold, which they often aren't.
Hello, nice article but if you're going to hotlink our graph on ISPreview.co.uk then at least credit the source once :) .
## Firstly: Would it be better to first focus on revenues and market shares than the number of people who are enjoying the game illegally? Suppose we could find a way to make MORE money from the fact that so many pirate the game if only we should look for ways to increase revenue and market share?
Does piracy hurt any more than lent games other than the fact that one user "broke a rule"? Heck, I've borrowed and swapped games a great deal without paying the publisher for the 'transaction', which "hurts" the industry as much as piracy IMO ... should I be feeling terribly guilty right now?
## Secondly: piracy does raise complications for licenses. Imagine a license that charges per customer, you say you've sold 1M, but they say that their technology identifies that you must pay for 4M users. And vice versa, what about in game advertising, do they pay for the 1M that paid as well as the 3M who didn't?
p.s. Excellent graph, would be great to know how that would look as a divisor for total sales in each industry.
Kind of ironic that an article claiming the high ground in piracy has taken an image without crediting the source. Nice.
The original article (from where the graph is sourced) is here
When DRM gets so bad that you have to download a pirate copy of the game you just bought to make sure you can still play it in a couple years time when the activation servers are all gone, I don't think statistics like this can be trusted.
I always buy games, and always have.
I download those same games because I like to play on my laptop while traveling and dont always have internet. Also with activation servers nowadays, I want to actually buy my game, not rent it until some company decides to shut those servers down.
And BTW, when I spend 29 bucks on a game, I expect it to last more than one day. (Red Faction 2 cough cough)
So I guess by their math I never bought anything. I wish I could use math like that.
