Is Piracy Growing?

The teacher stands before the class. “Children, today we are going to answer the question of piracy?”

 The little boys and girls, all beaded eyed and fixed on the teachers professional authority, are hanging on every word.

 “Now hands up who here is a pirate?”

 A number of hands fill the air! And the teacher begins tipping the air with the edge of her pencil as she begins to count the hands held high.

 “Well done, hands down, now who here was a pirate last year?”

 Again the hands flood the air, the teacher begins counting again.

If only it was that easy! And you are under no obligation to raise your hand, but the chances are that everyone has tried it at least once? Even if they haven’t downloaded, they probably have borrowed from a friend. And why not? Sharing is one of human’s most profound abilities, and yet at times we confuse piracy with sharing. But it’s not; it is more like stealing!

 But software piracy or illegal downloading is an oddity. While all the uploaders get all the credit, publishers don’t seem to get anything in return. It is normally here when pro-pirates jump in stating something along the line of “money grabbing”. But do we say this because it is easier to steal from someone who has so much?

 Yes Publishers make a profit, and do well, but doing better means more titles for the gamer. If I lend ten friends a 1 dollar each, and only three pay me back. Next time I can only lend three new friends a dollar, because I have no more. And that simply is what is happening to the Gaming industry. Piracy is a problem and because of the shortfall in returns publishers are taking fewer risks.

 Ultimately it’s the gamer that suffers, whether he be a pirate or land lubber!

So is Piracy growing…? That is a real tough question, because not everyone would put up their hand! And that’s not a criticism, that’s smart! Another thing that WarFace wants to address, suing people is the biggest waste of energy since an air-conditioned room full of servers! We don’t want to punish pirates or illegal downloaders; we want to encourage sharing, with publishers too!

 However, I believe piracy is not only growing, but it is flourishing. Unfortunately torrents and file sharing is something that can be picked up real easy. With little information, people can install the software and start looking for files that they want to download. The list is endless, and fairly easy to find.

 I recently found that BSA did admit to some errors! But what they have done is to take a broad guess as to the illegal costs, and assumed that every pirate unit is one direct sale. This has led to much criticism, partly because many court rulings have been based on it.

While I can understand the pirates and their banner of “One illegal download is not one Direct Sale!” This is now beginning, to pain the ears more than a child’s cry! I can also understand that the BSA only stated that the potential loss, because they wanted to show the market size of piracy. Good intentions landed them in hell.

 At the end of the year TorrentFreak releases a top 10 chart of the most illegally downloaded. These are the top 10 charts of 2008 and the top 5 charts of 2009. From watching the illegal torrents ourselves, I don’t believe that they watched every illegal torrent. But I do believe they have put some work into it and that it has a strong creditability.

What should be taken from this is not the number of times a game was actually downloaded. But if you look at the download in position one, for both 2008 and 2009, what is the difference? By looking at the top 5 positions, and calculating the increase, you find some startling conclusions. 

 The average difference between all the number spot is an increase of 251. This backs up the claim that piracy is growing, and will be very interesting to see what 2010 holds. Results should be out at the end of December this year.

 These figures show a more than double in the number of downloads for each of the top 5. I find it hard to believe that 2009 had much better games that people wanted and didn’t want to pay for. I can more likely believe that people have found downloading games very easy. This would explain the nearly 250% increase in piracy across the board. 

 Now if you take into account the sales figure of 2007, which related to the download figures ending 2008 by torrentfreak. When you look at these figures two things really stand out.

 Firstly the top 2 figures are games that are not pirated. The problem with pirating the top 2 games is that they require a serial key, which you have to log on to a server with. The Game Company can ban serial keys if people distribute them, therefore kicking them out. This game is an online game, which means that it is very hard to circumvent. Therefore you can see the figures for these are well above the figures for any of the other games, which are easily cracked.

 The second is the huge gap left between the sales figure and the download figures. While I only have three “download” figures for the PC game sales. What you can see here is the downloaded figure is far greater than the purchases. 

 As you can see from the results it suggests that Piracy for PC Games is rising, and at least twice as much as sales. Please note that I have used the word “suggest”, I would like to have a bucket of statistics before I add “heavily”. This also points out the glaring hole in the piracy issue. Not only is there a complete lack of people taking measurements of the piracy world, but even on the business side there seems to be a refusal of releasing measurements.

Pirates have the perfect right to claim that it is not a problem or that sales losses are made up and over exaggerated. Because when Publishers claim something with no facts to back it up, how else are you to convince them? This being said, what little evidence there is, only supports Publishers, Pirates need to stop pretending and hiding behind the childish excuses that hold no water.