It turns out that they are also quotes from the CEO of the company whose only release was the 5th most pirated PC game of 2011.
And yet, he accepts that piracy is a non-issue for the most part.
An article from the creators of the Humble Indie Bundle (
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy), where they do something unheard of, actually analyse statistics relating to piracy.
They come to soem rather sensible conclusions:
* People who pirate are not limited by finances, so they download more than they can ever play.
* This means that even though games see that (for example) 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
That last statement is counter-intuitive but here is the math:
Let's consider the following scenario. Because game pirates can get apps for free, they download a couple new games every day -- or about 500 games in a year. On the other hand, normal gamers tend to play the same game for a longer time -- buying an average of 5 games per year. If this seems low to you, then consider that you are also reading a post on an indie game developer blog. You are probably more hardcore than the average gamer. Anyway, given these statistics, if the market consists of 10 million gamers, then there are 500 million pirated game copies, and 90 million purchased game copies, From the perspective of every individual game, 80% of its users are using pirated copies. However, only 10% of the market consists of pirates.
It also asks, even if you stopped this small amount of pirates (10-20% of ther market) from pirating, would they buy the games?
That article has reference to another company's experiments with antipiracy measures, where they got 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. That's not a good conversion rate.
And then there's the argument that piracy can sometimes help a game. There's the try before you buy crowd. But there's also building brand awareness and the piracy of one game helps the sequel in sales. I remember watching a youtube video of one game developer who said their first game didn't sell that well, then it got pirated, word of mouth spread. Then the sequel came out and had massive day 1 sales, which he attributed at least in part to the pirates who tried the first game, enjoyed it, and were willing to pay for the second the instant it came out.
Microsoft has known about this effect for decades. They initially turned a blind eye to piracy of their software in 3rd world countries, because they knew that they were creating a market - when later versions came out, some of those people and companies would buy the new edition, and they'd be getting sales they wouldn't have got any other way.
There have also been experiments conducted with music sales and piracy, in which piracy has been shown to have a positive effect on sales (as well as a negative effect - it's complex), not to mention the massive success from bands who have done the occasional DRM-free, pay-what-you-want sales.
So piracy is a complex issue. The piracy 'market' and the commercial market can co-exist side by side, the 'damage' done by pirates is incredibly hard to quantify but is probably pretty small and has positive effects too.
Game publishers should pretty much ignore piracy and concentrate on making good games. Those games always sell.
