LogFAQs > #947826383

Kotenks posted...

Usually the most heavily pirated media are also the most popular to purchase. GOT was the most pirated show while it was on and HBO made hundreds of millions off of it. When you look at movies, it's the same. It's rare for there to be product that is highly sought out/pirated and people have no interest in buying. Pirates make up only a small portion of the market. If your game studio is going under, you have much bigger issues than pirates.

There are so many things wrong with that assessment that one hardly knows where to begin. First, HBO sells a subscription service, not advertising. Second, a lot of the revenue generated from GoT was merchandising. In fact, many major properties tend to make more on merchandising than they do on the show or movie itself. That's not just apples to oranges, that's like apples to wrenches.

The problem isn't "the most pirated" anything, it's the stuff that's pirated to the point where people aren't buying enough to return a profit where the money is only being made on the game itself. If a game only needs to sell a small number of copies to be profitable and most people are pirating instead of buying, that's far more of a problem than a major thing with multiple revenue streams which is just losing out on an additional return past the point where it's already been wildly profitable.

Or, in other words, if a game needs to sell 5k copies to cover costs and only 2k buy it with another 42k pirating it instead (where, even if it's not a 1:1, enough people would have bought to make it profitable), it has a bigger impact than millions of people pirating something where they've already covered costs.

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