@raven10: I seriously doubt that because if any given game was pirated at ten times the rate it was sold, we're talking about absurd numbers of players. Take tomb raider: it sold 3,5 million games across all platforms. Let's for the sake of argument assume that the PC version contributed 1 million of those. That would mean that 10 million people pirated it! That's insane - there' no way that's possible.
Just take a look at the torrent sites: right now, the highest leeched PC game torrent on the Pirate Bay, is Dead Island Riptide which has roughly 5000 downloaders across all versions. Tomb Raider is 10 Gb big. Assuming an average download speed of 20 Mb/s, which is way higher than the average connection speeds apart from South Korea, but I'm assuming the pirates are resourceful, it would take a little over an hour to download that under optimal conditions . But there's no way you can reach that with a torrent so let's say three hours, which is still hella generous. Assuming the number of downloaders remain constant, that means the torrents listed on the Pirate Bay can expect to facilitate about 40 000 downloads a day. The 3,2 million sales mark was reached in 21 days - in that time, the torrents would have facilitated 840 000 downloads which corresponds to roughly two thirds of the legal sales. And this doesn't even take into account the fact that the numbers of peers obviously declines over time the same way it does with any release, legal or not.
So where on earth did the remaining 9,16 million downloads come from? There would have to be 14 unique, equally popular, combinations of torrents on some other sites which for some reasons are not listed on the Pirate Bay. That just doesn't make any kind of sense: the whole point of torrenting is to achieve to highest numbers of peers in as few torrents as possible - or Tomb Raider would have to have been 14 times as popular as Dead Island Riptide which would mean about 56 000 downloaders at any given time over three weeks.
You know what comes pretty close to that, with 56 000 seeders and 12 000 peers at this time? The last episode of Game of Thrones. Which is pirated to hell and back because of the simple reason that it besides being the most talked about TV show in decades is both an HBO exclusive and that it is for all intents and purposes a US exclusive! There is simply no way for the rest of the world to get it legally for several months, barring the lucky few who have access to it through an HBO streaming service (including myself this season, thanks to HBO Nordic) But TV shows peak extremely early once everyone has watched an episode: the previous episode has half that number of seeds and almost a tenth the numbers of peers. And TV shows are always pirated way more than any other media anyway for a very simple reason: they are short. This both keeps the filesize down and means that pirates consume more of them.
Speaking of which, would you ever be able to guess which is the most seeded PC game torrent right now? Here's a hint: it's not Bioshock Infinite. It is....
<drumroll>
Subway surfers PC edition, which handily beats out the runner up Skyrim's 5000 seeds with a ludicrous 20 000 seeds. Why? Probably because it's only 20 megabytes big. And in that case I don't think it's stretch Subway Surfers might actually be pirated at ten times the rate it is bought. But for a AAA title, in the launch window? The numbers just don't add up.
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