"The EU Commission couldn't prove piracy affects sales" - PcGameN
Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2017 12:19 am
[Link]
That you guys might be interested into this."The European Commision have found that they were unable to prove that piracy has a robust impact on final sales numbers. A report that considered a variety of different types of media, from games to books, found that the only medium that suffered a significant loss of sales due to piracy was “recent top films.
The reason for the 300-page report’s existence is outlined at the beginning of the document. There, it says that “the extent to which digital consumption of pirated materials displaces legitimate purchases is of fundamental importance for EU copyright policy design. It’s worth noting that the methods attached to the report are related solely to EU sales and EU piracy, so the findings are not necessarily true of other regions.
Interestingly, the study did find that for games, as well as music and books, the likelihood of piracy was not actually based on price, but on “willingness to pay.” That means that an increase in price is unlikely to make someone more likely to pirate a game - if they want to pay, they will, and if they don’t, they might pirate it instead.
Overall, however, the findings were that an increase in piracy didn’t actually equate to a reduction in game sales. You can read a full summary of the report (and, in fact, the whole thing, if you fancy wading through legal jargon for a few days) right [Link]."
