Punch Club, a fighting game by tinyBuild, has sold over 300,000 units. BUT has been pirated about 1.6 million times. That’s a heck of a number!
tinyBulid in a blog post shared some interesting stats about how many times Punch Club has been pirated and also shed some light on how localization might impact.
According to the stats collected by them, Punch Club had been pirated over 11,37,000 times for PC/Mac/Linux along 5,14,000 times for mobile.
Most of the piracy happens on PC, as it doesn’t shocking me at all, because Punch Club had appeared within hours of launch on torrents.
For every Android sale there are 12 pirates and, as a result, 90% of mobile piracy is for Android.
Brazil, Russia and China are amongst the top-pirated countries with 11,627, 4,888, and 4,163 copies pirated respectively. In fact, the interesting but shocking part is, China who has pirated about 4,163 units had just bought only 2 copies of the game.
Although, there are some fair countries who actually paid for it. Among which Germany has the highest bought-rate with US and France following.
Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of tinyBuild, in the blog post, suggest developers and publishers to localize their games for Western Europe. He wrote:
The most interesting conclusion though is Localization and its impact. Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate.
While it’s difficult to fight piracy — and most DRM-enforced ways are horrible for the paying customers — it’s hard to deny it has an impact. Looking back I believe what we should’ve done is enabled cross-platofrm saves on launch. This way people who pirate the PC version may have converted better into buyers on mobile or vice-versa.
Piracy is truly dominating the sales number and also affecting the revenues developers/publishers get from it. Well, we already gave our thoughts on Why Should Games’ Piracy Have to Stop, which can be check here.