eMouse wrote:

Oops! I had my numbers wrong. The 10:1 ratio was the ratio WotC President Greg Leeds claimed to be the number of illegal downloads vs. legal purchases. Not sure if he meant legal PDF purchases or all purchases. http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/254134-exclusive-interview-wizards-coa...

Quote:

2. Is online piracy a continuing annoyance for Wizards, a substantial concern, or something between the two? Are there estimates of lost sales figures that you can share? The piracy became a substantial concern when we saw thousands of copies of our recently released Player’s Handbook 2 being downloaded illegally within hours of its release. We cannot share sales figures, but I can tell you that we conservatively estimate the ratio of illicit downloads to legally purchased copies was 10:1.

By comparison, the developer of Crysis pinned their estimate of piracy at 20:1. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19203 I'm wondering if there's a similar ratio known of downloads from the official torrent vs. total sales?

I think the biggest problem I see with that statement is that both groups fail to realize the market impact that the piracy of their product probably had. There is no telling how many people got ahold of those products that wouldn't have already purchased it. A 10:1 piracy ratio might seem like a lot, but if 91% of the people who have a copy of that book wouldn't have bought it anyways, then it becomes a moot point. Besides, I think that number is actually based on digital copies exclusively... a 10:1 ratio seems over-exaggerated if compared to actual book sales. If that's the case, they've made a bad marketing decision all around... I'd rather have 10:1 piracy to sold digital copy sales than 1:0, anyday. As for file distribution, I can only speak for what I have seen in my area. From the time I downloaded the free PDF, I have distributed it to 43 other people via bluetooth on my phone. Of those 43, I know personally that 6 of them have purchased copies since. I would like to note that I gave a copy to people I figured would purchase the game anyways, and that I am leaving out the number of people I have distributed the game to outside of bluetooth (most of which don't go to shops because they are too poor to afford the hobby). Moreover, I have no clue how many more people they distributed these copies to, and how many of those people purchased a copy. Therein lies a potential problem when dealing with Creative Common products, in that it is damn near impossible to keep track of actual distribution figures. But one thing that my example does provide, in my opinion, is the potential for market penetration. In the entire time I have been at that shop, I have only seen one other product get into as many players' hands... and that was D&D 3.5, when somebody at the shop started handing out free discs with pirated PDFs when the boss wasn't around. When Eclipse Phase's distribution is in 2nd place behind pirated copies of the most popular RPG around, that says something to me.