Piracy is a convenient excuse for generally sucky movie/music/game sales. It's much easier to blame college students for downloading pirated stuff than for media execs to own up to the fact that they might have a loser business on their hands.
The video game industry, for example, claims piracy costs roughly $3 billion per year. Cevat Yerli, CEO of computer game developer Crytek, says the ratio of legitimate games sales to pirated downloads of "Crysis" ranges between 1 to 15 and 1 to 20.
But another gaming guy, who has access to some data, says that's bunk. Tom Jubert, an editor of patching service GameShadow, says the hysteria surrounding game piracy is "overblown." Based on data collected by GameShadow -- which patches games for one million subscribers -- the ratio of legitimate to pirated copies of Crysis is more like 5 to 1 in the U.S. and 7 to 3 in the U.K.
"There's no doubt that PC gaming suffers due to piracy -- and to a considerably greater extent than console titles. However, ratios like 1:15, and claims that 'consoles sell factors of 4 to 5 more' are massively misleading . . . Revenues on some PC titles may well be down by as much as 15 percent to 20 percent due to piracy, but I've yet to see evidence for any greater piracy related impact on the platform's decline," Jubert wrote on Edge.
And if the PC gaming market has been hit by pirates, industry stats indicate sales are still humming along nicely.
Similarly, the MPAA keeps pointing its finger at downloaders, but the studios themselves could be partly to blame for lackluster sales. The MPAA alleges that college-student file sharers were responsible for roughly 15 percent of the industry's losses last last year (pdf) or roughly a quarter of a billion dollars.
But there are other reasons for lagging movie sales, including a glut of Hollywood films; generally bad movies; and increasingly unaffordable ticket prices at a time when the economy is flirting with a recession.
And how did the MPAA arrive at such pie-in-the-sky figures, anyway? Most likely the same way it calculated that confiscated pirated DVDs are worth anywhere from $83 each to $3,225.80 apiece in losses.
Academic publishers demonstrate a similar cluelessness. They're totally bewildered by the decline in textbook sales, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education report. Does it occur to them that students are paying an ungodly average of $900 per year on textbooks? With those kinds of prices, it could be a little silly and extravagant not to download books.
Photo: Flickr/Peasap
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