"when in reality there maybe 1% of pirates that would have otherwise bought the game"
Your number is ridiculous, and no-one assumes every pirated game is a lost sale either. Do you have any evidence to support this number?
Your number is ridiculous, and no-one assumes every pirated game is a lost sale either. Do you have any evidence to support this number?
Successful Free-to-Play games like League of legends are suspected to convert greater than 10 percent of players to paying customers. Of the millions of players who pirated Bioshock infinite, I seriously doubt that only 1 percent could have afforded to pay for it and had a desire to play it.
If we couldn't pirate something, we just didn't ever end up playing. It seems like the amount of money any one person will spend on games/gaming is very stable. So what game devs are really trying to do is to be a part of each of their customers game-spending pie. I know that's how it is for me and the people I interact with.
These people count towards the piracy number on hundreds of games yet would only ever buy a small fraction.
XBLA had an 18% conversion rate in 2007, and it's hard to say with a straight face that it'd go down. 2010 saw Ken Lobb (MGS) citing 20% to 40% rates in interviews for in-house games. These aren't perfect proxies for PC piracy but even if it's halved when you jump from console to PC, the 1% value just doesn't make any sense.