Piracy is something like the elephant in the room for the iPhone right now, but no one is quite sure how much it's costing developers. 24/7 Wall St. [thanks Pocket Gamer] recently attempted to put a number on App Store piracy to the tune of $450 million since it opened in July 2008.
The math that resulted in this number comes from Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi, who believes that between 13 percent and 21 percent of App Store downloads are paid, for an average price of $3. Factor in the three billion downloads from the App Store and the $60 million and $110 million in revenue generated per quarter with the estimated 75 percent of game downloads being illegal and you have the above level of piracy.
Earlier this year, iPhone developers Smells Like Donkey and Fishlabs reported their own problems with piracy and gave greater public awareness about the issue.
1 Comments
January 16, 2010
I don't buy this or real piracy numbers. Yes i'm sure piracy does cost some sales, but not as bad as they think. I know a lot of people who have downloaded pirated games/music/movies, and most of the time they had had to intention of every buying it to begin with. I have download some music and movies before, but companies didn't lose money from me (the reason being that if I didn't get them for free, I just would not have watched/listened to them at all. So the companies would not have gotten my money anyways).