i think that ratio is just a tad exaggerated

Well there are ways to bring piracy down or even to make the profit margin loss lower. It's just a shame the corporations are too bloody blind to see the basics.

A) Make decent games and stop launching DLC on day one! DLC is meant to extend games, so it's really sickening to see expansion packs or even small items being released on day one. Stop trying to con the public and release it with the game, or a month or two down the line.

B) Stop charging so bloody much for games when we all know it doesn't cost anywhere near that much. If they reduced prices then more copies would sell, meaning less wasted copies sat on shelves. It would also mean the ratio of sales over pirated downloads would increase.

C) Stop wasting so much money on making new DRM techniques and on stupid lawsuits. Instead, use that money to further develop the games. We all know it's only a matter of time before any DRM is circumvented so it's a pointless waste of time and money. Plus, people that actually purchase products get screwed over more than pirates anyway as of course, pirates can generally bypass the DRM.

What the public obviously wants is more affordable games. Would you rather download a $50 game you don't know if you'll even like, or would you want to dish out the full amount and hate it? Not to mention do you even have the $50 to invest in such a cause? That's the big problem I've noticed everywhere, the prices for games and add-ons are too freakin high. Industry thinks raising the prices will help boost sales and profits to counteract piracy, when they're really adding fuel to the fire. Slash prices and you'll see sales. Don't toos just crappy Disney games in the 2-for-$10 bin, toss some older titles people like and they'll sell quickly! Hell, Fat Princess is a seriously short and arcade-like game and it's being sold DIGITALLY for $19.99. That game (though fun) should only be about %4.99 or maybe $7.99, $9.99 MAX!! Same thing goes for music. Why pay $1.19 a song when you can just download the whole CD/discography for free? CDs are expensive and 20-year old discs still sell for $15 a pop!! Dammit!!

This is bullshit. Anyone who finished high school maths knows that this is just another example of statistics being abused and distorted towards an agenda. The actual figure might not be innaccurate, but it's presentation definitely is, its context; it doesn't talk about the number of pirates, which is more important if we want to see how it actually affects sales.

Scenario; a legitimate gamer might purchase ten games a year, while a pirate will happily download about fifty if we account for all games consoles they happen to own. For example's sake, let's say that these two gamers are the only ones in existance.

So even though, in this hypothetical scenario, that's a pirate to legitimate buyer ratio of 1:1 and a potential loss of about 50% (which is a reasonable estimate), the logic behind the research in the article would land us with a pirated game to purchased ratio of 5:1 and a loss of 83% in revenue, which is bullshit because the pirate obviously wouldn't have paid for everything he pirated in the first place so it can't possibly be regarded as lost revenue.

This isn't my opinion on the morality of piracy, it's just me calling researchers out for shamelessly telling the public white lies.

Well, to start, I think the ratio is total BS. But let's say it's real. 4:1 is NOTHING! Wanna guess what music piracy rates at? Movies? Yet all these industries remain filthy rich!!!

Thorn? I think not! About as much of a thorn as it is to only be able to afford 5 vacation homes around the world instead of 6! DAMN!!! If only I could buy that 6th additional house! If only it weren't for piracy!!!

Seeing companies suffer because of piracy is the reason I wake up in the morning.

"...around GB£ 1.45 billion was lost in sales to piracy in 2010 alone"

How can they determine what would have actually been bought if it wasn't DL'd for free?

I remember back on the ps1 before you could DL games so easily I just had a lot fewer games.

And I still wasted a lot of money on a bunch of turkeys.

Thanks to pirating and previewing I can avoid that now and and just pay for all the packaging and artwork for the good ones.

If a game never comes here then I have no choice but to download a pirated version do I?

Then how is it on the absolute most rampant piracy platform of all (even piracy experts agree on this) the PC, Blizzard continues to consistently break all time sales records? Whether, it be expansion packs(~5 million copies of WoW: Cataclysm have already been sold) or complete games (StarCraft 2 sold more than 1.5 million copies in the first 48hrs), records continue to be broken. Now Cataclysm has an installed user base being and expansion, and StarCraft 2 is a franchise title... but let's turn to consoles... the Top selling console games of all time(for and individual console and not bundled with the console) are for the Wii and DS(6 of the Top 20 are DS titles), but there's no piracy on those two systems...

What is comes down to is price and user base. Hand-held titles are easy to pirate but they cheaper so they sell better. PSP vs DS... PSP (~62 million sold), DS (approx 135 million sold), top title on each PSP(3.1 million), DS (18.5 million). Sony will say that it's due to rampant piracy on the system(yup they are right about that), but if they would have matched the DS in price upon release they would have sold many more units and in turn more games. If the games matched the DS in both price and quality it also would have further increased sales. Same goes for other consoles: Let's go for a much closer comparison. PS3(40 million) vs 360(50 million): not a huge difference there... Top game sales 5.5 million(1/8 of the base) vs 8.1 million(1/6th of the base) and the PS3 was hacked hacked and has a much lower piracy rate than the 360.... BTW, throw in the Wii (75 million) and you get 6 different titles (not including bundled titles) that are not only in the top 20 console sales of all time, but beat MS's 6:1 consoles per copy ratio with most of those beating at least 5:1.

The long story short, cheap consoles(you need a user base and seriously who's buying a 700$ console for their kids when they can pay $200 to a competitor...) plus quality games (say what you want about Nintendo they are more creative than Sony/MS) = less piracy(in terms of pirate/sale) and much more sales.