EPTOn November 11 2026 05:36 Flameberger wrote:
I always wonder how the 'dollars lost by the industry' numbers are arrived at. I don't know how to actually get to that Brunel University study to check though, since the article referencing it doesn't seem to have any direction towards it.
(This is even more off topic than emulator discussion but it's annoying me more the more I think about it, shouldn't a games journalism site actually cite the authors or title of a study that they base their posts on?)
I always wonder how the 'dollars lost by the industry' numbers are arrived at. I don't know how to actually get to that Brunel University study to check though, since the article referencing it doesn't seem to have any direction towards it.
(This is even more off topic than emulator discussion but it's annoying me more the more I think about it, shouldn't a games journalism site actually cite the authors or title of a study that they base their posts on?)
That's a really good question. A cursory Google search tells me that the total number of dollars lost by the video game industry tends to be based on a variety of factors, such as revenue lost to digital piracy and lost investments from failed AAA games. Ideally, game developer / publisher / company data will already have the latter (expensive-to-make games that didn't pay off), and data from emulation/piracy sites can probably cobble together the former (how much piracy is happening, which games are being pirated instead of bought, how many dollars are being stolen, etc.).
Here's an example that's related to the dollars-lost-due-to-piracy conversation:
"A new study suggests game piracy costs publishers 19% of revenue on average when digital rights management (DRM) protections are cracked. Research associate William Volckmann at UNC analyzed 86 games using Denuvo DRM on Steam between 2014-2022. The study, published in Entertainment Computing, found cracks appearing in the first week after release led to 20% revenue loss, dropping to 5% for cracks after six weeks. Volckmann used Steam user reviews and player counts as proxies for sales data." https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/10/10/1846211/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study
There are two hyperlinks in the above paragraph/source that didn't directly transfer over, so I'll paste them here:
19-20% lost revenue article: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/
The study / published paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1875952124002532?dgcid=author#fn9
