Today tinyBuild celebrate Punch Club crossing 300,000 units sold–a huge milestone for tinyBuild and Lazy Bear Games. Being number geeks, they planted plenty of analytics into all versions of the game to figure out the exact numbers of…well…pirated copies of Punch Club.
They even went further and decided to see how localization might impact piracy, and have some interesting regional stats.
• Punch Club has been pirated 1.6 million times
• 1,137,000 times is for PC/Mac/Linux
• 514,000 times on Mobile
• 90% of mobile piracy is Android
What’s most interesting though is the impact of localization. In short, as soon as they localized in Brazilian Portuguese, the game exploded in activations in Brazil…just not in sales. You can check out all the juicy details here.
I don’t understand why developers still chose to focus on platforms other than consoles so much. They should’ve at least put out a console version to guarantee some sales. I’m also a little confused about the resistance to DRM given these shocking figures. This is an excellent case as to why more control is needed in the industry. Some might say that strict DRM decreases ownership of a product and whatnot but is it really worse than companies being shut down and developers losing jobs because millions of pirates steal their games?
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.