Punch Club has been pirated over 1.6m times
But it's sold more than 300k copies.
Boxing game Punch Club has been pirated over 1.5m times, publisher tiny Build has announced.
That sounds bad - and it is - but (but!) the game has also sold over 300k copies, which isn't bad at all.
The publisher wrote a detailed blog post analysing the stats between piracy vs units sold and PC vs mobile sales.
It discovered that Lazy Bear Games' boxing affair sold significantly better on PC, even though it was pirated much, much more on that platform.
It turns out that 72.9 per cent of the revenue came from the PC version (including Mac and Linux), while while only 27.1 per cent came from mobile. When it comes to piracy, however, 68.9 per cent of the pirated copies were of the PC release, while only 31.1 per cent were of the mobile version.
For a more exact figure, Punch Club has been pirated over 1.6m times with 1,137,000 on PC / Mac / Linux, and 514,000 times on mobile. 90 per cent of the pirated mobile copies were on Android.
The publisher decided to analyse its piracy rates by region and arrived at some pretty interesting results.
Looking at the difference between pirated copies and sales the day the game was localised into Portugese (about two weeks after launch), Germany had the best sales-to-piracy ratio with 46 per cent who bought the game instead of pirated it. Second place was the United States with 26.2 per cent, followed by France with 18.8 per cent.
"The most interesting conclusion though is Localisation and its impact. Punch Club clearly shows that localising games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate," tiny Build assessed.
The publisher summarised its findings by noting that for every sale on PC there are four pirates, for every Android sale there are 12 pirates, and for every iOS sale there are two pirates.
"While it's difficult to fight piracy - and most DRM-enforced ways are horrible for the paying customers - it's hard to deny it has an impact," tiny Build stated. "Looking back I believe what we should've done is enabled cross-platform saves on launch. This way people who pirate the PC version may have converted better into buyers on mobile or vice-versa."
