Punch Club finds out most gamers pirated its game: 90% of mobile pirates were on Android

The game is available on both PC and mobile, and unfortunately the piracy rate is very high on both platforms. In fact, there are more people who have pirated the game than people who have actually paid to play it: at 300,000 legal downloads, there are over 1.137 million pirates on PC / Mac / Linux and more than 500,000 on mobile.

Interestingly - but not surprisingly - Android accounts for 90% of those 500k pirated copies of the game, while iOS accounts for the remainder. 

This is not where the interesting numbers stop, though, as the game developer TinyBuild ran some stats to see where the game is pirated the most. At first, China took a prominent place as Chinese users were installing the pirated version, finding no difficulty in the fact that it was only available in English. Interestingly, right after the developer added Brazilian Portuguese local version, piracy rates from Brazil skyrocketed from near zero. Gamers in Brazil obviously like their games localized before they are pirated.

For every Android sale, there were 12 pirates

Brazil was also the top market for pirates, while China and Russia were a distant second and third.

Those were countries, where a very small percentage of people actually bought the game. Compare this with markets like the United States, Germany and France, where there were still quite a few pirates, but also a high number of gamers who bought the game. The highest percentage of buyers to hackers was actually in Germany: 46%, compared with 26.2% in the United States and 18.8% in France.

The sad bottom line is that Punch Club was available in torrents hours after the official launch. For every Android sale, there were 12 pirates, while for every PC sale there were 4 pirates. For every iOS sale there were 2 pirates.

TinyBuild ends on a positive note for developers: localize your game for Western market, as people there are actually buying their games.

source: TinyBuild