NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Punch Club pirated over 1.5 million times since launch
After an incredibly successful Twitch Plays event, boxing tycoon sim Punch Club was this year’s first surprise indie hit, boasting over $1 million in revenue within weeks of its release. Any slightly popular game eventually has to deal with its share of software piracy, and Punch Club has been no different, as publisher TinyBuild LLC explained in a recent blog post.
“Today we celebrate Punch Club crossing 300,000 units sold – a huge milestone for tinyBuild and Lazy Bear Games,” wrote TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik. “Being number geeks, we planted plenty of analytics into all versions of the game to figure out the exact numbers of … pirated copies of Punch Club. We even went further and decided to see how localization might impact piracy, and have some interesting regional stats.”
TinyBuild’s data shows that Punch Club has been pirated over 1 million times on PC and over 500,000 times on mobile, meaning that the game has been pirated roughly five times for every legitimate copy sold.
According to Nichiporchik, the rates of piracy varied from region to region, and in some cases localizing the game resulted in a massive surge in piracy.
“We launched without Chinese or Portuguese,” Nichiporchik explained. “China started growing on its own right after launch, they were pirating the English version with no problem.”
“Meanwhile as soon as we added Portuguese, Brazil skyrockets in number of installs … but not in number of sales. Brazil likes to pirate localized games.”
“Localizing games to Western European languages pays off”
Nichiporchik noted that the value of localization varies from country to country, and TinyBuild found that Western Europe in particular was more likely to buy the game rather than pirate it if they had a localized version available. In Germany, for example, roughly 46 percent of fans bought the game rather than pirating it illegally, the highest percentage out of all of Punch Club’s audience.
Of course, according to Nichiporchik, the number of total sales made in Germany was negligible compared to the rest of the world, but he used it as an example of localization working out.
“The most interesting conclusion though is Localization and its impact,” he said. “Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off, and has a very low piracy rate.”
Image courtesy of TinyBuild LLC
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