Developer tinyBuild announced today that its fighting management simulator, Punch Club, has been pirated an astounding 1.6 million times since its release on January 8th in comparison to 300 thousand retail sales. This means that of the 1.9 million copies of Punch Club currently installed on PCs and mobile devices, 81% of them were acquired through piracy.
The developer dug deeper into the specifics of its pirating audience and also discovered the following figures:
- 1,137,000 of the pirated copies of Punch Club were downloaded for PC, Mac or Linux while the remaining 514,000 were downloaded to mobile devices.
- Of the mobile pirated copies, 90% belong to Android users. tinyBuild estimates that for every legal sale of the game on Android, it was pirated 12 times on the platform.
- Brazil pirated more copies than any other country on the game’s launch day as 11,627 Brazillian users downloaded the game illegally. Russia was second with 4,889 illegal first-day downloads, followed by China at 4,163.
- Germany has the highest percentage of bought copies vs. pirated copies on the game’s launch day with 46% of German players purchasing the game. This is followed by The United States with 26.2% and France with 18.8% percent.
- It’s also worth noting that along with having the most day one pirated copies of Punch Club, Brazil was also the source of the second most legal purchases of the game on its launch day. 373 copies of Punch Club were sold in Brazil at launch behind Germany’s 454.
tinyBuild concluded its findings with a brief statement on how it may have been able to counter some piracy by allowing for cross-platform saving at launch, as well as an encouragement for other developers to localize games for the Western European market at launch, given the success Punch Club experienced there at retail.
The game is currently available on PC/Mac/Linux for $9.99 and on Android and iOS app stores for $4.99.
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This post was originally written by Matthew Byrd.
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