"Punch Club sold 300k copies total, got pirated over 1m times on PC, and 500k times on mobile."

http://tinybuild.com/punch-club-has-been-pirated-over-1-million-times

via Reddit

Article concludes that localizing for Western European languages is worth it because piracy rate is lower compared to legal purchases. Brazil seems to have high rate of piracy for this game, as did China. Interesting to not see India anywhere.

"We have analytics built into the game -- two independent systems that track everything. We do fingerprinting per device... "

I don't even want to buy this game on GOG now. It sounds like they put spyware in their game to do this, which is even worse than DRM, and I don't want to support them financially even if the version sold here doesn't have it. Such behavior is simply unacceptable to me.

True, but they may be able to track said pirates if they played the game while being connected to the 'net.

They didn't track no piracy, this article is just a PR move to draw more attention, classical stuff.

F-Secure has a program that hides or constantly changes your IP address on any site visited for privacy reasons.So as far as tracing pirates nowadays that could very well be a tricky business.Their figures are a bluff to scare would be pirates:)

Because no internet, may be.
As publisher collected data via internet.

...the fuck? Does the GOG version have spyware? ...I should probably pirate the GOG version, just to see if I should continue to support GOG. I'm not buying or playing any of the developer or publisher's games ever.

same here

They have accurate data on how many legal copies they sell, and if they sold 300k legal copies and 1300k people tried to register their game or played it online, its obvious those 1000k were pirated versions.
Each digital copy of a game must also have a unique ID, an individual product code.

Since only a few choose to register their pirated game or join online mutliplayer, the 1 million pirated copies is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Considering China's, Russia's and Brazil's large populations, its not unreasonable to assume there'd be many millions of pirated copies around of each game.

Researching torrents would probably give you a good estimate as well.

Don't worry, I highly doubt the GOG version has spyware. Many posters have pointed out above that these stats are just cooked up fluff, to gain publicity. Even EA, a multi-millionaire company, can't put special stuff in their games to properly track pirates, do you think this indie company can?

@Topic
I'm glad to see that GOG folks here are sharper to spot the red flags. The key with piracy (and the big "advantage"), is the ability to play their game copies anywhere, on any computer they wish, without an internet connection, because an internet connection is not needed (games is cracked, so authentication is not needed). So without an internet connection, how can they track anything? Taking stats out from their butt, literally. And I wonder why are they pulling this, considering that their game sold very well. Their sales figures are 10 times more than the average indie title. You'd think an indie whose game didn't sell too good, would be the one to work the issue on piracy.

I compare this to the Kotaku comments, where people just took the things they say at face value, without even bothering to think, in a big hurry to bash "piracy".

pirating indie games.

sad.

No internet explains why its isn't up on mobile. People only use internet when they're browsing / downloading and don't keep it on by default. Maybe the game flew beneath the radar, which is nice considering indie piracy is worse than triple A.

Agreed. 300k sales hardly sounds like a reason to complain, when you're an Indie developer. And if I'm thinking of the right game here, I doubt this had a huge budget and production team.

On the other hand, if they really built some kind of tracking software into their game ( which may well be a bullshit claim ) then I find it hard to sympathize with them.