TinyBuild’s  Alex Nichiporchik has published a blog post about the success of their recently published game Punch Club, which has sold more than 300k copies. They have interestingly also published the piracy stats which are quite astounding.  Punch Club has been pirated a total of 1.5 million times – About 1 million times on PC and 500k on Android. That’s approximately US$10,000,000 in potentially lost revenue. Although the reality is, of the people who pirated it, only a fraction of the thieves would have likely bought it.

Interestingly, localization seemed to have had a significant effect on piracy, with localized versions being a popular target for pirates, especially in Brazil.

In a statement TinyBuild CEO said, “Looking back I believe what we should’ve done is enabled cross-platfrom (sic) saves on launch,” wrote Nichiporchik. “This way people who pirate the PC version may have converted better into buyers on mobile or vice-versa.”

These days Indie’s with popular game releases need to start factoring piracy into their launch strategy. Because releasing indie games wasn’t hard enough right?

The massive amount of android rips also is a big reminder of how loose the platform is.  And how significant platform release order can be. So it’s no wonder many indie developers  targeting mobile are embracing an iOS only strategy. Don’t steal games kids.