I don't know whether it is or isn't piracy, but it's hard to take his opinion on this as representative or forward thinking because of how "special" Minecraft is (i.e. it's massively popular). Maybe his goal is to maximize revenue, but it doesn't seem like that. In that case, I'd be more interested in the perspective of someone who's pulling in 30k/year in sales and has the same 70% "lost sales" rate. When you're making millions, there's a threshold above which more money is just more money and doesn't really matter (depending on the person). But the difference between 30k/year and what might be 60-80k/year if there was a lower piracy rate would probably drive me nuts because that's the difference between making a living doing something and not.
I'm glad you got something from the numbers in that article because I didn't. Something about 1% of the registered users coming in the last 24 hours? And a million out of 600,000 being such-and-such.
Is there some place other than that puff piece to get real MineCraft numbers from?
My rough calculation is that Minecraft goes for 15 Euros, so if he's registering 30k people/day, that's 450k/day in revenue. That's a lot. Maybe it could be double that if people who are pirating the game didn't have that option. But my point is, 450k/day or 900k/day? I'd be happy with either.
EDIT: Sorry, 30k/day is registered and 30% purchased, so it's actually 9k/day roughly. That's still 135k/day or 270k/day. Still, two numbers I'd be fine with.
Minecraft won an award (multiple awards?) at the Indie Games Festival Awards at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. That would explain the sales.
It beat out other indie games, which of course wouldn't get as high a sales boost. So yes, Minecraft is an example of a very rare case.
It's a number that may be impossible to account for. Heres a study concerning illegal music file sharers, it turns out that they spent more money on music than people who don't share music illegally.
