Quick answer: Both sides of this argument are overconfident. The European Commission's own €360,000 study found no reliable evidence that piracy reduces game sales, which undercuts the "every download is a lost sale" line. But that same study came with a 36% margin of error and warnings from its own authors, so it does not prove piracy helps either. What the 2026 data does show clearly is that the business problem in South Asia was never really piracy. It was that 18% of the world's players generate about 1% of its revenue, and that is finally changing.
Original illustration created for IGGG Guides.
Everyone in this argument is more certain than the evidence allows
Ask ten gamers about piracy and you'll get ten confident answers. One group says it's theft that's killing the industry. The other says it's a victimless workaround for an overpriced hobby. Both groups talk like the facts are obviously on their side.
They aren't. We went looking for the actual research, and what's there is messier and far more interesting than either slogan. Some of it badly embarrasses the anti-piracy argument. Some of it quietly demolishes the pro-piracy one. And the single most useful statistic about this whole subject, the one that explains why South Asia got ignored for twenty years, barely gets mentioned in these debates at all.
Before we get into it, two things so you know where we stand. Downloading a game you haven't paid for is copyright infringement in Pakistan, India and basically everywhere else. We're not going to tell you it's fine in some circumstances, and we're not going to tell you where to do it. What we are going to do is lay out what the evidence actually says, because most writing on this topic is just vibes.
The study nobody on either side quotes properly
In 2014 the European Commission paid a Dutch research firm called Ecorys about €360,000 to answer a simple question: does piracy actually reduce legitimate sales? Ecorys surveyed consumers across Germany, the UK, Spain, France, Poland and Sweden and delivered a 304-page report in May 2015.
The Commission then didn't publish it. For over two years. It only became public in September 2017 when Julia Reda, a Member of the European Parliament, obtained a copy through a freedom of information request and posted it herself.
It isn't hard to guess why it sat in a drawer. The headline finding was this:
"In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements."
For games specifically, it went further. The estimated displacement rate was positive, at +24%. In plain terms, the data suggested that for every 100 games obtained illegally, roughly 24 additional legal sales occurred. The report's explanation was that the games industry had got good at converting non-paying players into paying ones, through extra content, bonuses and online features.
Films went the other way. For recent blockbusters the study found a displacement rate around 27% to 40%, meaning ten illegal views cost roughly four legitimate ones.
Now the part the pro-piracy crowd leaves out
This study gets passed around as proof that piracy helps games. It is not that, and you should be suspicious of anyone who presents it that way.
The caveats are severe. The methodology carried a margin of error around 36%, which means the study could only reliably detect an effect larger than that. The authors wrote that the coefficients were statistically insignificant and stated directly that "not too much significance should be attached to the estimates." Their actual conclusion was not "piracy helps games." It was "we cannot prove piracy hurts them." Those are very different sentences.
So the honest reading is narrow but still useful. The confident claim that every pirated copy is a stolen sale has no solid evidence behind it, and a major publicly funded study failed to find any. That claim should stop being repeated as fact. But nothing here shows piracy is beneficial, and a study that can't detect its own effect size isn't a defence of anything.
One other finding is worth your attention, because it contradicts the most common assumption in these arguments. The study found that for games, price was not the main driver of piracy. Willingness to pay was. Game prices broadly matched what illegal downloaders said they were willing to pay. Making games cheaper, in other words, mostly doesn't convert the people who weren't going to buy.
Why games cost what they cost, and why that hurts here more
None of the above means the price complaint is imaginary. A new release at $60 or $70 is a genuinely large amount of money measured against local incomes in Pakistan or India, and no amount of economics writing makes that less true.
What's changed, and what a lot of these discussions haven't caught up with, is that the industry finally built tools for exactly this problem. We'll come back to those, because they matter more than anything else in this article.
DRM, Denuvo, and the numbers people get wrong
Original illustration created for IGGG Guides.
Piracy produced a response, and that response is Denuvo, the anti-tamper system gamers love to hate. A lot of what circulates about it is wrong in both directions, so here's what's actually documented.
What it costs. Denuvo's own AWS Marketplace listing puts it at $25,000 per month plus $0.50 per game activation. Separately, documents leaked from Crytek in 2020 showed a different structure: €140,000 for the first twelve months, €2,000 per month after that, with a €10,000 tier for indie titles under 100,000 units and a €60,000 surcharge for games exceeding 500,000 activations in a month.
You'll often read that Denuvo costs developers millions. For most games that's simply not true. At $60 a copy, a game needs to sell roughly 400 copies a month to cover the base fee. For a major release that's nothing. The leaked Crytek figures suggest Crysis Remastered needed about 5,000 sales just to break even on the DRM, which is a meaningful burden for a mid-sized game and a rounding error for a big one.
That also explains the pattern you've noticed where publishers quietly strip Denuvo out about a year after launch. It's a running subscription, not a one-off purchase. Once the sales curve flattens, the maths stops working.
What it does to performance. Here the popular belief is shakier than people think. Ars Technica ran the cleanest test available, comparing the identical build of Batman: Arkham Knight on the Epic Games Store, which shipped without Denuvo, against the Steam version, which had it. They found no measurable difference in frame rate or load times. On the other hand, benchmarks of Shadow of the Tomb Raider after Denuvo was removed showed gains of 8 to 17 fps at lower settings, rising further on systems with hyper-threading disabled.
So the accurate version is: the impact varies a lot by implementation, it's often negligible on a modern CPU, and it's worst on older or CPU-limited machines. Which, awkwardly, describes a large share of the hardware in this region. If you're squeezing performance out of an older rig, our Battlefield 6 PC setup guide covers the settings that actually move the needle.
The uneven part is real. Big publishers can afford protection during the launch window that matters most. Small studios usually can't, so their games are often copied within days. Whatever you think of DRM, it protects the companies that need protecting least.
One widely repeated claim we couldn't verify: that Red Dead Redemption 2 went about a year before being properly cracked. We found no reliable source for it, so we're flagging it rather than passing it along.
"Try before you buy" has a legal answer now
This is the most common justification you'll hear, and in 2010 it was a decent argument. Demos had largely vanished, reviews were thin, and there was no way to get your money back on a bad purchase.
In 2026 that argument has mostly run out of road, because the industry built the thing people were asking for:
- Steam refunds. Under two hours of playtime and within 14 days of purchase, you get a full refund. No justification required. That is, functionally, try before you buy, and it's the single most overlooked fact in this entire debate.
- Demos came back. Steam Next Fest runs several times a year with hundreds of playable demos. Most mid-sized releases now have one.
- Subscriptions. Game Pass and PS Plus let you play a large catalogue for a month for less than a single game costs.
- Reviews and gameplay within hours. Not just scores, but hours of raw footage from people running hardware similar to yours.
If someone still can't decide after a refundable purchase, a demo, a subscription trial and six hours of YouTube footage, the problem being solved probably isn't uncertainty.
The South Asia argument, and why it's now out of date
Original illustration created for IGGG Guides.
You'll read constantly that publishers ignore South Asia because of piracy. There's a version of that which used to be true, and a version being repeated in 2026 that simply isn't.
Start with what's genuinely true, because it's the number everything else hangs on. Roughly 18% of the world's gamers live in India. India generates about 1.1% of global gaming revenue. Niko Partners puts average revenue per player at about $2.04 per year.
That is the whole business problem in one line, and notice that piracy is at most a part of it. The bigger factors are incomes, the near-total dominance of mobile at around 79% of revenue, and until recently the absence of payment infrastructure for digital goods.
Here's what's changed, and it's a lot:
- India's game revenue crossed $1 billion for the first time in 2025, at $1.04 billion, up 14.8% year on year, with roughly $1.2 billion forecast for 2026.
- There are about 511 million players in India, expected past 550 million in 2026.
- The country now has close to 1,900 games companies and three homegrown AAA titles in active development.
- Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and Rockstar all employ hundreds of people in India. Krafton has committed close to a billion dollars between direct investment and a dedicated India fund.
- Subscriptions are priced for the region. PlayStation Plus launched in India at ₹699 a month, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate at ₹499.
"Publishers don't take this market seriously" was accurate in 2008. In 2026 it describes a market growing faster than almost any other on earth.
And if you want the clearest case study of what the old version of this problem actually cost us, it's the story of EA Cricket. A franchise with millions of devoted players across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, killed partly because almost none of that devotion reached the people making it. There's never been a Cricket 08, and twenty years later people are still patching a 2006 game. That's the real cost, and it isn't abstract.
Does pirating a game "punish" a publisher?
Gaming communities love this one. A publisher does something unpopular, and the response is "I'll play it anyway, just not pay." It feels like a protest with a payoff attached.
Mechanically, it doesn't reach the people who made the decision. Executives don't lose their jobs over a soft quarter. Development teams do. The documented pattern when a game underperforms is layoffs in production, cancelled sequels, and studios getting absorbed by larger publishers who are frequently worse. Whatever the intent, the impact lands several layers below the target.
There's also a simpler problem. Playing something while refusing to pay for it sends one signal to the only system that counts: that there's demand for more of it. If you genuinely object to how a publisher behaves, not playing it is the version that works. We looked at how publishers actually read these signals in our piece on why Call of Duty seems to be giving up, and in our look at whether Battlefield 6 can dent it. Nothing moves a publisher like a competitor taking their players.
Is it "theft"? The wrong question
The classic argument runs: theft removes the original, copying doesn't, so it isn't theft. People have been having this debate since the 1990s and it's never gone anywhere.
Part of why is that the framing is wrong. In Pakistani, Indian, UK and US law, this isn't theft. It's copyright infringement, a separate category with its own rules and penalties, written specifically because copying is not the same act as taking. The law already agrees that these are different things. Arguing the metaphor doesn't change anything.
What does change the picture is scale and intent. A person who downloads a game they'd never have bought occupies very different territory from someone selling cracked copies for profit, and the law treats commercial infringement far more harshly than personal infringement everywhere. Most arguments about this collapse both into one word and then get stuck.
Playing more games legally on a Pakistani budget
This is the part that actually helps, so we'd rather spend space here than on philosophy.
| Route | What you get | Catch |
|---|---|---|
| Check the regional price first | Steam lets developers set prices per country. The local price is often far below a straight dollar conversion | Not every publisher bothers. Always open the store page rather than trusting a US review |
| Wait two sales | Most non-Nintendo games drop 50% or more within a year, and 75% within two | You miss the launch conversation. For single-player games that costs you nothing |
| Subscriptions | A large catalogue for roughly the price of one meal out per month | Regional pricing and availability vary, and Indian prices don't always apply in Pakistan. Check before subscribing |
| Steam's refund window | Under 2 hours and within 14 days, full refund, no explanation needed | Two hours isn't long for a slow-starting RPG, so use it deliberately |
| Free and pay-what-you-want | itch.io hosts over 1.5 million listings, a large share free. Epic gives games away weekly | No curation on itch.io, so you sort it yourself |
| Buy indie instead of AAA | Smaller downloads, lower prices, runs on weaker hardware, often better designed | None, honestly. This is the most underrated answer to the price problem |
That last row deserves more weight than it gets. The thing people usually want is not a specific expensive game, it's something good to play. Hollow Knight: Silksong cost a fraction of a typical AAA release and outclassed most of them. It Takes Two only needs one of two players to own it. If your library feels empty but your budget is tight, we built a four-week plan for exactly that situation in our guide to why gaming feels boring lately, and three of those four weeks cost nothing.
And if the issue is simply download size on a capped connection, that's a real constraint with a real answer. We ran the full download-time maths against local speeds in our 2026 releases roundup.
So where does that leave the argument?
Three things can be true at once, and most people in this debate refuse to hold more than one.
The industry's standard claim is unproven. "Every pirated copy is a lost sale" has no robust evidence behind it, and the European Commission's own study failed to find any. That line should be retired.
The defence is also unproven. The same study is too imprecise to show piracy helps, and its authors said so. Anyone citing +24% as a fact is misreading their own source.
And the thing people argue about least is the thing that matters most. South Asia's gaming market was held back by an 18%-of-players versus 1%-of-revenue gap, driven by incomes, payment infrastructure and distribution far more than by downloads. That gap is now closing fast, with real money, real studios and real jobs attached. Every legitimate purchase made in this region now counts toward a market that publishers have finally started taking seriously, which is a materially better position than the one EA Cricket died in.
You don't need a moral verdict from us. But if you want more games made for players like you, the mechanism for that is not complicated, and it's the one thing in this entire debate nobody disputes.
Frequently asked questions
Does piracy actually reduce game sales?
There's no reliable evidence that it does. The European Commission commissioned a 304-page study from Ecorys, delivered in 2015, which found no robust statistical evidence of sales displacement, and for games estimated a positive effect of +24%. That said, the study carried roughly a 36% margin of error and its authors cautioned against reading too much into the estimates. The fair conclusion is that the effect has not been reliably measured in either direction.
Is downloading a pirated game illegal in Pakistan and India?
Yes. It's copyright infringement under both countries' copyright laws, and under the laws of essentially every country with a copyright regime. It's a different legal category from theft, with its own penalties, and commercial infringement such as selling cracked copies is treated far more seriously than personal downloading everywhere.
How much does Denuvo cost developers?
Its AWS Marketplace listing shows $25,000 per month plus $0.50 per activation. Documents leaked from Crytek in 2020 showed €140,000 for the first year, €2,000 monthly after, and a €10,000 tier for indies under 100,000 units. The common claim that it costs millions is overstated for most games.
Does Denuvo slow games down?
Sometimes, and it depends heavily on the game. Ars Technica compared identical builds of Batman: Arkham Knight with and without it and measured no difference at all. Benchmarks of Shadow of the Tomb Raider after removal showed gains of 8 to 17 fps at lower settings. The impact is generally small on modern hardware and largest on older CPU-limited systems.
Is there a legal way to try a game before buying it?
Yes, and it's the most overlooked fact in this debate. Steam refunds any game played under two hours and purchased within the last 14 days, with no justification needed. Steam Next Fest also runs several times a year with hundreds of free playable demos.
Is South Asia still ignored by big publishers?
Not any more. India's game revenue passed $1 billion for the first time in 2025 and is forecast near $1.2 billion for 2026, with around 511 million players and close to 1,900 games companies. Sony, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and Rockstar all have hundreds of staff in the country, and three homegrown AAA games are in development. The remaining gap is revenue per player, at about $2.04 a year, not a lack of interest.
Sources
Displacement research: Ecorys, "Estimating displacement rates of copyrighted content in the EU", commissioned by the European Commission for roughly €360,000, delivered May 2015, published September 2017 following a freedom of information request by MEP Julia Reda. Reported via PCGamesN, Engadget, Legit Reviews and the published report itself. Denuvo pricing from its AWS Marketplace listing as reported by How-To Geek and PCGamesN, plus 2020 Crytek documents reported by Overclock3D. Performance testing from Ars Technica's Batman: Arkham Knight comparison and DSOGaming's Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmarks via PCMag. India market data from Niko Partners, August 2026, with supporting figures from Lumikai and IMARC. One widely repeated claim could not be verified and is flagged as such in the text: that Red Dead Redemption 2 remained uncracked for roughly a year.