You know as well as I do that it's impossible to come to concrete numbers with something like this.
Perhaps I'm being unreasonable, but companies like EA and Blizzard are asserting some very strong claims of authority over the way the consumer can use their products, based on something they aren't interested in fully characterizing.
Even when numbers are thrown out there no one believes them anyways. EA can come out and say that 4 million people pirated Crysis, to which the publisher will claim all are lost sales while forum folk will claim none are lost sales. Who is right?
In a world not made of straw men, I imagine we'd both agree that the conversion rate is neither 0 nor 1.
There are far more mysterious problems that statistical analysis and proxy data have been used to get at least a ballpark figure.
It came up earlier that digital sales see an uptick when various file locker sites go down. The ratio of total sales to "spike" sales is a data point that might be helpful.
The debate should have factors like this:
1) What is the realizeable sales base, which isn't the whole set of valid and pirated copies, but something on a cost/time curve between the two numbers that can give a reasonable ceiling to what the most thorough antipiracy measure can hope to bring in?
2) What is the cost of the measure, in terms of extra design and validation, ongoing costs, and risk?
What are the revenue gains compared to larger ongoing expenses, and how much is left over after the apology giveaways are factored in?
3) What are the tangible and intangible costs of the more invasive schemes on consumers? This includes things like lost time, lost progress, loss of resale value of personal libraries, the chilling effect of things like loss of all games in the event of a dispute of one transaction.
4) What percentage of loss is society apt to declare the cost of doing business, rather than permitting further empowerment of the publisher?
5) Is the debate inside of the publisher mindset truly only concerned for piracy, and things like the end of used game sales and new means of user monetization are somehow "unexpected"?
Where is the crossover point in terms of risk and reward for the publisher, and are some of them taking on greater liabilities than they realize?
Even if there is still a margin of gain for the content developer, even after a given service is kept running, can the gain for a the content creator or publisher be accepted without taking into account the cost to the consumer?
For whatever reason the digital industry seems to be the only one where rampant theft is deemed to be a non issue to sales.
It's an issue to sales, but it's not theft.
I don't copy games, but I resent the overreach in declaring infringement to be theft.
The facility to sell one's digital product is not compromised, unless a hacker proceeds to delete your data repositories after copying a game.
The only thing "lost" is some amount of money that under normal circumstances should have been paid.
To say that someone "stole" a publisher's right to someone else's wallet implies a form of ownership they have no right to claim.
The interesting wrinkle is that if a game is truly running as a service with material publisher-side computation, then copying game and running it could constitute a theft of a service--if the publisher/developer is honestly interested in providing a service and not just calling their game a service so they don't have to allow returns or let someone play a game once the sequel comes out.
An obligate-online game like SimCity (if the online weren't so patently tacked-on) should have allowed for Origin to permit refunds, or partial refunds based on the play time statistics they collect on a user every couple minutes.
If you don't believe that then make something digital that you want to sell, then give it to me and I'll upload it for free to every website possible.
I do believe there is an effect on the sales of a product.
But look on the bright side: that product does not degrade, requires no warehouse space, can require no shipping costs, almost no manufacturing costs, can be remotely disabled for any reason, has instantaneous global exposure, can be sold broken and fixed at your leisure, is merely "licensed" so you can make someone not own it at any time.
It also has a regulatory environment that in which a person with an iPad filled with infringing material can be fined the sum total of the GDP of the United States, but publishers can take your money for a service running on a vacuum tube server connected to the internet with a taut string, and the publisher can just say "eat a dick".
Regarding online infrastructure, of course there will be teething pains at first but like anything else it will improve. Sim City may well be the poster child for that, but things will get better.
If that means that content providers will be willing to act like real service providers, with real QoS terms, transparent product lifespan, material claw-back for QoS failures, reasonable EULAs and maybe things like sunset and bankruptcy guarantees for products past their sales windows, I don't have many objections.
The current trajectory doesn't include that, since it seems their bigger foe is the idea that people own their own wallets.
FWIW 1.1M is significantly more than the first month sales of the last SimCity if the numbers I've seen are correct. Which is probably why they got swamped in the first place.
The last SimCity was also released a decade ago, prior to quite a few changes in the way PC sales are handled, and the peak of the preorder craze.
The marketing campaign, preorders, and a decade of waiting may have front-loaded things a bit.
EA did tout that SimCity had massive pre-order numbers, and Amazon's cloud service is what they use for the back end. The total number of selectable servers now is around 5x the initial outlay, and frequent server problems persist.
We'd have to assume EA's preorder and Origin download figures, plus the number of launcher registration requests in the early days, were off by a factor of 5, and that Amazon's cloud service isn't designed to scale up and down very rapidly.
We also have to assume that the server sync hiccups and multiplayer lag experienced in the press beta and the negligently pointless official beta didn't give them a clue that something was not right.
If it were developed right, it should have been able to spin up in hours or days.
Actual events are more indicative of a lack due diligence on the part of EA and Maxis in how they developed an ostensibly online game by skating by with the same sort of slapdash development their single-player games had (the predecessors weren't perfect by a long shot)--back when the bulk of their filing infrastructure was vetted as part of the Windows file system.
