Survey finds 35.8 percent of PC Gamers pirate

PC Gamer ran an anonymous survey to discover how widespread PC game piracy is and why gamers are doing it. The survey ran for two weeks and received a whopping 50,742 responses from gamers living in dozens of countries around the world.

While the data likely contains a lot of troll responses, the results are interesting nonetheless. Of the PC gamers who responded to the survey, 35.8 percent claimed they currently pirate PC games. But the piracy rate varies a lot by country, in the US and UK this rate drops to around 26 percent.

The reasons for piracy vary a lot, with most gamers indicating they do it to "demo a game" or because they can't afford it. The results also indicate the piracy rate goes down as people earn more income, which ties in with "affordability" being one of the main reasons why gamers pirate.

So do pirates buy the game after they've downloaded it illegally? The responses seem to indicate that 90 percent of gamers sometimes buy games after pirating them, with 47.9 percent of respondents answering they do this more than 50 percent of the time.



You can check the full report at PC Gamer.