According to Tom Jubert (Penumbra game writer), game developers should start blaming themselves more for various mishaps such as bad reviews, poor sales and overall failure of a certain game: “rampant piracy is no longer the catch-all excuse it’s often employed as.”

Jubert’s analysis (posted in an Edge blog) starts with a statement made by the CEO of Crytek: he claiemd that there were 20 illegal copies of Crysis for each legitimate one. However, the game writers says, the actual ratio is far less. According to data from GameShadow Metrics, an online service 5:1 in the US

To back up his statement, Jubert cites figures from GameShadow Metrics, an online service that automatically patches games and, thus, also detects modified .exe files. Thus, he concludes:

“Revenues on some PC titles may well be down by as much as 15% – 20% due to piracy, but I’ve yet to see evidence for any greater piracy related impact on the platform’s decline. Meanwhile, online and casual products are popularly held as moving from strength to strength. At the end of the day, faltering sales must not be pinned solely to pirate activity. We must also blame increased competition from consoles, lack of platform support in the form of a major stakeholder, and the snowballing effect of declining exclusives.”