For those who have heard about China being a hotbed for piracy a million times by anti-piracy organizations, there's an interesting report on just how the actual online video game industry is actually doing.It's almost a cliché all on it's own. China is a major hotbed for piracy. Of course, a number of these accusations come from major anti-piracy organizations like the MPA (Motion Picture Association) which says: Illegal motion picture and television piracy is a thriving international enterprise. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) estimates that its member companies lose approximately US$1.2 billion each year in potential revenue in the Asia-Pacific region alone, and US$6.1 billion globally. In many countries, MPA member company losses are far outstripped by production, theatrical exhibition, home video distribution losses to local industry, as well as losses to governments in uncollected tax revenues. Consumer spending losses on filmed entertainment worldwide are estimated at US$18.2 billion. If you follow the press releases of the Motion Picture Association, you'd think that it's a miracle that any sort of entertainment industry even exists over in China because of widespread piracy. Recently released figures suggest that China's online video game industry is not only surviving, but thriving and growing. With this thought, perhaps the other cliché of the Chinese economy growing at an incredible rate might be more fitting. The report comes from a media outlet in Taiwan called Digitimes. The report says that the Chinese video game industry has "generated total revenue of 4.43 billion yuan (US$637 million) during the second quarter of 2008, rising by 11.2% on quarter and 65.9% on year, according to China-based consulting company Analysys International." Not bad for one quarter. So how does the US gaming market compare? According to an ESA report: The computer and video game industry’s value added to U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2006 was $3.8 billion It might be poor economics/math, but if one were to divide that number by 4, you would get $950 million USD per quarter on average - a difference between the markets by $313 million. Unfortunately, most of the articles on DigiTimes is behind a paywall, but if one were to look at the headlines in the "related" section, one would see, "China market: Online gaming services valued at nearly 4 billion yuan in 1Q08", "China market: Online gaming services valued at over 3.3 billion yuan in 4Q07", "China market: Online gaming services valued at over 2.9 billion yuan in 3Q07", "China market: Online gaming valued at 2.67 billion yuan in 2Q07" Quite an impressive rate of growth (note: headlines in reverse chronological order. #Q denotes the quarter of the year and the two numbers following denotes last two digits of the year) considering the country is said to have a huge piracy problem. It's not perfectly clear what this means for all the claims of piracy, but it certainly puts the so-called devastating effects of piracy, even in China, in question here. We here at ZeroPaid don't support physical piracy, but we also don't support the distortion of facts on a situation either. |
 
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