‘Punch Club’ sold 300,000 copies, but with a staggering 90% piracy rate on Android

[Jared Peters]

Lazy Bear Games’ Punch Club is a boxing RPG that launched on PC, Android, and iOS not too long ago to pretty good reviews. The good news for Punch Club? They just passed the 300,000 mark for copies sold. The bad news? It’s been pirated over 1.6 million times. That’s a 5:1 ratio in favor of the pirates. Ouch.

Don’t worry, though, it gets worse. There were 1 million pirated copies on PC, but the PC version still managed to make over 3/4 of the total revenue for the game. That’s partly because of the higher price of the game on Steam, ($9.99 vs $4.99) but with that pricing you’d expect revenue to be doubled on the PC end, not tripled.



No, the real kicker is that out of all of the 500,000 pirated copies on mobile, over 90% of those copies came from Android. For every legitimate purchase from the Play Store, there were 12 pirates, which equates to a 92% piracy rate. Ouch, again.

On the fruity side of the fence, there were only 2 pirates for every 1 sale on iOS, although there’s no clear breakdown over how many total sales came from each platform.

Lazy Bear released some other interesting statistics about piracy in different countries, too, such as the countries most likely to buy a game and the countries most likely to pirate it.



Germany was the country most likely to buy the game, followed by the US in second place and France in third. Punch Club was localized in those countries, so the better sales figures can be attributed to that. Lazy Bear even notes that localizing for western European countries definitely helped to keep down some piracy numbers.

On the other end of that, China pirated the game heavily, even though it was never localized in Chinese. The game was localized in Portuguese, which should’ve helped boost sales, but the localization only drove up the number of installs in Brazil, but not the number of sales. Side note here: China does not have access to the Google Play Store. It’s reportedly in the works, but hasn’t happened yet. Making purchases there would’ve been tricky, so that shouldn’t shock anyone. Brazil’s economy is also currently in free fall, which can also probably explain away some of the high piracy stats.

Android gaming and piracy are always a hot button issue, and statistics like this don’t promote much development outside of freemium games with in-app purchases. Google’s heavy-handed approach to getting Android on as many devices as possible has had some drawbacks, and this is one of them, unfortunately.

If you’re thinking about giving Punch Club a spin, it’s only five dollars on the Play Store. And for only five bucks, it’s honestly a pretty good game, especially for an RPG with a few unique twists.

source: TinyBuild


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