92%? Really?

I don’t want to reflexively dismiss what could be a serious problem, but I find the claim that 92% of this casual game’s users were pirates - and the related claim that ”sometimes” increasing DRM can increase sales by up to 70% - to be inherently suspicious.  My main unanswered questions:

1)  How was this number (92%) reached?  It’s a little unclear to me from the Gamasutra piece, although it seems like the company essentially looked at the titles that were obtained from the company site and then used to go online.  If that’s the case, I have to wonder about the length of time they played the game (were they just trying to see if the crack worked?  Did they get it from a friend?), and whether they represent a real lost sale.

2.)  How are increased sales and downloads measured after a fix, and in what time frame?  Frankly, the idea that doing what is essentially the same thing and getting 4 wildly different results (from a 70% increase in sales to an actual - and non-quantified - sales decline) doesn’t even seem to qualify as a correlation to me, let alone some sort of plausible causative claim.

3.)  How applicable are the findings of this one developer to other casual game developers and/or the industry as a whole?  It doesn’t much help that Joystiq headlines this with “Piracy a huge problem for casual devs,” since last time I checked a lone anecdotal story didn’t count as statistical evidence of a trend.