Punch Club has been pirated 1.6m times, sold 300k copies

Indie publisher TinyBuild has revealed that Punch Club has sold 300,000 units, as well as some alarming information about the degree to which the game has been pirated.

The title has been illegally downloaded 1.6m times since it launched earlier this year. That breaks down as one million times on PC and further 500,000 times on mobile.

Just to put that into perspective – 81 per cent of all Punch Club units have been the result of piracy. 68.9 per cent of piracy has been on PC while 31.1 per cent was mobile. Furthermore, on mobile 90 per cent of piracy is Android (likely due to these devices being easier to side load app packages onto).

In a full blog post on TinyBuild’s website, CEO Alex Nichiporchik goes into some interesting details about Punch Club’s sales and whether localisation matters.

For example, the game launched without Brazilian Portuguese or Chinese. Downloads from China took up from the start, and localisation made no issue as China pirated the English version.

Meanwhile, when TinyBuild added Brazilian Portuguese the number of installs rose, but the number of sales did not.

TinyBuild also reveals that Germany saw the highest rate of buying, with the US and France trailing behind. The conclusion the publisher has drawn: We can definitely say localisation into French and German paid off."

Nichiporchik also says that localising games for Western Europe is definitely worth it due to its low piracy rate.