The anti-piracy organization posted a pirated copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution on the Web to conduct an experiment.

The young anti-piracy organization Vigilant Defender decided to conduct an interesting experiment, the purpose of which was to find out how many game lovers who downloaded the pirates are willing to pay for the licensed original of the game. The company's management made an extraordinary decision: a pirated copy of “Deus Ex: Human Revolution” with a crack and one interesting modification was posted on the Internet (later about it). This pirate has spread across many torrent sites, and thousands of users have downloaded it.

After the person installed the game and launched it, a certain amount of playing time passed, after which the web form with several questions was opened. The most interesting thing is that about 90% of gamers answered the questions and did not remove the strangely behaved game from harm's way. Most of the questions related to the topic of licenses. For example, gamers were asked if they were going to buy a licensed version of the game. In addition, there was a question about the cost of the license, the gamer was asked how much he was willing to pay for the licensed version.
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Here are the most interesting statistics, generalized answers of gamers:

- 24% answered that they had already ordered a licensed version of the game, plus 25% of respondents answered that they would order a license later;

- about 50% of gamers answered that they downloaded a pirate to see if the game was worth their money;

- to the question of how much gamers are willing to pay for a license, most responded that they would be able to part with an amount of 30-40 dollars. The game itself costs $ 60;

- The DRM system is ineffective, and if anyone prefers pirates, he will continue to download them from the Web, rather than buying licensed games.

Based on these answers, the guys from the anti-piracy organization that conducted this experiment, concluded that not all gamers who download pirates are such malicious defaulters. As you can see, about half of pirate lovers are really ready to pay, and some have already paid. It is possible that if companies that produce games reduce prices by half, in order to get an amount of about $ 30, there will be less pirates, and more money will go into the pocket of developers and publishers.

In any case, the experiment really turned out to be interesting.

Via dvice