ESA president and CEO Michael Gallagher reported, “Our industry continues to grow in the U.S., but epidemic levels of online piracy stunt sales and growth in a number of countries, including Italy, China, Spain, Brazil and France, where we see crushing volumes of infringing peer-to-peer activity involving leading game titles.”
”Game publishers lose opportunities for export sales, and the U.S. loses opportunities to expand our export economy, and consumers in those countries lose local benefits of having a thriving game market,” he added.
China is the least surprising of the countries named, as it has little use for international copyright law, while lax governmental policies in Spain were named for its notorious reputation as a pirate haven.
The ESA also states that of more than 144 million connections involved in peer-to-peer game file sharing, these top five countries accounted for 78 million of these (54%).
