Given what happened to them it's even more impressive:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/11/acrying-shame-world-o...

Internet-wide piracy statistics are meaningless, they basically show you how popular a game is in countries where properly licenced software is far out of reach financially, even with moderate regional pricing applied (you can't go down as much as you'd need to make it viable without risking massive losses from region-faking first-worlders, which is kind of like piracy but would not show up in the same stats)

90% piracy is about par for the course. Doom and Quake's was even higher IIRC. It basically tells you that your game runs on cheap PCs and poor people won't spend more than 5-10$ on a game. Steam sales and region-based pricing are one way of trying to capture that market.

I was reading a book which was essentially the memories of some BBS nerd from the 80s (i do not remember the name, sadly) and he basically quoted a magazine post from around back then - the 9 out of 10 piracy was a thing even in the 80s, more than a decade before Doom. It doesn't surprise me that it would be the same 10 and 20 years after it.

Fair point - I was not being judgemental of the poor, just impressed that these indy developers are mature enough to understand and not be salty about it (I think they almost went bankrupt at one point).

The pirated copies aren't all lossed sales. If you want some more statistics form the creator of the Humble Bundle I suggest you a small read about the topic: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy

No data to back that claim up. From my POV Steam still was seen as a burden in 2008 and wasn’t nearly as popular as today, pirating was still easier. I bought the game on steam around 2011/12.

IIRC the data they used was their own, that is, they seeded a pirated version onto the known suspects themselves and through the online functionality (iirc a leaderboard of creating the highest tower) were able to detect it.