While triple-A video game publishers tend to hide their sales data with great vengeance and furious anger, indies have become pretty liberal about their stats. You don't have to look very far and wide to find a smaller-fry game studio coughing up sales numbers or even piracy estimates.

In the case of Punch Club game maker TinyBuild, the development team went one further than usual on Monday with a news post that connected the dots between game sales, game piracy, and localization. What happens in a country-by-country basis after translating a game's text and officially launching and promoting it?

TinyBuild found that the most intense piracy impact came the day that it launched Punch Club in Brazilian Portuguese. On that day, the devs tracked a whopping 11,627 pirated users from Brazilian IP addresses, compared to only 373 copies selling to Brazilian users that day. Conversely, TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik noted that Chinese players were already pirating the game in droves when the game launched in English, meaning they didn't wait for a localized version to dive in.

On the other hand, German and French translations resulted in a "bought instead of pirated" rate of 46 percent and 18.8 percent, respectively, (with USA players splitting the difference at 26.2 percent). Nichiporchik said that data was reason enough to continue focusing on certain regions' translations: "Punch Club clearly shows that localizing games to Western European languages pays off and has a very low piracy rate."

Additionally, Punch Club's announced piracy stats far outpace its official sales numbers, with an estimate of 1.6 million unpaid copies compared to sales of more than 300,000 copies across PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android. Nichiporchik noted that 90 percent of pirated mobile copies were downloaded by Android users, though twice as many computer users pirated across the PC/Mac/Linux spectrum. In an interview with Ars, Nichiporchik confirmed that “analytics were built into” the game in such a way that even pirated and “cracked” copies would still report statistics back to TinyBuild, which he used to report his piracy estimates.

With the exception of super-sized studios employing intense, scene-scaring forms of DRM, most game makers are still subject to the realities of unpaid game file sharing. But even with those stats, TinyBuild didn't write its post with any anti-pirate judgments or calls to stop selling DRM-free copies of its games. Instead, the post's focus seemed to be on sharing with other developers how to best focus their development efforts to reward regions more likely to pay for that extra mile of language localization.