Study Links Game Piracy To Critics' Review Scores

An anonymous reader writes "A new study (abstract) published at the annual ACM Foundations of Digital Games conference by researchers from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Waterloo explores the magnitude of game piracy on public BitTorrent trackers. The researchers tracked 173 new game releases over a three-month period and found that these were downloaded by 12.7 million unique peers. They further show that the number of downloads on BitTorrent can be predicted by the scores of game reviewers. Overall the current paper gives a seemingly robust overview of the state of game piracy on BitTorrent. Although the results may not be all that surprising, it's certainly refreshing to see a decent report on BitTorrent statistics every now and then."

Piracy and indie games

[zget]

As can be seen from the table below, the most downloaded games are all major commercial titles.

If the piracy is directly linked to review scores, it means that people just want the games for free and aren't that much interested in trying them out before actually buying them. Such argument would hold more water if it was said that game piracy is linked to overall sales, but here it's saying that the better reviews and comments from people games get, the more they are pirated too. The most sad thing is when people pirate indie games

Strange conclusion looking at their own stats

[beef3k]

Looking at the table presented in the article, their conclusion seems a bit odd...

Fallout: New Vegas - Downloads: 962,793 Avg. rating: 83.7
TRON Evolution - Downloads: 496,349 Avg. rating: 59.5
Starcraft 2 - Downloads: 420,138 Avg. rating: 89.5

"Metacritic Scores explain 10% of the variance in the unique peers per game on BitTorrent,”. I guess the remaining 90% is just noise then...?

Re:Piracy and indie games

[Samantha Wright]

Here's a question for you—not that I necessarily disagree with your viewpoint—at what point do you consider an amount of money you've paid to access to something sufficient to reacquire it through any means you wish? I.e., if you were charged ten cents for access to an extremely DRMed e-book, would you still feel like you had the right to 'pirate' it and lend it to a friend?