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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."
It's not a tautology. It's just incredibly obvious that better-reviewed games would be downloaded more on BitTorrent.
[To be clear a tautology is something that is by definition true, like "a blue horse is blue" or "if a and b are rational numbers, then ab is rational". Usually the former example--which is essentially an error of redundancy--is the type "tautology" refers to in common speech, while the latter is used in formal logic.]
Yes, they ignored the fact, that Starcraft 2 pirated version is just campaing mode, while the most important one for this game - multiplayer - is only for legal copies.
Fallout doesn't have multiplayer part, so if you pirate, then you get 100% of the game.