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."

Comments

Deus Ex

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really nothing new, a good example is Deus Ex: Human revolution, the 10-hour leaked demo (everyone has their suspicions the devs leaked it on purpose) has done amazing things for the game. Deus Ex: 2 was a horrible failure of a game, but after the 10hour leak they've seen an increase in pre-orders and the developers have pushed up the release date. This isn't the first game we've seen this happen with over the years, there have also been studies showing people who pirate music are more likely to buy it after.

Let me get this straight...

[Haedrian]

The more higher rated a game is, the more people download it on BT?

Is that it? What an unexpected result.

Higher rated -> More people want to play it -> More people buy it OR More people download it

Simple.

Re:Piracy and indie games

[Anonymous Coward]

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

This is a completely illogical, irrational, arbitrary, random statement with no basis in anything and for which you didn't even attempt to provide an argument for. But carry on.

Re:IEA !! LET'S ALL STOP BUYING AND STEAL INSTEAD

[MadJo]

What's this stealing thing you're talking about.

Conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

The best way to fight piracy is to make shitty games

Already been tried

[Overzeetop]

The music and movie industries have already tried that tack, and it doesn't seem to be working.

Re:Piracy and indie games

[Digital Vomit]

I'm not surprised companies are looking for DRM methods, even if just to keep the piracy out for a little bit during the first few weeks so that people who want to play it buy it because they cant pirate it.

Are you serious? A few weeks? You're as deluded as the software publishers who punish their paying customers with DRM.