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

Re:Piracy and indie games

[Zemran]

Do you honestly believe that DRM helps sales? I do buy games but I will never buy one that I cannot play. I buy certain games and I am happy to buy them but I do not buy one that has DRM until a good crack comes out. What is the good of a game that is crippled? and why would I pay for something that is deliberately made into crap? I do not believe that I am the only one that thinks like me but I am sure that there are far more that do not bother to buy the game in the first place. I buy the game for the manuals etc. but now you often do not even get any thing but a disk, so more and more people cannot see why they would want to buy a broken product with no value added... If the games makers want to get the customers back they need to supply something that is worth buying.