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

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:Wait... what?

[bjourne]

Because someone will, or already has, misinterpreted the correlation to mean that more torrent downloads leads to higher game reviews. So as you can see, piracy is really good for the game industry!

NEWS: Review Scores Positively Influence Demand

[sarkeizen]

...and in other news water is wet.

I guess companies should continue to buy or otherwise influence reviews.

I just skimmed the actual study and it doesn't really provide much more info. It does make the claim that their methods are closer to the true number of pirated copies and refreshingly that these are not necessarily correlated with lost sales. However it's conclusions aren't all that interesting. My guess? This was more about their measurement techniques and the outcome was tacked on so it could get published (or have a chance of getting published)

Already been tried

[Overzeetop]

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

Re:Wait... what?

[FrootLoops]

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.]

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.

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:Strange conclusion looking at their own stats

[paziek]

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.

Re:Piracy and indie games

[zget]

Most do fail in that, you're right, but there has been cases where the DRM haven't been broken within a whole year.

However, what is even better for game companies is to make the game only playable online, or integrate so much gameplay online (co-op etc) that it makes no sense to pirate. That is s where it's been heavily went recently and those slashdot users and everyone who rather have single-player experience should support the companies who still make good single player games. Otherwise everything will be online games soon.

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?