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!