New Study Claims Game Piracy is Prevalent, But Overstated, By Industry

A new study has found that, while video game piracy is still a major problem within the industry, the number of illegal downloads has been overstated by previous surveys. Anders Drachen, from the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Kevin Bauer Cheriton from the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, and Robert W. D. Veitch from Copenhagen Business School's Department of Informatics completed the study.

The study followed 173 games on the popular pirating website BitTorrent for three months from 2010 to 2011, and found that those games selected were downloaded illegally by 12.6 million people over the course of 90 days. These numbers do not match previous numbers obtained by trade bodies, such as the Entertainment Software Association, leading the study to conclude that their numbers may be skewed by bias.

"...potentially biased, partially due to the interest of the industry to reduce piracy and thus potentially overestimate the problem...There is very little objective information available about [piracy's] magnitude or its distribution across game titles and game genres,"

In addition, Anders Drachen told Wired through a press release that their study also debunked several myths about what games get pirated, in addition to finding lower numbers overall than expected.

"First and foremost, P2P game piracy is extraordinarily prevalent and geographically distributed...However, the numbers in our investigation suggest that previously reported magnitudes in game piracy are too high. It also appears that some common myths are wrong, e.g. that it is only shooters that get pirated, as we see a lot of activity for children's and family games on BitTorrent for the period we investigated."

The study also found that their was a correlation between a game's high rating on sites such as Metacritic and the amount of times it is pirated. The most popular genres being pirated were RPG's, action-adventure, and third-person shooters.