Game piracy linked to critic scores.

[Jagos]

Link (http://torrentfreak.com/game-piracy-linked-to-critics-review-scores-110803/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Torrentfreak+(Torrentfreak))

A new study 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.

So the better your game is, the more people will download it before they buy it. Oddly, the older games such as Bejeweled 3 still made the list. Granted, there's still some flaws in this report, such as a correlation of downloads of BT and the average review score on Metacritic, but at least better research is coming out other than the laughable 301 report and other academic studies such as The University of Ballarat’s Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL).

[Aerozord]

So the better your game is, the more people will download it before they buy it.

no, it says that games people like are pirated more then games they dont like. None of this is evidence that they actually bought the game or that piracy had any affect on sales one way or the other.

This should be obvious, people would rather steal something fun then a piece of crap

[Kim]

So the better your game is, the more people will download it before they buy it.

Hahahaha...

Ah... I wonder if you actually believe the words you're saying, or if you're intentionally trying to mislead. Common sense would dictate the latter, but I'm not so sure. The study says the better received a game is, the more people will download it. Don't tack "before they buy it" to make piracy sound better in polite conversation, especially when the study you linked doesn't seem to say thing about "before they buy it."

Seriously, man.

[Osterbaum]

The study also says nothing on how many of these people didn't later buy the game they downloaded or how many of them thought the game was bad and didn't play it to the end.

e: That isn't to say I'm claiming that a huge number of people bought the game or never finished it. I'm just saying that we don't really know either way.

[Kim]

The study also says nothing on how many of these people didn't later buy the game they downloaded or how many of them thought the game was bad and didn't play it to the end.

e: That isn't to say I'm claiming that a huge number of people bought the game or never finished it. I'm just saying that we don't really know either way.

We don't know either way, but Jagos opens with pretending we do and as though that study supports his assumption, which it doesn't. If Jagos hadn't tried to mislead, I wouldn't have brought it up, because it wouldn't have mattered. If we're going make assumptions without data to back them up, that most people are downloading games illegally just to get a free demo seems like the least likely scenario.

Study: People steal a game more when it's popular.

Jagos: People try games out before buying more when they're popular.

Me: Naw, most of them are probably stealing them because it nets them a free game.

[Krylo]

I would think the 'try it before you buy it' people would be more likely to download games that reviewed poorly. If everyone says a game is great there's not that much risk in just buying the game. If everyone says a game is average or not that good, maybe you'd want to give it a 'rental' first.

But that doesn't mean I'm surprised that games that review highly are more often pirated. If I were a video game pirate (which I am, unfortunately,* not) I'd be downloading games that I was excited about rather than choosing to get THIS AAA title today, and maybe that one when I can afford it unless something that looks better comes out.

*I know too much about the economics of video games and care too much about the industry continuing to expand to pirate games, but I could have so many more games if I did pirate.

[Yumil]

I would think the 'try it before you buy it' people would be more likely to download games that reviewed poorly. If everyone says a game is great there's not that much risk in just buying the game. If everyone says a game is average or not that good, maybe you'd want to give it a 'rental' first.

But that doesn't mean I'm surprised that games that review highly are more often pirated. If I were a video game pirate (which I am, unfortunately,* not) I'd be downloading games that I was excited about rather than choosing to get THIS AAA title today, and maybe that one when I can afford it unless something that looks better comes out.

*I know too much about the economics of video games and care too much about the industry continuing to expand to pirate games, but I could have so many more games if I did pirate.
I'm going to play the devil's advocate here.

It may still be a try before you buy thing because higher reviews and hype tend to have a peer pressure type effect toward sells, regardless if you like the game or genre. Like I bought MW2 even though the only thing I liked about MW1 was the single player game. I'm no good at fpses, and Im far worse at ones where death is so easy. Game got good reviews, I still dont like it, though I own it due to the reviews>.<

Reviews don't mean anything anyway. Transformers War for Cybertron is probably one of the best multiplayer experiences I've ever had as far as fun in a shooter and it got meager reviews(could go into the Gamespot review that had to be reedit after posting due to grievous errors in describing the game, but they just removed the errors and kept the score the same), but not what it deserved. Anywho, the sheeple tend to think review < 7 isn't even worth the time to look at and I'm sure that shows in piracy as well.

[Fifthfiend]

We don't know either way, but Jagos opens with pretending we do and as though that study supports his assumption, which it doesn't. If Jagos hadn't tried to mislead, I wouldn't have brought it up, because it wouldn't have mattered. If we're going make assumptions without data to back them up, that most people are downloading games illegally just to get a free demo seems like the least likely scenario.

Study: People steal a game more when it's popular.

Jagos: People try games out before buying more when they're popular.

Me: Naw, most of them are probably stealing them because it nets them a free game.

I'm a big fan of stealing anything and everything but yeah I mean we shouldn't kid ourselves.

[Amake]

Two things that could contribute to this trend: If a big name game gets good reviews, you know a lot of people are going to buy it, and that means the chances of finding a clean torrent and of finishing downloading it before running out of peers go up, and likely the speed with which you can download it too. So it's more convenient. And secondly, if you know a lot of people are buying a game your incentive to support the developers decrease. It's always easier to justify stealing from the rich.

PS. Would it have killed them to compare their figures to the sales of the games?

New Vegas: 5 000 000 sold (November 2010)
Darksiders: 1 200 000 sold (February 2010)
Need for Speed: >5 000 000 sold (February 2010) (Compare to projected 4.2 million sales)
NBA 2K11: >5 000 000 sold (May 2011)
TRON Evolution: 450 000 sold (First ten weeks)
CoD BLack Ops: 13 700 000 sold (March 2011) (US only)
Starcraft 2: 4 500 000 sold (December 2010)
Force Unleashed 2: 2 110 000 sold (First ten weeks)
Two Worlds II: >2 000 000 sold (February 2011)
The Sims 3 Late Night: 850 000 sold (First ten weeks)

That's just some scetchy-ass figures I pulled from Wikipedia and Gamrreview, but we see there's no immediate connection between sales and piracy. I don't know what conclusions to draw from that other than "Those big name developers sure are bitching a lot about selling millions of games and also Tron Evolution sucks."

[Ramary]

BREAKING NEWS: Thieves tend to steal diamonds instead of logs of shit, more at 11.

Also at 11, SPECIAL REPORT: We find out why people tend to go for the more highly advertised product!

[Jagos]

BREAKING NEWS: Thieves tend to steal diamonds instead of logs of shit, more at 11.

Also at 11, SPECIAL REPORT: We find out why people tend to go for the more highly advertised product!

Eh, Bejeweled 3 is on there. And there was already a report that looked into people's tendency to go for the most recent latest and greatest.

http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-132.pdf


At the height of the popularity of Akerman, four of her last ten movies
were unavailable and there was no demand for two additional films. As in music, downloading activity for movies is heavily concentrated on current releases and the supply of titles is substantially broader than the demand.


There's some other good stuff in there, but this is an older report. It was created in 2009. The best one currently was the one linked in the Operation Rainfall thread, "Media Piracy".

[Magus]

Let me just say, if you are wasting your time or bandwidth pirating Bejeweled 3 you are doing it wrong. Unless you are just the ultimate pirate who has somehow downloaded every other game you ever wanted to play, and then downloaded every single porn movie you ever wanted to watch because man, you ain't gonna see me bothering with pirating Bejeweled until I've become so entrenched in crazy-ass fetishes I'm down to watching a midget have sex with a duck just to get my dick up.

[Aerozord]

Jagos people are saying you are drawing conclusions you shouldn't, and accusing you of using those conclusions as propoganda for piracy.

Even the thread title "game piracy linked to critic scores" is misleading. There isn't even solid correlation let alone causation. Even if there was you shouldn't site clearly biased sources for your argument. A site called torrentfreak says file sharing is good, what a shocker.

Also, metacritic? If you know anything about critiquing you'd know its an inherently unreliable method to judge a games quality. What it does say is whats popular, and should be no surprise that a popular game is pirated more

[Magus]

Well, to be fair a bunch of statisticians apparently were the ones linking game piracy to critic scores, not Jagos himself. In the sense that they can be used to predict if a game will be pirated.

But really, this is just kind of obvious. It's kind of like that study that says men like to fantasize about super models more than janitors.

EDIT: Though I have a had a few fantasies about the janitor lady, after work, in the cleaning supply closet...she can clean my bathroom anytime, if you know what I'm saying.

[Krylo]

ITT Magus needs to get laid.

[Malek]

Alternatively, he just has a really dirty bathroom.

[Jagos]

Jagos people are saying you are drawing conclusions you shouldn't, and accusing you of using those conclusions as propoganda for piracy.

Even the thread title "game piracy linked to critic scores" is misleading. There isn't even solid correlation let alone causation. Even if there was you shouldn't site clearly biased sources for your argument. A site called torrentfreak says file sharing is good, what a shocker.

Also, metacritic? If you know anything about critiquing you'd know its an inherently unreliable method to judge a games quality. What it does say is whats popular, and should be no surprise that a popular game is pirated more


Although it sounds intuitive that review scores are correlated to interest in games (and other entertainment), this is certainly not always the case. To find out whether the number of game downloads on BitTorrent could be predicted by the average review score on Metacritic, the researchers correlated the two.

If you look at some of the links on that, you can see that they've actually debunked (http://torrentfreak.com/incompetent-bittorrent-researchers-strike-again-101211/) other bittorrent data from academic studies.

The "downloads before they buy" thing is a fault on my part. After researching so much in filesharing (http://piracy.ssrc.org/hadopi-says-lets-try-cutting-off-nose-to-spite-face/), where study (http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-898813.html), after study (http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-research-p2p-filesharing-no-barrier-to-music-sales/), has shown that filesharing increases sales, I came to a conclusion that people in the gaming world do the same thing. $60 is a lot for a game in the US. In Brazil, it's even more. Looking at competitive pricing points of how much a game costs in different areas of the world, the best rated games probably do more to signal to pirates (in those countries) which games the market might be interested in.

But really, propaganda for piracy? How's your research coming along? (http://www.nuklearforums.com/showpost.php?p=1143960&postcount=67)

[Kim]

After researching so much in filesharing (http://piracy.ssrc.org/hadopi-says-lets-try-cutting-off-nose-to-spite-face/), where study (http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-898813.html), after study (http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-research-p2p-filesharing-no-barrier-to-music-sales/), has shown that filesharing increases sales

It says pirates are more likely to spend more overall than people who aren't pirates. I think that's an important difference to recognize. I think this has a lot to do with who's doing the pirating and the growing number of people who are technically pirates. It also doesn't say that the things they're buying are the same things they pirated. There are a lot of things that this can be attributed to that aren't simply, "They pirate it and then they buy it if they like it!" There are definitely people who are like that, but there's currently no reason to suspect that they're in the majority. It's also important to point out that video games simply cost more. If you like a movie and decide, "I want this on DVD" for whatever reason, there is a much, much smaller investment required on your part than their is when purchasing a video game. (There are exceptions to this of course, and I'd say these exceptions make up the bulk of "pirate then buy" sales)

[Jagos]

If you like a movie and decide, "I want this on DVD" for whatever reason, there is a much, much smaller investment required on your part than their is when purchasing a video game. (There are exceptions to this of course, and I'd say these exceptions make up the bulk of "pirate then buy" sales)

My reasoning (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-karaganis/the-simple-economics-of-p_b_887110.html) has more to do with price disparities globally.

I wish they could have geolocated where the downloads were coming from, which might have increased understanding of what's going on with torrents. As it stands, the more legal alternatives there are, the more piracy decreases for certain goods. And while games are inexpensive here, they are more expensive in other countries such as Australia where it costs ~$100 US to buy one game, or Russia where supposedly everyone has to pirate. Gabe (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLC_zZ5fqFk&list=FLVpjG_y7HTy0&index=9) actually learned this two years ago.

Also, given the fact that the most pirated game of 2009 and '10, was Modern Warfare 2 (and Black Ops), it should say something that a number of people picked up the game even after pirating it.

[Aerozord]

My reasoning (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-karaganis/the-simple-economics-of-p_b_887110.html) has more to do with price disparities globally.

I wish they could have geolocated where the downloads were coming from, which might have increased understanding of what's going on with torrents. As it stands, the more legal alternatives there are, the more piracy decreases for certain goods. And while games are inexpensive here, they are more expensive in other countries such as Australia where it costs ~$100 US to buy one game, or Russia where supposedly everyone has to pirate. Gabe (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLC_zZ5fqFk&list=FLVpjG_y7HTy0&index=9) actually learned this two years ago.

Also, given the fact that the most pirated game of 2009 and '10, was Modern Warfare 2 (and Black Ops), it should say something that a number of people picked up the game even after pirating it.
you do realize this is somewhat contradictory to what you said before
"most people pirate before they buy a game" doesn't work with "most people pirate because they cant buy the game"

Besides, stay on topic, this is your thread so dont go off on tangents about third world nations when the topic is about the US.

As has been pointed out, all these studies say is that popular games are pirated more then unpopular ones, with people going duh. As I pointed out about the metacritic score, a high metacritic score is linked to popularity more then actual quality.

In any case there is zero evidence that any one of these pirates actually bought the game afterwards. Your argument is just as circumstantial as those that claim people pirate instead of buying.

While you can get number of downloads and compare it to number of purchases, its impossible to conclude one way or another how pirating affects sales.

[Jagos]

They've only looked at 179 titles. So it's not all that conclusive. I was saying that there was no link of "try before you buy". I had gotten that confused with a ton of other research I've been reading recently on piracy.

And how exactly doesn't "can't buy a game" work with "try before they buy?"

[Aerozord]

And how exactly doesn't "can't buy a game" work with "try before they buy?"

because if they cant buy the game at all then they cant buy it after trying it

[edit] actually I realize I can easily disprove this study. If pirating a game has a significant impact on metacritic scores, then why does the PC version (with vastly higher number of illegal copies) score approximately the same as the console version?

[Jagos]

Aero, they correlated the review scores to the downloads. It's a flaw in the methodology.

I've said that at least three times now, and you're still going on about that. The main thing about this study is the very fact that it's better than what's come out before in regards to BT downloading.

(Add more later, gotta go for work)

[Magus]

ITT Magus needs to get laid.

Completely true but that's every thread I post in!

Alternatively, he just has a really dirty bathroom.

Also completely true!

[Aerozord]

Aero, they correlated the review scores to the downloads. It's a flaw in the methodology.

I've said that at least three times now, and you're still going on about that. The main thing about this study is the very fact that it's better than what's come out before in regards to BT downloading.

(Add more later, gotta go for work)

better in what way? It draws many incorrect conclusions, has no real evidence, and is basically nothing but a collection of unrelated data. You have this nasty habit of confusing "better" with, "it agrees with me"

[Jagos]

because if they cant buy the game at all then they cant buy it after trying it

Aren't you making the argument that someone's income remains stagnant, unable to buy games at later dates?

Now, look at this (http://torrentfreak.com/incompetent-bittorrent-researchers-strike-again-101211/). This is a poorly thought out academic research paper that the correlation is even worse. What they were saying was that they correlated the two numbers. They did not PROVE any causation between the metacritic scores and the number of downloads. Somehow, you keep thinking I agree with that, when it's acknowledged by *both of us* that this is not the case.

As I had said, if they could expand the research into more areas, we would have a clearer view of the bittorrent arena. From other research that I'm reading, I made a jump that people were using the downloads as previews. That was my fault because I didn't establish that at all. Again, I'm admitting that I had made the mistake in my initial post.

So what you're basically going on about is that the very same flaws that the researchers themselves have admitted to. And it's not "better" because it agrees with me. It's better than the other academic study that came out by ICSL.