Game piracy linked to critic scores.

[Jagos]

Link

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]

Originally Posted by Jagos

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]

Originally Posted by Jagos

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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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]

Originally Posted by 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.

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]

Originally Posted by NonCon

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!