Game piracy linked to critic scores.

[Jagos]

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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).