Although there's no denying that piracy is hugely prevalent in video games, a new report from Aalborg University and the Copenhagen Business School has found that it is perhaps not as widespread as previously reported by the Entertainment Software Association.
Professors Anders Drachen and Robert Veitch conducted an analysis [PDF] of BitTorrent file sharing over a three-month period between late 2010 and early 2011, analyzing the torrents of 173 video games across 14 different game platforms. The study aimed to provide an unbiased review of video game piracy, as previous studies have typically been conducted or commissioned by parties for or against the practice.
The Copenhagen study found that 12.6 million unique peers on average were sharing torrented copies of games like Fallout: New Vegas, Darksiders, Tron Evolution, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Starcraft 2 and The Sims 3: Late Night.
That's a lower rate of piracy than reported by the staunchly anti-piracy ESA. The trade group previously said 9.78 million "illegal" downloads of about 200 games occurred in December 2009 alone.
And influential pro-P2P sharing website TorrentFreak.com had reported 18.4 million downloads for the top five most-downloaded BitTorrent PC games of 2010 ("The five most downloaded console games add a further 5.34 million downloads," the study notes).
According to Copenhagen's study, the 10 most torrented games made up 42.7 percent of all unique peers, while the top 20 countries accounted for a staggering 76.7 percent of total video game file-sharing. The biggest offenders were Romania, Croatia, Greece, Portugal and Hungary.
Elsewhere, the report found that RPGs were the main type of game to be pirated, with the genre making up 18.9 percent of all torrents surveyed. Action-adventure were next (15.9 percent), followed by third-person shooters (12.7 percent) and racing games (9.3 percent).
"The numbers in our investigation suggest that previously reported magnitudes in game piracy are too high," said study co-author Drachen in a press release on Wired.
"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."
I've never been a pro pirating supporter but even i acknowledge the fact that much of the information about pirating is false. I for one truly believe that a certain margin of pirating happens because people have lost faith in buying games blindly. The ability to try a product first will always interest core gamers more than wasting money on a game that is oversold.
I think to a certain extent, that could be true. (Just to be clear, I'm also against piracy). A lot of the high profile games these days don't have demos.
A recent study also clouded the picture, showing that games with just a good video (as opposed to a demo) generally sold better. It would also be interesting to see how often the games with just a video (or no video) were pirated versus games that also had demos. If a game has a demo, the sales might be lower, but is the piracy rate also lower?
With a lot of games (first person shooters, I'm looking at you!), the single player campaign is short (<8 hours, for example), that by the time a person has a feel for the game, they've already played through half of it. I don't imagine too many people wanting to pay $60 to see what the other 4 hours of the campaign is like. Multiplayer would be another can of worms, but I might guess that enforcing content protection on a multiplayer game might be a bit easier than that of a single player game.
Also, just because people downloaded a game, does it mean that they've actually played it? Gathering in-game metrics on both pirated and purchased games could give some interesting insight that perhaps we currently lack.
Agree games that have a good video do indeed sell better but the majority of people spending that money on such a product is more than likely casual gamers with very little knowledge in the field of games. Devs that on the other hand do release Demos are doing people a service letting them try out the game and not regretting their purchase. In the long term it might actually have a more positive effect.
I've lost count on how many times I've regretted purchasing a game and that there's nothing i can do about it. If i had the option to try it out before purchasing it i would never have bought the game. I've become quite picky about games in recent years thanks to the fact that i feel that I've been shafted one to many times. It's not good to become cynical about things you love but it's an unfortunate side effect. I can guaranty that large parts of the people that pirate games to try them have the same experience as I've had but instead of ignoring the games they try them out.
Most FPS games offer multiplayer besides singel and a large parts of them focus on the multiplayer as well. There are some of devs that do release demos though and those games tend to be praised. Either way those that don't release demos tend to blame it on costs and developing time. I can't argue with that but there's more to it. There's a strong chance that a demo will hurt the games sales figures and there for it's better to deceive the consumer and take the hit with pirates. If the game does fail beyond that point there's the alternative to be obnoxiously loud about pirates being the driving factor.
Your right there's no way we can find out if pirates actually to play the games. Something i would love to see is statistics on how many people endup buying the game if they liked it. I have a few friends that i know are actively pirating games(and there's nothing i can do about it). I most cases they actually end up buying the game because they like it.
The world of piracy is much, much larger than simple Bit Torrent distribution. The study even lists a number of other distribution channels that it didn't measure.
The paper repeatedly states "Bit-Torrent protocol is generally viewed as the major channel for game piracy today", contrary to your assertion. The other distribution channels mentioned are usenet binaries (subscription required) or person-to-person social interactions (IRC, FTP).
I think flea markets and street vendors are regional at this point. In rich countries, such as the US and much of Europe, where high speed internet is the norm, street vendor piracy is pretty non existent. However, in poorer countries, such as much of Asia, Africa and Latin America, street vendors are much more common as the internet is not capable or common enough to allow for online piracy.
@Tyler I'm suggesting that all the other piracy types combined are much larger than Bit Torrent. Bit torrent is very public, and I would postulate that it is a casual form of piracy. Without data it's hard to prove or disprove that there is still massive piracy outside of the bit torrent ecosystem.
I guess I shouldn't have worded my original post so much as fact, just that I know there is organized piracy worldwide that don't use bit torrent at all.
I think you're a little confused Karl. I don't blame you for it, but I think you need to question a few assumptions. Now my own assumption is that you don't travel much? I've seen more than my share of street vendors and pirated products internationally, and do you know where they're biggest? Typically where there is no retail of the product at all. Seriously I question it even as a loss of income, even if you count piracy as loss of income, becuase the products aren't commercially available anyway. That's the main reason they're pirated, it's the only way to get them.
I'd also note the age of some of the bit torrents, as again, most are probably older games that are not as easy to obtain anymore. Ease of consumption is pretty much the main impetus of piracy, which is why bit torrent probably dwarfs any other form. Bit torrent is easy, and more often than not I imagine people are just downloading things they heard were good that are likely a few years old and still retaining some word of mouth. Not that new games won't be on there but as they mentioned they're mainly going to areas where they would otherwise have to go out of their way to pay international shipping to even obtain the games.
Yep... there's Piracy.. and it's all primarily committed against those games that continue to ship shrink wrapped & or DRM'd products. So that means that most of the games being pirated are also relegated to the Western Hemisphere's game devs/pubs. This will continue until this hemisphere starts taking F2P more seriously. This is something that the E. Hemisphere's game companies figured out a long time ago. Not saying F2P is the be all end all...but it has a lot of merit when done correctly.
Consider that there's no Piracy in a League of Legends or World of Tanks style game, or even something like Farmville for that matter. Primarily because they are free to play games. Digitally distributed games, and MMO's are also at least an order of magnitude tougher to pirate as well. Most games that have also migrated to F2P actually see a significant shift in earnings.
In the grand picture.. piracy is overblown.
Check out my lengthy blog on this topic if you have time.
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/09/22/gaming-piracy-separating-fact-f rom-fiction
I think it's a big presumptuous to say that F2P removes all incentive for pirating. I'd wager in most cases that F2P models, especially the ones you mentioned, are storing a lot of information server side. Naturally, this makes it incredibly difficult to pirate the game assets you do want, so instead you tend to see larger amounts of players trying to "dupe" or trick the system into reproducing some type of in-game currency in order to achieve the same goal.
Back to the original issue, and not to stroke the mighty Valve image, but I think Gabe said it best about piracy being more of a service issue instead of a player issue. We definitely need more unbiased research like this!
Back at the 27C3 conference that discussed how Fail0verflow were able to discover the inroads that have enabled PS3 hacking (in large part because Sony blundered by removing OtherOS), even they admit that at best, despite how apparently easy it might be for someone to hack a Nintendo Wii to mod and play backup/copied games on it, less than 3% of the entire potential userbase has likely even gone through the trouble, with the total installs of the HomeBrew channel barely passing the 2.5% of total Wii consoles sold worldwide.
I'm not blind to say that Piracy is not a factor, but it's certainly overblown. As another article on here put it, it's hard to quantify revenue lost due to piracy because the bean counters fall into the logical fallacy that all the people that might have pirated the game would have ever bought it in the first place.
There's also the other notion to consider, that a small number of those that do modify their systems or pirate games do so because all legal avenues to acquire content for them would not carry what they want otherwise. I can state with almost surprising regularity that there are games I usually find on a modded platform that I am suddenly impressed and amazed with simply because none of the legal channels chose to offer it legitimately.
Yes, many who do pirate are usually pretty intelligent, but it's also been documented that a lot of the "big filthy pirates" are also the same people that actually buy the most movies/music/games legitimately, or would go out of their way to promote a good, lesser known product.
As @Sorin Sandru also noted above, it's become increasingly hard to convince someone to pay $60 for a game - especially if it's one that is going to induce someone to spend far more on its DLC - if the standard boxed copy itself isn't that great to begin with. I can say rather safely that there were a fair few games that I was quickly disappointed in after buying... one off the top of my head would be GTA IV, especially after looking back and seeing how much more fun I had with Saint's Row 2 (and then 3).
People in Croatia are rich enough to have a computer, but not enough to buy games for it. Considering really high prices (almost 100$ for blockbuster game old one year) and generally low availability, it is not that surprising.
Not that many of those who pirate would pay anyway.
Off of the top of my head I'm not too familiar with the state of gaming/accessibility in any of those countries, but do any of them suffer from region locks?
I can't speak for croatia, but I know that Australia suffered badly from region locking and over-inflated prices of games... even there, a *used* game can cost the equivalent of ~$100 USD, while new titles on disc for the current platforms go for as much as the MSRP was for Neo Geo AES titles.
Sony in particular had been making this big stink due to a few stores there deciding to take matters in their own hands and offering pre-modified consoles to break region locking and enable Australian gamers the ability to choose more games for them to play, because so many would either take almost a full year to finally arrive, or were never released proper for the country. Finally it went to their country's supreme court and in a rather landmark decision, the courts decided in favor, ruling that it MUST be legal to allow consumers to modify their systems in order to enable the choice that was otherwise deprived of them through legal avenues by the respective companies and manufacturers.
I've never been a pro pirating supporter but even i acknowledge the fact that much of the information about pirating is false. I for one truly believe that a certain margin of pirating happens because people have lost faith in buying games blindly. The ability to try a product first will always interest core gamers more than wasting money on a game that is oversold.
A recent study also clouded the picture, showing that games with just a good video (as opposed to a demo) generally sold better. It would also be interesting to see how often the games with just a video (or no video) were pirated versus games that also had demos. If a game has a demo, the sales might be lower, but is the piracy rate also lower?
With a lot of games (first person shooters, I'm looking at you!), the single player campaign is short (<8 hours, for example), that by the time a person has a feel for the game, they've already played through half of it. I don't imagine too many people wanting to pay $60 to see what the other 4 hours of the campaign is like. Multiplayer would be another can of worms, but I might guess that enforcing content protection on a multiplayer game might be a bit easier than that of a single player game.
Also, just because people downloaded a game, does it mean that they've actually played it? Gathering in-game metrics on both pirated and purchased games could give some interesting insight that perhaps we currently lack.
I've lost count on how many times I've regretted purchasing a game and that there's nothing i can do about it. If i had the option to try it out before purchasing it i would never have bought the game. I've become quite picky about games in recent years thanks to the fact that i feel that I've been shafted one to many times. It's not good to become cynical about things you love but it's an unfortunate side effect. I can guaranty that large parts of the people that pirate games to try them have the same experience as I've had but instead of ignoring the games they try them out.
Most FPS games offer multiplayer besides singel and a large parts of them focus on the multiplayer as well. There are some of devs that do release demos though and those games tend to be praised. Either way those that don't release demos tend to blame it on costs and developing time. I can't argue with that but there's more to it. There's a strong chance that a demo will hurt the games sales figures and there for it's better to deceive the consumer and take the hit with pirates. If the game does fail beyond that point there's the alternative to be obnoxiously loud about pirates being the driving factor.
Your right there's no way we can find out if pirates actually to play the games. Something i would love to see is statistics on how many people endup buying the game if they liked it. I have a few friends that i know are actively pirating games(and there's nothing i can do about it). I most cases they actually end up buying the game because they like it.
I think flea markets and street vendors are regional at this point. In rich countries, such as the US and much of Europe, where high speed internet is the norm, street vendor piracy is pretty non existent. However, in poorer countries, such as much of Asia, Africa and Latin America, street vendors are much more common as the internet is not capable or common enough to allow for online piracy.
I'm not sure what exactly your suggesting here. You think flea markets are "much, much larger than simple Bit Torrent" piracy?
I guess I shouldn't have worded my original post so much as fact, just that I know there is organized piracy worldwide that don't use bit torrent at all.
I'd also note the age of some of the bit torrents, as again, most are probably older games that are not as easy to obtain anymore. Ease of consumption is pretty much the main impetus of piracy, which is why bit torrent probably dwarfs any other form. Bit torrent is easy, and more often than not I imagine people are just downloading things they heard were good that are likely a few years old and still retaining some word of mouth. Not that new games won't be on there but as they mentioned they're mainly going to areas where they would otherwise have to go out of their way to pay international shipping to even obtain the games.
Yep... there's Piracy.. and it's all primarily committed against those games that continue to ship shrink wrapped & or DRM'd products. So that means that most of the games being pirated are also relegated to the Western Hemisphere's game devs/pubs. This will continue until this hemisphere starts taking F2P more seriously. This is something that the E. Hemisphere's game companies figured out a long time ago. Not saying F2P is the be all end all...but it has a lot of merit when done correctly.
Consider that there's no Piracy in a League of Legends or World of Tanks style game, or even something like Farmville for that matter. Primarily because they are free to play games. Digitally distributed games, and MMO's are also at least an order of magnitude tougher to pirate as well. Most games that have also migrated to F2P actually see a significant shift in earnings.
In the grand picture.. piracy is overblown.
Check out my lengthy blog on this topic if you have time.
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/09/22/gaming-piracy-separating-fact-f
rom-fiction
Matt
Back to the original issue, and not to stroke the mighty Valve image, but I think Gabe said it best about piracy being more of a service issue instead of a player issue. We definitely need more unbiased research like this!
I'm not blind to say that Piracy is not a factor, but it's certainly overblown. As another article on here put it, it's hard to quantify revenue lost due to piracy because the bean counters fall into the logical fallacy that all the people that might have pirated the game would have ever bought it in the first place.
There's also the other notion to consider, that a small number of those that do modify their systems or pirate games do so because all legal avenues to acquire content for them would not carry what they want otherwise. I can state with almost surprising regularity that there are games I usually find on a modded platform that I am suddenly impressed and amazed with simply because none of the legal channels chose to offer it legitimately.
Yes, many who do pirate are usually pretty intelligent, but it's also been documented that a lot of the "big filthy pirates" are also the same people that actually buy the most movies/music/games legitimately, or would go out of their way to promote a good, lesser known product.
As @Sorin Sandru also noted above, it's become increasingly hard to convince someone to pay $60 for a game - especially if it's one that is going to induce someone to spend far more on its DLC - if the standard boxed copy itself isn't that great to begin with. I can say rather safely that there were a fair few games that I was quickly disappointed in after buying... one off the top of my head would be GTA IV, especially after looking back and seeing how much more fun I had with Saint's Row 2 (and then 3).
Not that many of those who pirate would pay anyway.
I can't speak for croatia, but I know that Australia suffered badly from region locking and over-inflated prices of games... even there, a *used* game can cost the equivalent of ~$100 USD, while new titles on disc for the current platforms go for as much as the MSRP was for Neo Geo AES titles.
Sony in particular had been making this big stink due to a few stores there deciding to take matters in their own hands and offering pre-modified consoles to break region locking and enable Australian gamers the ability to choose more games for them to play, because so many would either take almost a full year to finally arrive, or were never released proper for the country. Finally it went to their country's supreme court and in a rather landmark decision, the courts decided in favor, ruling that it MUST be legal to allow consumers to modify their systems in order to enable the choice that was otherwise deprived of them through legal avenues by the respective companies and manufacturers.