Large-Scale Analysis on Digital Piracy

The latest report on sharing computer games through BitTorrent’s networks revealed a number of interesting aspects of the digital piracy problem. The unauthorized sharing of digital material (via P2P technology) has led to heated debates and media headlines. While one side is claiming that Internet piracy kills American jobs and deprives content industry of billions of dollars in revenue, the other one stands for freedom of speech and online freedom.

The latest report is focused on game piracy and used open methodologies to collect information which covered a 3-month period in 2010 and 172 games. The interesting fact is that the results tore down all the myths surrounding Internet piracy. For instance, “shooter” games aren’t the most pirated ones – instead, children’s and family games are. In addition, the report points out that the real figure of unauthorized copies which are being accessed via P2P networks is lower than the entertainment industry claims to be.

It turned out that 12.6 million unique peers from over 250 countries/areas shared pirated games. In the meanwhile, of the 173 sampled games, the 10 top popular titles drove over 40% of unique peers on BitTorrent, and 20 of the countries made up over 3/4 of the total file-sharing activity.

Overall, over 500,000 unique peers from all over the world sharing the most popular games titles through P2P were acknowledged in the research. The most dedicated peers were from the following countries: Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Armenia, Serbia, and Portugal. In addition, mass-media’s positive game reviews attract the most attention on file-sharing networks.

Anders Drachen and Robert Veitch, the researchers from Denmark, explained that first and foremost, BitTorrent game piracy was extraordinarily prevalent and geographically distributed – at least within the period covered by the research. Nevertheless, the numbers in their investigation proved that previously reported scale of game piracy was far too high. Moreover, the researchers point out that some common myths were also wrong, like it was with the belief that it was only shooters that got pirated – instead, the researchers saw a lot of activity for children’s and family games on file-sharing networks within the investigated period.