Is that computer game legal?
It has to be easier to legislate appropriately in matters concerning computer game piracy. Researchers are ready with a new report.
The report cuts through the volume of obscure and sometimes unreliable studies that haunt the heated debate about illegal file sharing of computer games, music and movies. One the goals is to improve the politicians' ability to legislate appropriately within the field.
Hidden methodology and data
The major problem is caused by the fact that many studies keep their methodology and data secret, making it difficult to assess the credibility of the figures. It is also difficult to discern objectivity of the studies as the majority of the surveys are ordered by the game industry's interest groups, who obviously have motives to exploit the debate in their own favour.
By publishing a report on on-line computer piracy, where the methodology and survey data are available, researchers from CBS and other universities are trying to establish a new starting point for the debate.
-Our ambition with the Digital Games Piracy project is to try to dispel the many existing myths and get more concrete and objective figures on the table. Ultimately, such studies should help policy-makers to obtain a better basis for legislation, says Anders Drachen, one of the researchers behind the study.
127 of 173 games are available as pirate copies
To conduct this study, the researchers monitored the peer-to-peer network BitTorrent over a period of three months. BitTorrent is considered to be the primary channel for on-line piracy, although new file sharing methods also have come into play. The researchers monitored 173 games, which amount to all the games that were released in Autumn 2010 and Spring 2011.
It turned out that 127 of the 173 games could be found as illegal copies on BitTorrent in that period - and that there were attempts to download the pirate copies from 12.7 million unique IP addresses.
Games from a to z
Although the researchers behind the study are reluctant to draw too many conclusions, they are willing to comment on which games are copied the most.
-We chose to focus on all the games that were released in a three-month period, and nothing suggests that certain games or genres are preferred over others. Everything from game blockbusters to small family games were represented among the 127 games that could be downloaded from BitTorrents, says Anders Drachen from Aalborg University.
It is quite surprising, because conventional wisdom dictates that it is specific computer games that are most popular.
Read the whole story in the newsletter Insights@CBS.
Next step
The report on file sharing on BitTorrent will be followed by a new study later this year. After examining which games and how many, the researchers will now ask why.
- One of our theses is that there may be economic reasons to why people in some places are more likely to copy the game illegally. For example, a particular on-line game costs the same all over the world, and therefore in reality, it is more expensive to buy it in countries where the average income is lower than in other countries, says Ioanna Constantiou from the Department of IT Management at CBS.
Read the survey
The report ”Piracy Activity vs. Product Features in Digital Games” has been conducted in collaboration between researchers from CBS, Aalborg University and the University of Waterloo. Besides Anders Drachen and Ioanna Constantiou, Kevin Bauer from the University of Waterloo and Robert Veitch from the Department of IT Management at Copenhagen Business School are behind this study.