A new study reveals that the amount of piracy associated with a given title may have a correlation to what kinds of review scores it is getting. At least that is the consensus of researchers from the University of Waterloo, the University of Colorado and the Copenhagen Business School. They conducted a study that looks at the correlation between the number of downloads on BitTorrent of a game and the scores given to these games by video game reviewers. The study hopes to provide solid research on the magnitude and distribution of pirated video games across a variety of titles and genres, since the availability of this type of information is rare.
Researchers monitored the downloads of 173 new game titles on BitTorrent that were released between late 2010 and early 2011. Of those 173 games, 127 were available on BitTorrent, and these games were downloaded by 12.7 million unique peers in the three-month research period. The 10 most downloaded games accounted for 5.3 million downloads, or 42 percent of the 127 games.
The top ten downloaded video games on BitTorrent in the three-month period were Fallout: New Vegas with 962,793 downloads, Darksiders with 656,296 downloads, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit with 656,243 downloads, NBA 2k11 with 545,559 downloads, TRON Evolution with 496,349 downloads, Call of Duty: Black Ops with 469,864 downloads, Starcraft 2 with 420,138 downloads, Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2 with 415,021 downloads, Two Worlds II with 388,236 downloads, and The Sims 3: Late Night with 356,771 downloads.
When researchers compared review scores to the most or least downloaded games they found that higher review scores resulted in more downloads from each game. Game reviewers gave the 10 most downloaded games the following scores: 83.7 for Fallout: New Vegas, 82.7 for Darksiders, 88 for Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, 86.7 for NBA 2k11, 59.5 for TRON Evolution, 83.8 for Call of Duty: Black Ops, 89.5 for Starcraft 2, 61 for Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2, 73.3 for Two Worlds II, and 77.5 for The Sims 3: Late Night.
"The result indicates a statistically significant positive relationship between the number of unique peers and aggregated review scores," said the research paper. "Put differently, Metacritic Scores explain 10 percent of the variance in the unique peers per game on BitTorrent."
While it's interesting to see these numbers and how scores might affect them, it's not particularly surprising either. I mean, who would pirate a crappy game? It is also unclear how these numbers can be used to combat piracy. The only proof it really provides is that if you make a crappy game then you don't really have to worry about someone else stealing it..
Source: Daily Tech
Comments
Re: Research: No One Pirates Crappy Games
I have noticed myself that if you look at any top ten pirated games list for a given month it almost perfectly mirrors that month's top ten sales lists.
Re: Research: No One Pirates Crappy Games
With these numbers, you'd think developers would be BRAGGING about piracy.
"Hey, our game's the most pirated/popular game out there!"
Re: Research: No One Pirates Crappy Games
And another entry in the "No shit Sherlock" files.
Re: Research: No One Pirates Crappy Games
It's not all that cut and dry though. What you can take away from this, is that you can figure out how good your game is simply by watching the P2P networks. It's a free market research tool that gives you data on the success and popularity of your game.
-Greevar
"Paste superficially profound, but utterly meaningless quotation here."
Re: Research: No One Pirates Crappy Games
A while back the fansub community used to be considered such a tool. Studios would look at how successful various fansubs and their distributors were to help determine which titles would be worth investing in an official translation and US release.
Re: Research: No One Pirates Crappy Games
To bad they hardly ever invest in decent actors for the translations. A few of them (especially older ones) have deliveries almost good enough to be from trolls 2.