Abstract
The practice of illegally copying and distributing digital games is
at the heart of one of the most heated and divisive debates in the
international games environment, with stakeholders typically
viewing it as a very positive (pirates) or very negative (the industry,
policy makers). Despite the substantial interest in game piracy,
there is very little objective information available about its
magnitude or its distribution across game titles and game genres.
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of the illegal distribution
of digital game titles, which was conducted by monitoring the
BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol. The sample
includes 173 games and a collection period of three months from
late 2010 to early 2011. With a total of 12.6 million unique peers
identified, it is the largest examination of game piracy via P2P
networks to date. Analysis of the data shows that games of the
“Action” genre, which include the majority of major commercial
AAA-level titles, comprise 45% of the unique peers in the dataset,
although games from “Racing”, “Role-Playing Game” and “Simulation”
genres have higher numbers of unique peers on average
than “Action” games. The ten most pirated titles encompass 5.27
million aggregated unique peers alone. In addition to genre, review
scores were found to be positively correlated with the logarithm
of the number of unique peers per game (p<0.05).
at the heart of one of the most heated and divisive debates in the
international games environment, with stakeholders typically
viewing it as a very positive (pirates) or very negative (the industry,
policy makers). Despite the substantial interest in game piracy,
there is very little objective information available about its
magnitude or its distribution across game titles and game genres.
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of the illegal distribution
of digital game titles, which was conducted by monitoring the
BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol. The sample
includes 173 games and a collection period of three months from
late 2010 to early 2011. With a total of 12.6 million unique peers
identified, it is the largest examination of game piracy via P2P
networks to date. Analysis of the data shows that games of the
“Action” genre, which include the majority of major commercial
AAA-level titles, comprise 45% of the unique peers in the dataset,
although games from “Racing”, “Role-Playing Game” and “Simulation”
genres have higher numbers of unique peers on average
than “Action” games. The ten most pirated titles encompass 5.27
million aggregated unique peers alone. In addition to genre, review
scores were found to be positively correlated with the logarithm
of the number of unique peers per game (p<0.05).
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Udgivelsessted | Frederiksberg |
| Udgiver | Department of Informatics INF, Copenhagen Business School |
| Antal sider | 8 |
| Status | Udgivet - 2011 |