Academics from three seperate universities have concluded a joint study which they say shows game piracy is "not as prevalent as feared."
According to the study's authors their work represents "the largest examination of game piracy via P2P networks to date." They discovered that 173 games were illegally downloaded by 12.6 million people over the course of three months.
Though the numbers suggest piracy is a serious problem the study significantly undercuts industry body the ESA who has reviously reported 10 million illicit downloads of a single game in one 30 day period.
The paper suggests that the figures outed by the ESA are "potentially biased, partially due to the interest of the industry to reduce piracy and thus potentially over-estimate the problem."
Among the finding of the paper is that there is "very little objective information available about the magnitude of piracy."
Anders Drachen of Aalborg University and one of the study's researches commented that despite the lack of data game piracy is a serious issue "First and foremost, P2P game piracy is extraordinarily prevalent and geographically distributed.
"However, the numbers in our investigation suggest that previously reported magnitudes in game piracy are too high. 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."
Recently, in a novel attempt to fight piracy Game Dev Tycoon developer Greenheard Games deliberately uploaded their game to a top torrent site. The version of the title uploaded became increasingly difficult for the game's pirates to play because of game piracy.
Via: CVG.
