Torrent game piracy stats fudged by publishers?

While game publishers and developers release their own numbers on the severity of game piracy, a new study from a research paper suggests that the numbers are drastically inflated.

The study was conducted by a research team, led by Anders Drachen of the Aalborg University, which used state-of-the-art BitTorrent tracking software to monitor the illegal distribution of games through torrents.

Over the three month tracking period (late 2010 – early 2011), 12.6 million unique peers were identified pirating games. The most pirated title was Fallout: New Vegas, which racked up 967,793 downloads.

That’s a big number; however, it was much lower than the statistics being distributed by publishers and developers.

“The numbers in our investigation suggest that previously reported magnitudes in game piracy are too high,” explains the research paper. “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.”

It must be said that the period of research won’t indicate the entire lifespan of the game’s piracy, but does give an indication of how games are distributed at the height of their popularity.

Another point made by the paper explains that the geographical location and status of a country’s economy has little to do with piracy.

“This is definitely not a case of developing countries vs. industrial countries but much more diverse. While we can only speculate about the underlying causal factors of the patterns we observe, I suspect that they are pretty complex.”