"The illegal downloading of video games is a heated debate with one hand, the" pirates "and other rights holders, and legislators" ... In a recent study, Anders and Robert W. Drachen D. Veitch of the Copenhagen Business School and Kevin Bauer of the University of Waterloo in Canada, intend to supply a vision "objective and transparent" about the importance of piracy in the gaming industry
The end of 2010 to early 2011, researchers have focused on file sharing on 173 games, Bittorrent networks. Play all genres are represented, titles of action racing games, be it "blockbusters" video game or independent productions. The authors of the study also followed the games of various platforms, from PCs to consoles, to the Nintendo DS and PSP.
Of the 173 analyzed games, 127 of them had a version of "cracked", available on Bittorrent. Approximately 12.6 million people shared the different files during the conduct of the study. This figure tempers those provided by the Entertainment Software Association, which brings together industry giants, whose critical study methodology. For the month of December 2009, the association said for example that 9.78 million illegal downloads were taking place, and involved about 200 titles.
The study also found that the sharing of gaming networks peer-to-peer is "unbalanced". The ten most popular games on P2P networks focus almost 42% of downloads.
