What the First Legit Study of Illegal BitTorrent Downloading Means for Stealing

Online piracy is so widespread that it's taken for granted as much as it's fought and denounced. A windfall for consumers and a major thorn in the side of the entertainment industry, illegal downloading has become a nice ripe hot-button issue used by politicians to ingratiate themselves with Hollywood. But just how major of a thorn is it really?

Digital piracy is deeply pervasive. It disrupts multibillion-dollar industries, and it's virtually un-studied--a trifecta that affords people on all sides of the debate the luxury of vaguery. You can say piracy costs the entertainment sector billions in lost revenue each month and no one would be in a position to argue.

In fact, a few industry associations have already offered estimates of downloading rates and revenue losses. For example, the Entertainment Software Association claims there were 9.8 million illegal downloads of 200 games in December 2009. But why would anyone trust those figures? Such groups aren't transparent about their methodologies and have every incentive to overestimate the rates and the costs.

This absence of credible data is a prop wielded by both sides of the debate over the causes and effects of digital piracy. A new study out this month is a good first whack aimed to chip away at that absence and give the digital piracy landscape some shape.

A team of researchers at universities in Denmark and Canada conducted what they call the first "large-scale" analysis of video game downloads executed via BitTorrent. During three months from late 2010 to early 2011, the team tracked 173 games of all kinds--racing games, first-person shooters, RPGs and others--across 14 popular platforms, including Xbox 360, Play Station 3, PC, iOS/Mac, Wii, Nintendo DS and PSP.

To gather the data, the researchers built a web crawler that queried BitTorrent for metadata containing server uniform resource identifiers. The data provided IP addresses of the people involved.

In observing the dissemination within the decentralized file-sharing network, researchers found that BitTorrent's downloader "swarm" for those 173 games tallied 12.7 million unique users from 250 countries. As it turns out, there are a ton of download-happy gamers in Eastern Europe--Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, Poland, Serbia and Armenia. There are a bunch more in Greece, Italy, Israel, Portugal and Qatar.

This is definitely not a case of developing countries vs. industrial countries but much more diverse," coauthor Anders Drachen told Wired. In a press release he said that "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."

Not surprisingly, the 10 most popular games were highly ranked on game review websites and accounted for more than 40 percent of the downloading. Each one garnered shares from more than 536,000 unique peers. They were:

• Fallout: New Vegas
• Darksiders
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
• NBA 2k11
• TRON Evolution
• Call of Duty: Black Ops
• Starcraft 2
• Star Wars the Force Unleashed 2
• Two Worlds II
• The Sims: Late Night

But the question of what these numbers mean to the industry is still up in the air. "How the number of unique peers translates into lost sales is a contested issue," the authors say, "and one that future research will investigate."