Study: Positive correlation between piracy and game review scores

Groundbreaking. I mean, who wouldve thought? I suppose next there will be a study that shows the most pirated movies are the most popular on rotten tomatoes. It's astounding!

Life is too short to play PC games, and also waste bandwidth to pirate them, especially with tightening bandwidth caps by providers.

I enjoyed immensely both that last pun and the canned audience groan I imagined following it.

@Aguiluz
I don't think Ms. Conditt is familiar with the McElroy pirate babies.

You mean people AREN'T pirating Elf Bowling?

Well... duh, idiots.

Study shows that more people eat yummy ice cream than poopy ice cream.

So, people like good games?

Just remember, correlation does not equal causation. It can simply be a coincidence.

I think this indicates something a bit more frightening. Game that are considered by the general public to be good enough to be worth playing but not good enough to spend money are proabably more likely to be pirated.

If that makes any sense.

Of course there's also Starcraft II but that could just be in response to the drm...

Or maybe it's just the fickle mind of mad gamerz.

So what's the point of this? Great game gets downloaded a lot while shitty game gets downloaded a lot too~
....
And? Do those bean counters run out of stuff to further drain their populations' taxes on all these WORTHLESS studies in euroland?!

So if I'm doing my research hard enough (and I'm doing it as hard as I can), I'm gonna go out on a limb and say hardly anyone tries to pirate terrible games...

So wait - popular games are more likely to get pirated? I find that shocking.

I love to pirate games.

From the store.

After I pay for it.

I always buy my games.... But there are times when you can't afford it or are just bored of the games you had. I just beat black and white 2 thanks to torrents and it not being up on steam.

I half-expected whitenoise to be all up in this telling us "See, SEE!? PIRACY ISN'T ALWAYS BAD!" or some such nonsense.

This is actually a very poor correlation. The statement says "Metacritic Scores explain 10% of the variance in the unique peers per game on BitTorrent." This 10% is actually what is known as a coefficient of determination, or R-squared value. The R-squared value tells you the percent of variability in the dependent variable (Unique peers per game on BitTorrent) explained by the independent variable (Metacritic Scores). It is obtained by doing a simple regression of the data values for both sets. An R-squared value of 10% or .10 is very low, even for a social science study such as this. I am an Economist and we are use to seeing relatively low R-Squared values because it is a social science experiements involving humans and their "rational choices". FYI, people don't always make rational choices but it is an assumption we must make. This is in constrast to other sciences that have very high R-Squared values due to the level of control they may have in their experiment, e.g. monitoring for the effect of a new drug. Long story short, I don't see this figure as being statistically significant.

Face it, usually everybody pirates because they don't have the money to buy it on there own, and once they start doing it, they won't want to stop because they can get it free, even when they do have the money.

Yo dude, I'm just downloading it to make sure it doesn't suck. Reviews are bad, I 'll just play a bit of it...

*19 hours later*

...well I beat it, ending sucked, won't buy it. Glad I didn't waste money.

Most pirates are poor kids/students who otherwise have a very limited budget for games anyway.

People need to know one thing, and it is very important.

A single pirated game is not equal to one sale loss! If a person pirates a game, it does not mean that person would have bought it if piracy wasn't possible. They more than likely didn't have the budget to begin with, or didn't think the game was worth the risk (money).

Piracy does have an impact, but it doesn't have the massive impact corporations want the public to believe.

Demo versions of games in general are usually rare for either console or PC. It also doesn't help the developer if you buy the game from the bargain $5 bin, or a cheap 10-20$ used copy. Developers get very little to nothing from those types of sales.

Pirates are going to save their money to grab the few online or "already known to be kickass franchise" games and pirate the rest.

Pirating what seems like an "alright" game, might surprise you and cause you to at least buy the next release in the franchise if the game impressed you, especially if it has online/bonus content that usually doesn't work on cracked/pirated copies anyway.

Piracy is an easy group to point the finger at when a game just sucks so much balls that it builds negative reputation and suffers horrible sales.