Illegally downloading any copyrighted material is wrong. Unfortunately, it continues to happen at alarming rates, and no digital content is immune to piracy.
For those wondering what were the most and least favored mediums for the pirates to steal, TorrentFreak has released a report showing just that. Video games and software are listed as the least pirated medium, and video as the most.
Certainly, there are other ways, besides torrents, that pirates access content on the internet. However, based on the large gap (in both seeders and leachers) between games and more talked about media such as audio and video, these torrent numbers do indicate that games are being illegally downloaded at a lower rate. It's hard to imagine the direct-downloads through services such as Rapidshare and other file-sharing sites would cause videogames to spike in the rankings.
Check out the numbers courtesy of TorrentFreak:
This fact may still come off as surprising to some, as the video game industry is widely reported as bringing in more revenue than the film industry. These numbers make sense though, seeing as each generation of consoles make pirating harder and harder. There are many steps in place to make illegally downloading and playing games an intimidating feat.
Downloading game software takes up much hard-drive space. The current generation of consoles need to be modded (which voids the warranty) in order to play illegally burned games. Finally, the most reoccurring step console developers use to fight piracy are mandatory firmware updates that disable the latest method hackers/pirates use to play illegally obtained games on their consoles. Microsoft is well known for banning users from Xbox Live caught with modded consoles or pirated games. Sony tends to take the lawsuit route for people who hack their consoles.
TorrentFreak also provided a lists ranking the top platforms that the games were downloaded from.
Gaming platforms
- PC
- PlayStation Portable
- Nintendo Wii
- Nintendo DS
- PlayStation
- Xbox
As one might have guessed, PC is in the top spot of this list because it's the simplest platform to just download and play. On the other hand, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 didn't make it to the top five list, most likely because their respective companies are the most strict when comes to punishing pirates . It would seem until the movie industry makes takes a clue from console developers and make their software insanely difficult to to download, they will continue to stay at the top of the most downloaded list. Sadly, until an innovative new technique is created to combat pirating, it'll be here for a while.
So what do you Ranters think is the reason that games are the least pirated medium?
Source: TorrentFreak