14 DAY TRIAL // The Entertainment Software Association, a trade group which aims to advance the interest of video-game developer and publishers, has said that the five most important countries when it comes to online game piracy are Italy, Spain, China, Brazil and France.
The ESA says that peer-to-peer sharing, like that done through torrents, is the most important cause for piracy in the five countries, with 54 percent of all the game sharing activities during 2010 linked to them.
The ESA suggests that the United States Trade Representative should take the action of placing the five countries and 28 others on a special watchlist and pressure them to take action to combat illegal file sharing and better protect intellectual property.
There are apparently more than 144 million Internet connections that are involved with illegal file sharing.
Michael Gallagher, who is the president and the chief executive officer of the Entertainment Software Association, has stated, “Our industry continues to grow in the U.S., but epidemic levels of online piracy stunt sales and growth in a number of countries, including Italy, China, Spain, Brazil and France, where we see crushing volumes of infringing peer-to-peer activity involving leading game titles.”
He added, “Game publishers lose opportunities for export sales, and the U.S. loses opportunities to expand our export economy, and consumers in those countries lose local benefits of having a thriving game market.”
A recent event saw beta stage copies of both Crysis 2 from Crytek and of Killzone 3 from Guerrilla Games and Sony leaked onto the Internet, apparently complete with master online keys that allow pirates to set up their own multiplayer games.
Video-game piracy is an important phenomenon on both the PC and on home-gaming consoles, with the recent hack of the PlayStation 3 opening that platform to piracy, which had been impossible since it was first launched.