14 DAY TRIAL // Piracy conducted via torrents for video games, including the PC, mobile devices and home consoles, is significantly smaller than piracy for other entertainment mediums, like music and video, and for software, as shown in a new set of data offered by the blog TorrentFreak.
The data from TorrentFreak shows that, when using the number of seeders and leechers as a criterion, shows that piracy for video games accounts for 3.6 percent and respectively 4.1% of the entire pirated content that is available online.
The video game category is dwarfed by video content, which contributes the most to piracy, but also by audio, which comes in at 18.6 percent of seeders and other software, which accounts for 6.9%.
It's interesting to note that the number of leechers for software is lower than that for video games, despite the disparity in seeders.
The amount of pirated data generated by video game torrents stands at 657.8 TB, which is 5.5% of the total, although the number of overall torrents stands at a lower percentage of 3.3, with the actual number at 340,416.
Video still leads when it comes to actual data shared and to number of individual torrent file offered, followed by software in terms of data and by audio when it comes to number of files shared.
The data from TorrentFreak does not mean that it is safe to ignore video game piracy or that its impact on the industry is not negative, but it suggests that compared to other categories video games see relatively limited torrent-based traffic.
Both developers and publishers have suggested that piracy is one of the main reasons they are no longer launching some titles on the PC or they delay that version past home version launch dates.
The PSP and the Nintendo DS have also been heavily affected, but piracy is also possible, although a bit harder, on the Xbox 360, the Nintendo Wii and the PlayStation 3.