ESA names European countries with high amounts of game piracy

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ESA names European countries with high amounts of game piracy

Posted Feb 17th 2009 5:00PM by John Callaham
Filed under: Biz

PC game piracy is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, issue in the game industry. Fighting illegal piracy of such games overseas has been extremely difficult. The game trade group the Entertainment Software Association recently took part in a new study of piracy of games and other media outside the US by the International Intellectual Property Alliance.

The annual study of piracy revealed that in December 2008 the ESA did research into how many illegal copies of 13 unnamed games were distributed via the BitTorrent and EDonkey file sharing networks. The ESA claims that 6,429,279 copies of those 13 games were downloaded via those two networks for that month. Just the two most popular games accounted for 4,787,441 copies of the total amount. Users in Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Poland were the countries that accounted for the most downloads.

Tags: bittorrent, edonkey, entertainment-software-association, esa

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Space?
I'm assuming it is supposed to be Spain, because I doubt astronauts and cosmonauts pirate too many games from the ISS.Posted at 5:09PM on Feb 17th 2009 by Xeones25

haha those dastardly cosmonauts are at it agian! i want to know if the games being pirated over there are readily available for purchase. and what are the cost of living and income statistics. though piracy is terrible, i would assume that if someone is in space, that they at least have a job. also, when do we find out if it is actually piracy? what percentage of these people actually own the games that they are downloading? is there a way to tell? maybe they buy and then download for drm reasons or what not. im no expert though, so i probably sound stupid. i have a poopie. Posted at 5:22PM on Feb 17th 2009 by goog9

Sweet, Canada is still on the priority list. I hope we never drop from it, as that would mean enacting draconian US-style copyright laws.Posted at 5:37PM on Feb 17th 2009 by bVork

Game prices are ridiculous in Europe. I was there last summer and here are some prices converted to $ that I saw, they were so bad they haunt me still:
Crysis - PC - $75 - Czech Republic (Tesco, kind of like Walmart)
COD4 - PS3 - $110 - Switzerland - Mall store
COD4 - PS3 - $104 - Germany - Best buy type storePosted at 11:22AM on Feb 18th 2009 by lokar82