The number of illicit digital copies is not as high as reported by industry trade organizations, according to a large-scale analysis of BitTorrent file-sharing of videogames.

Anders Drachen from the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University and the PLAIT Lab at Northeastern University as well as Robert Veitch from the Department of IT Management at Copenhagen Business School analysed a the filesharing of some 173 computer games over a three-month period between 2010 and 2011.

They set out to study videogame piracy because "despite the substantial debate about digital game piracy, there is minimal objective information available about the relative magnitude of piracy, or its distribution across different countries nor across game titles or game genres" ...