Today, Dejan Diklic, chief crawling architect at Attributor, contributes his second post about online gaming piracy. Dejan manages the text, image and video crawling team and is responsible for the company’s crawling architecture, algorithms and operations.

Most recently, Dejan began researching online gaming piracy, and shares new insight again today.

In a recent post, we talked a bit about online game piracy and our first set of numbers as they relate to Wii games. We searched for 15 games and found each game on the web and roughly 16 different pages that provided us with links to each game hosted on multiple different file hosting sites (sometimes also called cyberlockers).

In this post, we’ll examine a rather interesting popularity question: “Who is the most pirated one of all?” To do so, we used the list of top 10 games from gamespot.com for each of the 3 top consoles (Wii, Xbox, PS3). We also used the top 10 games for the PC market. We then crawled the web to find links to these games on the top 25 file hosting sites. As a disclaimer, a problem with this method arises from the fact that not all games exist on all four platforms and one of the platforms might have more popular games than the others. Since we are looking at the top 10 most popular games for each platform, this problem is largely marginalized, though not entirely eliminated.

As in the previous study, we dumped the pages from the production system for each platform and then verified them. The results were really interesting:

As far as the consoles go, Wii games resulted in most pages with links to games. We found 220 pages with links to Wii games. Xbox and PS3 have much lower rates of piracy as we found only 59 and 22 pages respectively. The PC games were the absolute winner in terms of piracy. We found 50% more pages for the top 10 PC games than for Wii. The most popular copied game out there is “Battlefield: Bad Company 2” for PCs with 82 pages linking to ISO files. It is followed immediately by “Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing” for Wii with 79 pages linking to ISOs.

My hunch is that these numbers can be explained through ease of piracy for a given console. Piracy for PC and Wii games require pretty much just copying the CDs. PS3 and Xbox require a bit more effort in hardware.

In conducting this research, I came across an interesting post on Shack News about the most pirated Japanese DS and PSP games. The claim is that the top two games on Nintendo DS and PSP were downloaded 2 million and 5 million times, respectively. While we didn’t look at piracy for those two consoles, the numbers of downloads are staggering. With average game price of around $30 the potential loss to developers is huge.

To top these numbers, CESA came out with a report saying total piracy loss from 2004 to 2009 was around $41B. While this report needs to be taken with a grain of salt, the numbers are again huge.

In the next post, we will take a peek at game copying on P2P networks and attempt to quantify the value there as well.

Today’s post comes from Dejan Diklic, chief crawling architect at Attributor. Dejan manages the text, image and video crawling team and is responsible for the company’s crawling architecture, algorithms and operations. He plays an integral role in the strategy, development and implementation of Attributor’s research, which has brought international attention to the depth of content piracy across the Internet.

Most recently, Dejan began researching online gaming piracy, and shares his insight for the first time today.

As Chief Crawler here at Attributor, I spend a lot of time seeing what’s on the Web. Recently, computer game software piracy caught my attention and I thought I’d take a first look at what’s happening in this industry. When I started the research, I expected the game piracy to be a well-established “trade” concentrated on just a few sites. But as it turns out, online games are being pirated even more then expected and they are available everywhere.

Since Wii is my personal favorite, I chose this as the segment of the industry to examine. For this blog post, I looked at a total of 15 games on 20 of the largest hosting sites (most of which we identified in previous research for books and magazines). The system crunched through our 40-billion-page index and found several hundreds of thousands of pages that might be relevant for these games. A page is considered relevant if it is classified as being “game related,” meaning it has a lot of keywords that are normally associated with games, has links to known hosting sites and talks about the specific game we searched for.

After the system processed all the pages, the algorithm ranked several thousand pages as almost 100% likely to contain the games in our search. During a one-day period in June 2010, Attributor professional services reviewed 300 pages from that list and found 250 pages linking to desired content, which resulted in roughly 3,200 links leading to copies of the games. We found a copy of every game we looked for. As usual, most infringements were found on rapidshare. The top 5 domains — are rapidshare, hotfile, megaupload, x7 and mediafire — were responsible for 85% of the infringements.

If we take a rather unscientific average of these numbers, we get more than 200 links found for each game and 16 pages referring to valid links for each game (keep in mind these are numbers for just one day of processing). This simply means that anybody looking for any particular Wii game can find it on 16 different sites, on average. These results show that the current state of piracy control on hosting sites is non-existent since anybody can go to a search engine and find any pirated game they want.

The distribution of hosting sites is also rather interesting, as now there is a new domain in the top 5 that we haven’t seen as prominently before, x7.to.

The next step in my project will be to look at game piracy across different platforms and see who is the most pirated out there. Stay tuned!

Today, we are thrilled to announce our latest round of funding from previous investors Sigma Partners, JAFCO Ventures and Selby Venture Partners. The $3.2 million in financing will help us deepen our leadership in the industry and advance our technology so that we can support even more publishers around the world.

With their continued financial support, our VC partners recognize the need for a solution that gives today’s publishers ways to make money from their online content. Key players in the publishing industry continue to endorse our vision and confirm our leadership. As Greg Gretsch with Sigma Partners put it, “We believe Attributor has the best solution available to help publishers succeed in the digital world.”

The visibility that our technology provides helps publishers stop piracy, while the analytics enable more revenue opportunities. With this latest infusion of capital, we have an even greater ability to expand our infrastructure and will continue to develop the product in order to address the growing needs of book, newspaper and magazine publishers in a rapidly evolving online landscape.