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.