Piracy in the video game industry: analysis of levels, habits and motivation of Spanish students at public universities

Abstract

Although the video game industry is one of the most emerging in Spain, it suffers losses due to piracy as other industries based on digital content do. In fact, despite being one of the least affected, it is estimated that more than 231 million are lost each year because of this illegal actions. This research aims to determine levels, habits and reasons for video game piracy among university students. In addition, it tries to understand what measures are considered for they effective to reduce this criminal behaviour. Therefore, it has been conducted a survey to analyse different variables related to sociodemographic characteristics of these students, their levels and patterns of consumption of video games and how and why they pirate. Thus, it has been possible to determine that university students in Spain, who are usually light players, are used to pirate video games for economic and practical reasons through torrents and other P2P links. Furthermore, social advertising and restrictions on the use of the Internet, which aim to become their aware of this problem, are irrelevant for them. In fact, they usually spend less than 50€ per year in this type of content, they frequently buy digital formats online at sites such as Steam or Origin. However, significant gender differences appear, especially related to piracy levels: while four out of five males consume pirated content, only two out of five of females do. Keywords: Masculinity, metrosexual, advertisement, Narcissus, myth, narcissism, consumer society.