EenVandaag, a Dutch current affairs TV program, recently conducted a survey on their youth's downloading habits. What the survey found was that a whopping 93% of the youngsters download content in a manner that most laws would consider illegal, citing the use of BitTorrent among other popular download programs.

The ESA board must have been reduced to tears of joy yesterday - to them, I'm sure, they now believe there is a god. This week, the Swedish court has found the four operators of torrent site The Pirate Bay guilty as charged for copyright infringement and illegal activities (digitally distributing illegal copies of games and media content). Of course, ESA is more than happy with this victory against the ongoing war on piracy - so happy, in fact, that they had to come up with an official press release about it!

Someone couldn't hold on to their jammies long enough. 2K Games' BioShock (also coming to Xbox 360) demo for the PC hit BitTorrent long before the official channels could snip the red ribbon. Although this isn't a real surprise to the people who call the Internet their second home, it has opened opportunities for other avid uploaders and free download sites, granting downloaders a good collection of sources to select.

 

The BioShock PC demo weighs in at 1.84 GB of data and is currently seeded by 662 (or so) BitTorrent users. Compared to 6,700 downloaders, however, that's a really small number of sources to leech from. Everyone's trying to jump the gun, hoping to get the demo earlier before the really heavy queueing begins when the demo officially releases.

The early lead is soon going to get cut short, however. Time continues to tick down to the prime hour while those packets trickle in through your LAN port, so players who can't seem to squeeze their way through the seeds might have to settle for the usual limited bandwidth downloads. It'll probably be out the same time Midway's Stranglehold PC demo is out, too.

Feedback from gamers of souped up rigs place the BioShock demo as one hot item to grab, and if you've got a capable system, you might want to give it a try. You'll just have to look for that Torrent site providing the leaked BioShock demo though. Happy hunting!

Joel Durnham of extremetech.com informs that in a panel discussion at the Game Developer's Conference 2007, the idea of PC game viability was discussed by a quintet of industry folks that include: Xbox Live Arcade's David Edery, Electronic Arts' Richard Hilleman, Firaxis' Soren Johnson, Epic Games' Michael Capps, and Obsidian Entertainment's Chris Avallone.

As well as the usual PC gaming competing with console gaming debate that's been ongoing for years now, the effect of piracy on the PC gaming market was discussed. Capps in particular notes that PC Gaming is really falling apart and even though it "killed" them to make Unreal Tournament 3 cross-platform, Epic had to do it.

The reason for going multiplatform, of course, is piracy. Big AAA titles usually get stolen and, as Capps says, the market that would buy a US$ 600 video card also knows how BitTorrent works.

The future of gaming on the PC so far looks like it is set to be dominated by "casual" games and MMOs. Of course there's nothing casual about most casual games since the average Chuzzle/Zuma addict plays for 24 hours a week. MMOs are notable since they can't be pirated - unless of course you steal the source code and run your own illegal server. However, those things are easier to monitor than burned CDs.

They also covered the fact that user-generated game content could be big for the PC since console manufacturers try to wield more control over their products.

They end the discussion by noting that even though things look grim, AAA titles might never die on the PC, and that trends are ultimately hard to predict.

Oh well, so much for the good old days.