Twitch has revealed November's free games and content for Twitch Prime, a name given to additional benefits for Amazon Prime subscribers. This month's loot includes exclusive in-game content for Watch Dogs 2, in addition to digital copies of This War of Mine: Anniversary Edition and Punch Club.

Anyone who's subscribed to Amazon Prime during the month of November can get themselves an in-game Twitch hoodie for Ubisoft's open-world action game. It also comes with an XP boost and two skin packs. The first is pixel art-themed, while the other is titled, "Guts, Grit, and Liberty." Unfortunately, no images of the skins were released.

This of War Mine's Anniversary Edition brings three new areas, which introduce new characters and alternate endings to the stealth-survival game. PC Gamer's review of the base game scored it an 80/100. You can also currently pick This War of Mine up on Steam for $5.

Punch Club, on the other hand, doesn't include any additional content, but it did receive a free expansion, The Dark Fist, earlier this year.

The Watch Dogs 2 content is available from November 7 to December 12, but a schedule for the two games has not been released. When they become available, the games will be downloadable through the Twitch Launcher.

Twitch Prime also offers ad-free viewing, in addition to free monthly games and content. As mentioned earlier, they're additional benefits to an Amazon Prime subscription, so you only need to pay one monthly or yearly fee to access both services.

Back near the beginning of the year, Punch Club publisher tinyBuild made an interesting proposition: It would release the game early if the audience of Twitch viewers could come together to beat it. It happened much more quickly than anyone expected and it also turned a very bright spotlight on the game, helping it to significant levels of success. In fact, Twitch Data Scientist Danny Hernandez said in a recent blog post that based on his calculations, 25 percent of Punch Club's sales are directly attributable to its presence on Twitch.

That might seem obvious people see game, people like game, people buy game but Fernandez said he's only recently acquired the data to really explore the influence that Twitch has. And it's not just sales that Twitch boosts, but also player retention, through provided complementary activities, like viewing, chatting, and broadcasting. The more invested someone is in your game, the more likely they are to buy cosmetics, DLC, and sequels, Hernandez wrote. I can t put a monetary value on it, but I m sure you know what retention lifts like this are worth to you.

But what I think is really interesting is that the greatest direct influence on consumers comes not from the most super-popular streamers, but mid-tier influencers with audiences between 33 and 3333 concurrent viewers, who account for nearly half of all Twitch-driven sales.

Smaller channels are more like your friend s couch and less like a stadium. Mid tier broadcasters convert views into purchases 13 times more effectively than top tier broadcasters, and small broadcasters convert views into purchases 1000 times more effectively than top tier broadcasters, Hernandez wrote. This is strong evidence that Twitch does more than just remind potential buyers that your game exists.

The strength of the big players, he explained, is their massive reach. He cited Hurtworld as an example, estimating that ten percent of its sales are attributable to Twitch; of that figure, 52 percent were driven by channels with 33 to 3333 average concurrent viewers, while those with more than 3333 accounted for less than ten percent. But those big channels have a very powerful influence over the smaller ones, resulting in a sort of trickle-down effect: After Lirik, one of Twitch's most prominent broadcasters, played [Hurtworld] many mid-sized broadcasters followed suit, Hernandez wrote.

There's obviously a self-serving element to all this Hernandez is a Twitch guy, so naturally he's going to promote it and I'm not sure his final conclusion that game-makers can improve sales by building their communities is really all that terribly insightful. There's also a built-in element of inaccuracy, as he acknowledged in his footnotes; for one thing, the sales estimates are based on Steamspy's numbers, which as we noted in our post-game coverage of the 2016 Steam Summer Sale are themselves extrapolations of data from a limited sampling. And measuring influence as a hard-and-fast number is fraught at best. Even so, Hernandez makes a convincing case.

Punch Club viewers were 4.6 more likely to buy the game within 24 hours than non viewers. The converse, purchasers were much more likely to watch within 24 hours is not true. That s evidence we don t have correlation with causality flowing in the opposite direction, he wrote. The strongest alternate hypothesis to viewing influencing purchase intent is that users seek out games they are already very likely to buy. The strongest evidence that Twitch is influencing purchase intent, is the variance different broadcasters have in selling games. Mid tier broadcasters convert views into purchases 13 times more effectively than top tier broadcasters, and small broadcasters convert views into purchases 1000 times more effectively than top tier broadcasters. This is strong evidence that Twitch is more than a pitstop on the way to checkout.

Thanks, VentureBeat.

G2A is an online marketplace for videogame keys that lets its users make a buck here and there by selling surplus game keys. As publisher tinyBuild explained it in a recent blog post, it's like eBay for game keys : You buy, for example, a Humble Bundle that includes games you already own, so you unload the keys you don't need through G2A for less than the regular price, and everybody is happy: You get a few bucks, someone else gets a cheap game, and G2A earns a small cut from its payment provider. The problem is that the system encourages bad behavior, as people can use hot credit cards to purchase large numbers of bundles or keys from various sellers, then offload them on G2A.

It's basically a quick-and-dirty form of money laundering, and while G2A does have a system for addressing fraudulent transactions, it comes with an awful lot of strings attached, as tinyBuild learned when CEO Alex Nichiporchik began an investigation into how much of an impact G2A really has. He eventually received information indicating that the site had sold more than 26,000 keys for Punch Club, Party Harder, and SpeedRunners, collectively worth $450,000 at retail, for considerably less than half that amount. He then began chasing down the origins of those keys, and what sort of compensation the publisher could expect for them.

G2A said in response to his inquiries that the keys came from tinyBuild's resale partners, and because of that, no compensation will be given. Furthermore, investigating the origin of the keys requires TinyBuild to want to work with G2A, to supply a list of suspected stolen keys, and to revoke those that are proven to be. But, it warned, I think you will be surprised in that it is not fraud, but your resale partners doing what they do best, selling keys. They just happen to be selling them on G2A.

In short, G2A claims that our distribution partners are scamming us and simply selling keys on G2A. They won t help us unless we are willing to work with them. We are not going to get compensated, and they expect us to undercut our own retail partners (and Steam!) to compete with the unauthorized resellers, Nichiporchik wrote in the post. There s no real way to know which keys leaked or not, and deactivating full batches of game keys would make a ton of fans angry, be it keys bought from official sellers or not.

In an email, Nichiporchik told us that this sort of thing could be prevented if publishers had control over which keys could and could not be sold on marketplaces like G2A. "However we can't do anything about that even if we were to sell keys there ourselves, we'd have to undercut official retailers (like Steam) in order to be competitive, he explained. The only other option is to completely stop doing bundles and giveaways, and refuse to work with any distributor but Steam.

That would hurt our business too much. We love doing bundles and giveaways and honestly don't care about the potentially lost revenue there as long as fans are happy. That's the most important thing to me, he said. Instead, we are in a situation where giveaways no longer work, and consumers gravitate towards cheaper marketplaces like G2A without understanding how it may damage us as a game developer/publisher.

That's really the killer. G2A may be, as he wrote in the blog post, facilitating a fraud-fueled economy where key resellers are being hit with tons of stolen credit card transactions, but the bottom line is that it also offers cheap games. And as unfair to developers and publishers as it may be, you can't really fault people for wanting to pay less than full pop for their games.

I've reached out to G2A for comment and will update if and when I receive a reply.

Punch Club was quite a success for tinyBuild and Lazy Bear Games: it's sold over 300,000 copies, which is a great result for a new Steam game in 2015. Still, it could have sold a bunch more. In fact, according to stats collected by Alex Nichiporchik of tinyBuild, at least 1.6 million people have pirated the game. That's roughly five times more than it has sold legitimately thus far.

According to Nichiporchik, Punch Club appeared on torrent websites within hours of its launch last year. The biggest concentration of pirates was in Brazil, with 11,627 copies downloaded illegally on the day tinyBuild implemented Portuguese language localisation. Russia and China followed in second and third place. It's worth noting that games are notoriously expensive in Brazil, due to high taxes.

"While it s difficult to fight piracy — and most DRM-enforced ways are horrible for the paying customers — it s hard to deny it has an impact," Nichiporchik wrote. "Looking back I believe what we should ve done is enabled cross-platform saves on launch. This way people who pirate the PC version may have converted better into buyers on mobile or vice-versa."

It's worth checking out the full blogpost for some deeper insights into the stats (and some pretty pie charts, too). The highest number of paid downloads happened in Germany, with the United States and France following. Meanwhile, the game was pirated 1,137,000 times on PC, Mac and Linux, and 514,000 times on mobile.