Gather ’round, merry men, for now is the time when we look back at the year’s most pirated video games. Specifically, we’re looking at the most pirated PC games, according to data compiled by TorrentFreak.
And they are:
10. Pro Evolution Soccer 2009
9. Far Cry 2
8. Fallout 3
7. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
6. Call of Duty 4
5. Command and Conquer 3
4. Crysis
3. Assassin’s Creed
2. The Sims 2
1. Spore
Keep in mind that this list only includes BitTorrent downloads, and doesn’t take into account the old guard who still get all their stuff from Usenet. That said, TorrentFreak did use some fancy computational methods, even including data from private, invite-only sites, to figure out the ranking. So bravo to those guys.
That Spore is the most downloaded game of the year isn’t exactly surprising. For one, the game was hyped to pieces, so there was always gonna be a throng of people downloading it. Then you take into account the whole DRM debacle—people downloading the game using BitTorrent despite the fact that they already bought and paid for it, people “protest downloading” merely to stick it to the man (EA), etc.—and you can totally see the game being the most pirated of the year.
My guess for most pirated console game is Grand Theft Auto IV. Not that I have any proof, mind you, but can you name a bigger console game this year?
no NFS, FIFA, just shows how crappy EA franchise has became. LOL (till the state no one wants to pirate it).
this is just another attack on pc gaming there is pircay on consoles too. where those numbers?
you can’t track pircay it just can’t be done.
Flash games is for free, so http://pcgamesx.com/ enjoy :)
I just had to download a ‘pirate’ copy of GTA: San Andreas because although I could still install GTA, GTA 2, GTA 3 and GTA Vice City, my DVD drive could not read the GTA SA disk! I understand that to save a little money, Rockstar used a dual layer DVD, which obviously doesn’t have as long a use life as two ordinary DVD’s! I might point out that all my games were kept together in the same place,and the other GTA’s (much older) read from the disk and installed fine! I wonder if, in 2-3 years, this is going to become a bigger issue as the ’suits’ now in publishers use cheaper disks with shorter life-spans, in order to make a couple more cents!
In any event, I was going to be damned if I was going to buy another copy of the game just because the DVD stopped working after only 4 years, so I downloaded a ‘backup’ so I could play a game I own!!
So don’t look at this list and just think piracy means people wanting a game for nothing. There are many reasons why legitimate gamers need to download a ‘copy’ of a game they own! Only the games media and publishers assume every download is a lost sale!
Dude for biggest console game of the year, my vote would be on MGS4 as all GTA games are basically the same, but don’t get me wrong I love all the GTA games to death, and beat them all multiple times, but my opinion rests