Piracy in the game industry continues to be a huge problem with millions (if not billions) of dollars lost each year. In 2009, not only did Activision's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 set new records in entertainment sales with $550 million grossed in just 5 days, but the game apparently was also the most pirated title of last year, according to TorrentFreak.
There were 4.1 million pirated PC copies of the game downloaded on BitTorrent, and another 970,000 were downloaded for the Xbox 360 version. By comparison, the most pirated title of 2008 - EA's Spore - was downloaded 1.7 million times. Looking at TorrentFreak's list and comparing it to the top pirated games of 2008, the sobering trend is that piracy continues to rise; the numbers for the most pirated games more than doubled compared to 2008.
Piracy numbers for PS3, PSP and DS titles were not listed, but the Wii saw a fair amount of illegal downloading too, as New Super Mario Bros. Wii was illegally downloaded 1.15 million times, followed by Punch-Out! (950,000) and Wii Sports Resort (920,000).
5 Comments
January 4, 2010
So does that mean that piracy doesn't exist on the PS3 or that it's just more difficult to crack?
January 4, 2010
That's a great question. My guess would be that because Xbox 360 is similar enough to PC that it's far easier to crack than PS3. I might have to check with Sony on how "piracy proof" the PS3 is.
January 4, 2010
I know the PS3's exotic architecture has made modding the console more of a challenge, plus nearly every third-party game comes to the Xbox 360 as well, and that has basically a "Power PC" base which makes it much simpler to mod, so there's simply less attention paid to the PS3 from the modding community.
January 5, 2010
Oh, and it's clear that if you tick off PC gamers, they will pirate the hell out of your game.
February 4, 2010
As long as theres a market for pc building and high-end electronics like graphics cards i dont see why/how pc gaming can possibly be killed by piracy… I agree it is an issue. All it really is, is the general tech-savvy public(pirates) saying that they’ve had it with all the big software companies (like IW) monopolizin’ over the gaming community and jackin’ up the prices for their games/software in a bad economy… anyways thats my 2 cent$ on the topic…
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