Not to stoke the flame of publishers blaming piracy for everything under the sun, but data compiled by TorrentFreak has revealed some interesting stats about this year’s most illegally downloaded games. It’s not really a surprise that Call of Duty: Black Ops is this year’s most pirated game, as it also had the biggest entertainment launch of all time. The game was a massive success, but with over 5.2 million downloads across PC and Xbox 360, there’s certainly an argument to be made about the sad state of piracy.
While TorrentFreak didn’t include numbers for PS3 or handhelds, there’s still plenty of other big numbers in this list. While PC downloads focused on the big hits, with Black Ops, Bad Company 2, Mafia 2, Mass Effect 2, and Starcraft II making up the top 5, piracy on the 360 targeted some of the year’s less successful titles. Dante’s Inferno and Alan Wake took top spots on the list, with 1.28 and 1.14 million downloads respectively. It’s unclear how much of an impact this would have had on actual sales, but that has to be a scary number for publishers working on new IPs.
Now what I’d really be fascinated to see are the numbers for PSP piracy.
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