bittorrent posts

Even though PC games have gotten a new surge in popularity lately, piracy of PC game software remains a huge concern. This week the web site Torrentfreak.com reports that the single most pirated PC game of the past year is developer Treyarch's first person shooter Call of Duty Black Ops. The site claims that even though the game was released in November, the site claims that it was downloade 4,270,000 times. The report claims the data comes "from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers."

In second place was Battlefield Bad Company 2 which the report claims was downloaded 3,960,000 times in 2010. Mafia 2, Mass Effect 2 and StarCraft II make up the rest of the top five.

StarCraft II was designed to use Blizzard's Battle.net service to be authenticated and played but that hasn't stopped the sci-fi RTS sequel from being found on BitTorrent download sites. The web site TorrentFreak.com claims that one digital copy of the game has been downloaded 2.3 million times in just the last three months. By comparison Blizzard sold over 3 million legit copies of the game during its first month of sale.

While the file itself may be downloaded it's currently unknown how many of these files are actually playable due to the game's requirement that it be signed on to Battle.net to play online. Blizzard recently banned several thousands StarCraft II players for multiplayer cheats and hacks; it's also possible that other gamers could also be banned for playing illegal copies.

PC game piracy is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, issue in the game industry. Fighting illegal piracy of such games overseas has been extremely difficult. The game trade group the Entertainment Software Association recently took part in a new study of piracy of games and other media outside the US by the International Intellectual Property Alliance.

The annual study of piracy revealed that in December 2008 the ESA did research into how many illegal copies of 13 unnamed games were distributed via the BitTorrent and EDonkey file sharing networks. The ESA claims that 6,429,279 copies of those 13 games were downloaded via those two networks for that month. Just the two most popular games accounted for 4,787,441 copies of the total amount. Users in Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Poland were the countries that accounted for the most downloads.