I’ve been looking at this list TorrentFreak created, the one of the top ten most pirated games of 2008 according to BitTorrent tracking. It is utterly fascinating, but not, as many people latched onto, because Spore is the number one most pirated game of the year. That’s an eye-rolling obvious thing to reveal, the same as if you were told The Dark Knight was the pirated movie of 2008 (Surprise! It is). So the most heavily marketed PC game of the year was the one the most people tried to get for free. So what?
No, what’s interesting is how gigantic some of these numbers are. I’m going to go ahead and say this list is almost certainly low-balling the number of people who pirated these games, as only taking into account a certain number of well-managed trackers, as TorrentFreak did, leaves out the private trackers and people who got lucky on bad trackers. And of course, there are the people who went to their local unmarked van for a clandestine exchange using unmarked bills, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s assume these numbers represent a conservative estimate.
It was predicted by people paid to predict such things that Spore would sell about 2 million copies in September, and while EA hasn’t released the actual numbers if that turns out to be true that would mean Spore is doing okay. In this case, we’ll define “okay” as “more copies are being sold than being stolen.” After the jump, things will no longer be okay.
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