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” because things are quickly about to get not okay.
The Sims 2, between its top three selling versions and expansions, sold about 1.2 million copies in 2007, about on par with the number of people that stole it in 2008.
The PC version of Assassin’s Creed was a known piracy debacle. It was pirated before the game hit shelves, but the pirated version was built by Ubisoft to crash. It was excessively downloaded anyway, of course, and was blasted in forums for being unreliable; sales were mutilated, to the tune of just 40,000 moved. That’s a 2675% piracy rate, people. On conservative numbers.
Crysis sold 1.5 million copies, though odds are good that a fair percentage of that moved in 2007, again comparing unfavorably to the piracy rate. Far Cry 2 has sold a million copies as well, but it’s a certainty that the vast majority of those sold on console—again unfavorable.
It would be utterly foolish to imagine that this vast amount of piracy on PC is some kind of new event. It’s probably always been this bad. But there have never been independently sourced piracy estimates that could be compared to available sales data. Now there are, and doing the comparison is chilling.
Here are the numbers:
1. Spore - 1,700,000
2. The Sims 2 - 1,150,000
3. Assassins Creed - 1,070,000
4. Crysis - 940,000
5. Command & Conquer 3 - 860,000
6. Call of Duty 4 - 830,000
7. GTA San Andreas - 740,000
8. Fallout 3 - 645,000
9. Far Cry 2 - 585,000
10. Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 - 470,000
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