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Crysis 2 is most pirated game of 2011
by Andrew Yoon, Jan 03, 2012 10:30am PSTEA has finished 2011 dethroning Activision's Call of Duty series. Just... not in the way it wanted to. Crysis 2 has won the "honor" of being the most pirated game of 2011.
The PC version of the game was torrented about 3.92 million times, besting Modern Warfare 3's 3.65 million downloads. EA and its Partners games round out the rest of the top 5 with games like Battlefield 3, FIFA 12, and Portal 2.
Piracy plagued the original Crysis, and it appears the sequel has suffered the same fate. Developer Crytek claimed that for every purchased copy of Crysis, there were 20 copies downloaded. The rampant piracy on the platform led the developer to pursue a multi-platform approach with Crysis 2, with claims that consoles provide better anti-piracy measures.
Of course, consoles aren't exactly secure platforms either. Gears of War 3 was the most illegally downloaded Xbox 360 game of 2011, and it was torrented about 890K times. Surprisingly, Kinect Sports: Season Two also ranked highly on the list with 690K downloads--proving that piracy can be a family-friendly affair as well.
While Wii software sales have dropped quite significantly, the pirate community continues to thrive. Super Mario Galaxy 2, a game which released in 2010, continued to be the top-downloaded game in 2011, with 1.28 million downloads last year. Notably, Xenoblade Chronicles was downloaded 950K times since its European release in August. With such staggering piracy figures, will sales be impacted when the game releases in the US later this year? And if so, how will that affect the ongoing efforts of "Operation Rainfall"--a grassroots organization that wants Nintendo of America to release other hardcore JRPGs on the Wii in 2012?
These staggering figures undoubtedly pushed EA and Nintendo (and others) to initially support SOPA, a bill that aims to curb piracy via questionable methods. Both these companies have since rescinded support for the controversial bill.
For the complete list of most-pirated games this year, visit TorrentFreak.
Comments
EA has finished 2011 dethroning Activision's Call of Duty series. Just... not in the way it wanted to. Crysis 2 has won the "honor" of being the most pirated game of 2011.
EA has finished 2011 dethroning Activision's Call of Duty series. Just... not in the way it wanted to. Crysis 2 has won the "honor" of being the most pirated game of 2011. : Shacknews
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I used to pirate all my PC games, and it was always down to convenience and lack of money, and I'm sure it's much the same for lots of people. And there's one point noone seems to latch onto, and a big point of my piracy: Your PC specs.
I pirated Oblivion years ago. I've purchased 3 copies of Morrowind (Disc (lost), disc again and Steam) and 2 copies of the Bloodmoon/Tribunal pack (disc and Steam), but I didn't have a clue whether my PC would even run Oblivion, I'd have to wait for my game to come in the mail, and moreover, it'd been out for so long by the time I had a PC worthy of running it that Bethesda would never see any income from me purchasing that game. It wasn't being printed anymore. It was more convenient for me to pirate it, and it didn't make a difference to Bethesda if I did.
A year and a half later I bought it on a Steam sale, and I preordered Skyrim in advance.
Piracy can be for a variety of reasons, and you cannot examine the number of pirated copies of a product for indication of revenue lost, because you just don't have any idea how many of those would have been sales, and how many will become sales later on.
The point here, though, is that Skyrim sold way more than Crysis 2, and it's a single player game, but it was pirated less. That can't be portrayed as some coincidence. People bought Skyrim because they had confidence that it was going to be high quality gameplay and worth every pound. Crysis 2 got pirated more than Skyrim because Steam got removed as a platform, because they didn't know what to expect from a game that was made on consoles, because other people told them it wasn't worth it and because they didn't know if it would be a quality title.
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