(Pictured above: your average PC gaming pirate.)
Torrentfreak has released its statistics for the most pirated games on the BitTorrent network for 2008, and it's quite an interesting list.
1Spore(1,700,000)(Sept. 2008)2The Sims 2(1,150,000)(Sept. 2004)3Assassins Creed(1,070,000)(Nov. 2007)4Crysis(940,000)(Nov. 2007)5Command & Conquer 3(860,000)(Mar. 2007)6Call of Duty 4(830,000)(Nov. 2007)7GTA San Andreas(740,000)(Jun. 2005)8Fallout 3(645,000)(Oct. 2008)9Far Cry 2(585,000)(Oct. 2008)10Pro Evolution Soccer 2009(470,000)(Oct. 2008)Note that all of these titles, CoD 4, PES and San Andreas aside (to my knowledge), have some hefty Digital Rights Management (DRM) on them, meaning anything beyond serial keys and/or disk checks.
Assassins Creed is notable for being a poor Ubisoft port (in line with the company's reputation, as it seems) and having a bug inserted into the pre-release version of the game to prevent piracy, Crysis is well..Crysis, and Fallout 3 was supposed to have nothing beyond a disk check but didn't (and it was pirated early on the Xbox 360). Far Cry 2 (from Ubisoft) seemed to have less unreasonable DRM, and the same for C&C 3 (from EA).
Funnily, EA's -- publisher of Spore, The Sims, Crysis and C&C 3 -- support page, in answering why they've chosen SecuROM, states: "This solution serves to protect our software from piracy." Well clearly the answer is more protection. More more more; gamers can't get enough SecuROM to fill their little bellies.
Electronic Arts' Mariam Sughayer said recently, downplaying the Spore statistics, “Stepping aside from the whole issue of DRM, people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale. We’ve talked to people that made several unsuccessful attempts to download the game and ended up with incomplete, slow, buggy or unusable code. In one case, a file identified as Spore contained a virus. To say that every download represents a successful copy of the game –- or that there’s been more than 500K copies downloaded — that’s just not true.”
This sounds nearly identical to what Rockstar pitched the other day, likely leaving at least some readers with the impression torrent sites are rife with viruses and the like ("warez are a great place to pick up a Trojan or key logger, using a cracked copy of GTA IV PC will result in varying changes to the game experience. These can range from comical to game-progress-halting changes"). TF reports, in two related articles:
Of course, it should be pointed out that when TorrentFreak computed the download figures previously, the basis was only a few torrents, all known to be working and virus free, and similarly with figure earlier. TorrentFreak is not new at this, and we know how to tell the difference between an incomplete, a virused, buggy, or even encrypted with a password, and one that would work if downloaded. To attempt to spin it otherwise is rude and condescending, and shows how hard EA is attempting to salvage the reputation of itself, and Spore.
We wont deny that on badly moderated torrent sites, malicious torrents probably can be found. However, this constitutes less than 1% of the available torrents, and they are not added to our statistics.
I respect the conflict here, but EA and Rockstar using propaganda like that lessens mine for the developers and publishers in question. If we're going to reach an end or at least a compromise on this issue -- we're going to have to be honest with each other. It's demeaning too, really: to me it says they think gamers are stupid and naive. Obviously not everyone is well-versed in these matters, but I'd bet the majority of people reading articles like these certainly are not naive or stupid.
