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It will come as no surprise to many to read that ‘Black Ops', the latest title in the Call Of Duty franchise is reportedly the most pirated game of 2010.
Torrentfreak, the popular bittorrent site have awarded COD: Black Ops the highest amount of illegal downloads in 2010. It shows that 4.27 million users downloaded an illegal copy of the game, dated to December 26th. Scarily enough, the game has only been out for a short while and that number will increase significantly over the next couple of months.
While this is a serious amount of cash for the developer not to be getting in the form of sales, the title did sell 5.6 million copies on the first day of sales and generated revenues over $1 billion within a few weeks of the launch, making it the most successful game launch in history.
Other leading titles didn't escape the warez scene, with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 having almost 4 million illegal downloads. Mafia 2 received 3.55 million downloads and Mass Effect 2 with 3.2 million.
This is billions of dollars of lost revenue for the companies involved, but there really is no way to stop this from happening. DRM and other methods rarely work as the cracking teams can break them. The Ubisoft system seems the hardest to break, it has been used in titles such as Assassins Creed 2, however it requires gamers to be online all the time. If your internet connection has a problem then the game you just bought won't work.
KitGuru says: Do you download games or are you one of those people who believe in paying for everything you get, including software?
4 million x £40. thats a lot of cash to vanish into nothing. Ubisofts system is a disaster by the way. I hate it.
I am one of the millions who downloaded it. Why? Well i dont game online, so im not paying £40 for a PC game to play 5 hours of single player. THey need to drop the prices to £20 for these and then more people would buy and less would warez it. Seriously, im not just saying that.
It wasn’t me! Seriously. On-line oriented games&FPS/TPS are complete no go for me. I wouldn’t pay 1£ for COD not to mention 40£. In truth there is not a single title from UBISoft which is even remotely interesting to me.
But I’m kind of sympathetic for people who did downloaded it. UBISoft treatment of paying customers is disgraceful (which Tim above is best example).
I don’t game online either, only single player ‘offline’ mode for me…. in the US, these games are typically over $50 which is ridiculous if you’re not an online gamer. Maybe the game companies should consider releasing “single player only” versions for $15-$20, and “single player and online” versions for the full price. I think this would make a HUGE difference in the pirating of software. If I could buy the new CoD games for $15 or $20, I’d have all of ’em!!!
It’s expensive IMHO. I think they should consider lowering the price.
This means that COD Black Ops is really that popular. Too bad many still opt for the pirated one. I wonder how are RPG games like WoW and the upcoming Diablo III will do.
illegal