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Black Ops Tops Most-Torrented Games List

by Adam Biessener on Jan 03, 2011 at 07:50 AM

2010's highest-profile release of the most popular genre among software pirates was the most torrented PC game of 2010. Hooray?

According to BitTorrent enthusiast blog TorrentFreak, Call of Duty: Black Ops edged out Battlefield: Bad Company 2 with 4.2 million tracked downloads from the public torrent trackers that TorrentFreak monitors to BFBC2's 3.9 million.

StarCraft II was reportedly torrented 2.3 million times as of November 15th, and closed out the year at 3.1 million tracked downloads.

Among console games, the highest reported total belongs to Super Mario Galaxy 2 and its 1.4 million tracked downloads. Dante's Inferno, which suffered from a high-profile pre-release leak, topped the Xbox 360 list with 1.2 million. TorrentFreak did not report on PlayStation 3 titles.

While the magnitude of these numbers is terrifying, it should be noted that not every tracked download is completed, much less played by an illegal downloader. Equating tracked torrent downloads to lost sales is an impossible task that certainly is nowhere near a 1:1 conversion.

That said, stop stealing games, ya morons! Seriously. Buy the games that you love. It's the only way that more of them get made. And that's all there is to it.