Call of Duty: Black Ops the Most Pirated Game of the Year 5
Torrentfreak reports that after calculating download frequency for pirated copies of popular video games, Call of Duty: Black Ops has won the dubious honor of being the most pirated game of 2010. The PC version of the game was torrented roughly 4,270,000 times, and the Xbox 360 version was downloaded an additional 930,000 times. (The most pirated Wii game was Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Dante's Inferno somehow managed to accrue the most downloads of Xbox 360 games.) Fortunately for Activision, the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players have racked up over 600,000,000 man-hours of play time since the game's launch in early November.
Pokemon (Score:2)
Possible reason (Score:3)
Hmm... so comments are finally allowed on this article? I wonder what happened there...
I can think of two possible reasons why Black Ops might have been the most pirated game. The first is boring and uncontroversial; it was a huge selling game. I'm not sure whether it was the biggest selling game of 2010, but it was certainly near the top of the table. So if you make the broad assumption that games which people are interested in are more likely to be both bought and pirated, there's no surprise that a huge selling game would also be heavily pirated.
However, I wonder if there isn't another factor at play. I bought the PC version of Black Ops and, as a gamer who pretty much only plays singleplayer these days, I can honestly say it was a waste of my money. Not quite as bad as Medal of Honor, whose four hour campaign manages the impressive feat of feeling both insultingly short and also padded and boring, but still over very quickly. Now, a lot of people like their multiplayer; but at the same time, I know I'm a long way from alone in not wanting to spend my leisure time being sworn at in German by 14 year old cheaters/glitchers (which seems to be what happens whenever I do give online play a chance these days in anything that doesn't require a subscription). I have no wish to condone piracy (whatever the faults in the industry's response, it's ultimately the pirates who are the ones screwing over legitimate gamers), but I can at least follow the logic of those who decided that the Call of Duty series (whose success, with the exception of the 4th installment, I have never understood) has a history of giving the singleplayer gamer a few short but visually impressive set-pieces and not much else - therefore why spend money on the latest. Sure, you might want to see those set-pieces, but given that they're over in less time than the average movie (and are mostly just variants on the same thing), it's hard to justify forking out the higher than usual price tag for them.
The real answer, of course, is just not to play the stupid game; hopefully, I'll have the sense to do this with the next installment.
Piracy = win? (Score:2)
the game has still made over $1 billion in sales, and its 20,000,000+ players [...] since the game's launch in early November.
So... "Massively pirated game becomes wildly popular and makes shitloads of money!"
Okay, correlation is not causation, but what was all the panic over?
Sad (Score:1)