Although tens of thousands of people downloaded a copy, the real boom came when the full version was released in March, resulting in nearly 4 million downloads by the end of the year.

This ‘success’ landed Crysis 2 the title of most pirated game of 2011 on the PC platform, beating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 with 3,650,000 and 3,510,000 downloads respectively. Interestingly enough, the interest among pirates in the Xbox 360 version of Crysis 2 was relatively low and the game didn’t make it into the top 5 there.

On the Xbox 360 the title of most pirated game goes to Gears of War 3. This game was released in September and amassed a total of 890,000 downloads. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 also came in second and third on the Xbox 360.

On the Wii platform ‘Mario’ titles traditionally come out on top, and this year is no exception. Super Mario Galaxy 2, released in 2010, becomes the most pirated Wii game for the second year in a row. With 1,180,000 downloads it comes just in front of Mario Sports Mix, which was pirated 1,090,000 times since February.

As can be seen from the three lists below, PC games are by far the most downloaded titles, with on average more than three times the number of downloads compared to Xbox 360 and Wii releases. Overall, the number of downloads of the top titles in each category is slightly lower than last year. The platforms that are not mentioned, such as the PS3, get considerably less downloads and are excluded for that reason.

The data for these estimated download numbers is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers.

Source: The Most Pirated Games of 2011

The first demos of the game were well received by the gaming community and as a result many PC gamers asked Ubisoft to release a PC version as well. This is not going to happen anytime soon though.

PC gamers shouldn’t “bitch” about it, ‘I Am Alive’ creative director Stanislas Mettra said in a recent interview. In his commentary Mettra insinuates that many of the people who are asking for a PC release are in fact going to end up pirating the game.

“We’ve heard loud and clear that PC gamers are bitching about there being no version for them,” Mettra told incgamers.

“But are these people just making noise just because there’s no version or because it’s a game they actually want to play? Would they buy it if we made it?”

The creative director argues that it might not be worth the effort porting the game to PC because of widespread piracy.

“It’s hard because there’s so much piracy and so few people are paying for PC games that we have to precisely weigh it up against the cost of making it. Perhaps it will only take 12 guys three months to port the game to PC, it’s not a massive cost but it’s still a cost. If only 50,000 people buy the game then it’s not worth it,” he said.

Indeed, it’s undeniable that game piracy is an issue for developers, but the question has to be asked to what extent piracy has been a factor in the non-release of a PC version.

Talking to Digital Spy Mettra reveals that not all the blame can be put on pirates.

“This is basically the second version, especially designed for XBLA and PSN in mind, knowing that we had to design something really unique, really different type of game experience, but we knew we had to push some levels that aren’t compatible with mass market gaming experiences,” Mettra said.

In other words, for this version a PC port wasn’t ever the plan, and it’s doubtful that pirates are solely to blame for that. It is of course good to use as an excuse, especially for a game that was originally announced in 2006, has suffered several setbacks since (including development by two different studios) and one that underwent a “total re-engineering” only last year.

The piracy blame-game is an interesting choice too, particularly coming from Ubisoft. The company was previously exposed using pirated music and cracks to support their games.

Luckily, not all people in the gaming industry blame piracy for all their troubles and misfortunes. Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell, whose Portal 2 sold more copies on PC than on any other format, has a refreshing take on how to approach the issue of piracy. According to him, game publishers should compete with it.

“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” he said recently. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”

For now, however, Ubisoft is taking the “no service” approach to ‘I Am Alive’ and actually killing PC piracy dead in its tracks, but sadly in the most cynical way possible.

Instant update: There goes Ghost Recon: Future Soldier too

Source: Ubisoft Blames Piracy for Non-Release of PC Game

It’s not all bad though, a recent paper published by Copenhagen Business School researcher Anders Drachen and his colleagues is a good example. The researchers looked into the magnitude of game piracy on BitTorrent and they monitored the downloads (peers connected to the swarms) of 173 new game titles that were released late 2010, early 2011.

During this period the researchers found that 127 of the 173 games were available on BitTorrent, and across the three months monitoring period these games were downloaded by 12.7 million unique peers in total.

As can be seen from the table below, the most downloaded games are all major commercial titles. However, the researchers note that there are a few exceptions, such as Bejeweled 3 which was downloaded by more than 250,000 people.

Combined, the 10 most downloaded games are good for over 5.3 million downloads, which equals 42% of the downloads recorded for all 127 games.

Besides game budgets, which appears to be linked to the number of downloads on BitTorrent, the researchers found that game reviews are directly correlated with the interest of pirates. That is, higher reviews generally speaking result in more downloads.

Although it sounds intuitive that review scores are correlated to interest in games (and other entertainment), this is certainly not always the case. To find out whether the number of game downloads on BitTorrent could be predicted by the average review score on Metacritic, the researchers correlated the two.

“The result indicates a statistically significant positive relationship between the number of unique peers and aggregated review scores. Put differently, Metacritic Scores explain 10% of the variance in the unique peers per game on BitTorrent,” the researchers write.

The researchers further note that this correlation may be even higher for older games which don’t have as many download spikes. The current research only looked at new releases.

TorrentFreak spoke to Anders Drachen who told us that one of the main motivations for this research was curiosity about the ‘true’ scope of game piracy on BitTorrent.

“There are a lot of numbers being pushed in the piracy debate but a lot of them are being critiqued from different sources, and not a lot of them are based on open methodologies – we were wondering what was actually happening,” he said.

The researchers will continue to look into other factors that influence game piracy and will publish this data in future articles.

Overall the current paper gives a seemingly robust overview of the state of game piracy on BitTorrent. Although the results may not be all that surprising, it’s certainly refreshing to see a decent report on BitTorrent statistics every now and then.

Source: Game Piracy Linked To Critic’s Review Scores

The developers have said all along that they had no intention of spending that money on advanced DRM and would rather use it to improve the game. Piracy is inevitable, they believe, and it’s pointless trying to fight it. But sometimes a line has to be drawn, even by the most pirate-tolerant devs.

After a build of Project Zomboid was leaked to 4chan by someone from the game’s tester group, it seems that this month a modified version started doing the rounds on torrent sites. The version included an additional ‘Update’ button which downloaded the latest build, not from BitTorrent, but from the developer’s servers.

“We’ve always turned a blind eye to pirate copies, even on occasion recommending people who had problems with the legit version try a pirate version until the issues are resolved. We realise the potential viral benefits of pirate copies, and while obviously we’d prefer people to purchase our issue is not with those,” the developers say.

“However, these ‘auto updating’ versions of the game could screw us completely. We have a cloud based distribution model, where the files are copied all over the world and are served to players on request, which means we are charged money for people downloading the game,” they continue.

So, to mitigate the threat of excessive bandwidth consumption and rising costs, over the weekend the game was switched off for a day. A dramatic move maybe, but according to the developers it was one they were forced into but it could actually have been avoided – if only pirates had used BitTorrent instead.

“Whether piracy actually amounts to lost sales we’re not going to get into,” say the devs.

“The possibility that it raises awareness and promotes the game cannot be ignored, but the difference is offline versions on torrents, which we’ve been largely unconcerned about, do not cost us real money, only potential money, and even then we can’t really guess at what the net effect is.

“Likewise people who download the game through our website only download it when there is a new version, so once every week or so. These new pirate copies have an ‘update now’ button which will download the game every time it’s clicked, potentially every time the game is run by everyone using it.”

After Indie Stone took the game offline, they responded by releasing a free public tech demo, distributed using BitTorrent of course.

Despite the problems, the devs have asked fans of the game not to be “down” on piracy, and have highlighted reasons why people might have gone down that route, such as having no access to PayPal.

“We have no ill feeling toward those pirating the game or those distributing the pirated copies of the game. We’re mainly glad that people feel it’s worthy of pirating,” they conclude.

The situation has been spotted by Notch of Minecraft fame who chimed in on Twitter a couple of hours ago to add his opinion.

“Everybody stop pirating this game, please,” he wrote. “It’s very cool.”

Source: Zombie Game Taken Offline Because Pirates Didn’t Use BitTorrent

Therefore, it would come as no surprise if the game repeated this success on BitTorrent. And indeed, Black Ops takes the honor of most pirated game on the PC this year, a title which went to Modern Warfare in 2009. Even though it has only been available for a few weeks, the game beat Battlefield: Bad Company 2 by a wide margin with 4,270,000 downloads in total.

Despite this ‘success’, Black Ops does not lead the Xbox 360 and Wii lists.

As expected, Mario and Donkey Kong are in high demand on the Wii with a 1st and 3rd place respectively. Wii Party is listed in second place with well over a million downloads, while Black Ops fell a few thousand downloads short to make it into the top 5.

On the Xbox 360 the title of most pirated game goes to Dante’s Inferno. This game was released in February and amassed a total of 1,280,000 downloads, beating Black Ops which ended up in 5th place with 930,000 downloads. The latter, however, did make the headlines several times due to an early leak.

Weeks before the official release of Black Ops, reports came in that the Xbox 360 version had already leaked to BitTorrent. Although not all “leaks” turned out to be legit, a copy of the game did eventually come out a week before it hit the stores. This, despite efforts from Treyarch’s community manager Josh Olin to stop it.

As can be seen from the three lists below, PC games are by far the most downloaded titles, with on average more than three times the number of downloads compared to Xbox 360 and Wii releases. Overall, the number of downloads of the top titles in each category grew a little compared to last year.

The data for these lists is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers. All the data is carefully checked and possible inaccuracies are systematically corrected.

Source: Call of Duty: Black Ops Most Pirated Game of 2010

Although the use of P2P technology has many benefits, it is not always implemented with the interests of consumers in mind. In fact, quite often gamers are simply abused as cheap bandwidth sources by million dollar corporations, often without their knowledge.

Akamai, one of the largest content delivery companies around, has a P2P-based product called the Netsession Interface which is rather abusive towards customers. The software is installed as a Windows service and it is always running in the background. Even worse, most users wont even know that it’s running because it doesn’t show up in task manager. Nothing of the above The fact that it’s running continuously is not mentioned in their EULA.

The NetSession Interface is used by game publishers including Kuma Games, Aeria Games and NetDevil. Customers who play the games have no user controls or visible indicators, while the software uses ‘their’ upload bandwidth to deliver content to other users for an indefinite period after the download is completed.

Besides Akamai there are various other P2P-based solutions that lack transparency, control or privacy, such as Pando’s Media Booster. Blizzard’s BitTorrent Downloader which is used for the distribution of StarCraft 2 and World of Warcraft is one of the more transparent solutions, but that one is not perfect yet either.

From the Akamai example above it is clear that something has to be done to ensure that consumers are not exploited as bandwidth slaves. P2P technology is great, and many consumers would love to donate some, but there has to be a clear set of rules to guarantee that those consumers have a choice.

To address this issue, game publisher company Solid State Networks has just released a best practices document (pdf) which emphasizes giving users transparency and control over their resources. According to the company it all boils down to the following directives:

1. Transparency – Make visible and readily accessible information about the presence and operational activity of the P2P technology.

2. Control – Provide the ability to manage, operate and remove the P2P technology in an intuitive and conspicuous manner to the user.

3. Privacy – Ensure the absolute privacy and security of personal information and user originated files.

We think this is a great initiative and sincerely hope that the gaming industry will adopt this, or a similar set of rules, in the interests of the consumer. A quick search on Google shows that most of it is much needed, as there are are many complaints (1,2,3,4,5) from gamers about the lack of transparency and control that most of the current P2P delivery systems offer.

Surprisingly enough, Solid State Networks already offers their very own P2P-based delivery solution for game publishers that adheres to all three directives. However, the other P2P-based solutions that already exist out there can be easily adopted to become ‘fair’ as well.

Below you’ll find an additional PSA, summarizing how and why game publishers should handle P2P-powered game distribution.

Source: Game Companies Should Play Fair With P2P

Only 10 days after the game’s launch date, already half a million people had downloaded the game. During the months after that, another million people obtained a copy of the game via BitTorrent. According to our estimates, Spore was downloaded 1.7 million times since early September, a record breaking figure for a game.

When we posted about the impressive download rate on Spore – inflated due to the DRM that was put into the game – EA doubted our statistics. EA’s Mariam Sughayer said that every BitTorrent download was not a successful copy, and that several downloads didn’t work, were buggy, or contained viruses. 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.

Below is the list of the 10 most downloaded (PC) games on BitTorrent in 2008, with an estimated download count for each. In second place we see The Sims 2, also from the hands of Spore creator Will Wright. Assassins Creed completes the top 3 with just over a million downloads.

Source: Top 10 Most Pirated Games of 2008

Today, BitTorrent Inc. has announced that it will use its DNA service to distribute clients and patches for Aeria and IAHGames, known for EA’s FIFA Online 2. BitTorrent DNA is used to stream and download content efficiently via BitTorrent, without interfering with VoIP calls and Internet browsing.

Eric Klinker, chief technology officer at BitTorrent Inc. said “BitTorrent is proud to be working with leaders in the massively multiplayer online gaming space such as Aeria and IAHGames. BitTorrent DNA thrives in this environment by giving online game distributors an ability to manage user-contributed bandwidth, boost delivery performance and enhance the end-user experience.”

“With BitTorrent’s advanced congestion control technology and game-play detection features, DNA ensures that gamers won’t have to suffer any delays or breaks in their game play while simultaneously downloading the latest software patch,” Klinker added.

Video streaming is another area where P2P content delivery might play a significant role in the future. NewTeeVee reports that YouTube might get on the P2P bandwagon, as the makers of PPLive are experimenting with a P2P accelerator for Flash streams. If it works, YouTube could save millions of dollars in bandwidth costs.

Finding an efficient way to use BitTorrent or P2P based video streams is one of the most difficult, but revolutionizing challenges for P2P developers. But we’re getting there, as early tests indicate that it is possible to stream video, even live feeds, with BitTorrent.

Source: BitTorrent to Speed up Game Distribution

It’s interesting how companies are starting to realise the potential of BitTorrent as a promotional platform for their content. Distributing demos of games is a great way to build up hype around an upcoming, or even slightly old (Disciples II, for example) title, and what better way to do it than share it over BitTorrent?

From BitTorrent.com:

Disciples II: Dark Prophecy returns gamers to the magical realm of the Sacred Lands where four races – the Empire, the Mountain Clans, the Legions of the Damned and the Undead Hordes – continue the battle for the destiny of their Gods. A decade after the First Great War, the final prophecy continues to unfold. Deep within the crevices of the Sacred Lands, the Chosen One has emerged, fated to bring salvation to some and destruction to others. Braced with renewed faith and newfound conviction, each race must once again take up the sword for the sake of their people and the glory of their God.

As a kid, I used to be a total strategy game buff. I not only played all the RTSes like Command & Conquer and Age of Empires, but also many turn-based ones like Age of Wonders and Disciples. Even though I only had the demo of Disciples I: Sacred Lands, me and this friend were crazy about it and spent more hours on it than is healthy. So when I finally got my hands on Disciples II, I played it constantly for days, until I finished the game.

Disciples II: Dark Prophecy is truly one of my favourite games, and I highly recommend it to anyone remotely interested in strategy games. The only drawback is that it’s Windows-only. Check out some screenshots below.

Source: Disciples II: Dark Prophecy on BitTorrent.com

We’re used to copyright infringement letters form the RIAA and MPAA because it’s their core business, but letters from game developers are quite exceptional.

A Destructoid reader reported that he was accused of downloading a copy of NHL 07 and wrote:

“I’m not sure if this has been shown anywhere else, I certainly wasn’t aware of it. I had thought it was just giant organizations like RIAA and MPAA that were watching BitTorrent. But if it was going to be any game company, it was going to be EA. I got a letter from my ISP this morning (Comcast) informing me that EA had sent them the IP address of my network as downloading a torrent of NHL 07. I haven’t heard of them suing anyone yet, but they’re keeping an eye on it apparently.”

It’s in the game…

Source: EA Games: Challenge BitTorrent Users!

He said:

“The version of Gangs Of London that you have brought our attention to here is a pre-production ‘preview’ version,” he revealed. “It is not the complete game and it has anomalies in the code since it hasn’t been through our QA process yet.”

This reaction makes you wonder.. Is this some new form of a advertising? Piracy or promotion? What’s wrong with the good old “trial/preview version”.

The full version is scheduled to appear by the end of 2006.

Source: Gangs of London Leaks on BitTorrent