Most Pirated Games 2011

Whilst it is easy to copy and share movies and music, something that goes towards the huge numbers of illegal downloads of such content each year, pirating games is often a lot more involved with cracks or keygens. Games are also platform specific, so will need to be cracked differently for the XBox, PlayStation, or PC – but this doesn’t appear to have slowed the downloads this year.

Modern games can cost millions of pounds to create just like a movie, and so recouping these costs is important to keeping the games industry flourishing and producing new titles. Many developers turn to copy protection in an attempt to avoid their games ending up on the internet, but such defences are rapidly broken almost without fail – meaning that the annoyance of those restrictions are only imposed on paying customers – whilst those that pirated the game have much more freedom – a major issue with all forms of DRM. Consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have digital rights protection built in (but these protections can and have been broken), the PC does not – meaning all the DRM must be in the game – much to the customer’s annoyance.

Whilst movies can be legally bought and streamed through Netflix, and music through Spotify, streaming games is a much more difficult proposition due to the bandwidth needed for high frame-rates – but such technology is appearing with OnLive and could do much to reduce piracy in the future. For the time being, gamers can also download games through services such as STEAM which locks the game to its service, and thus avoids piracy, but at the same time offers such quick and easy downloads of games that it has swayed many pirates to switch sides.

Anyway, thanks go to TorrentFreak for doing the leg work in putting together this list:

PC Game Downloads on BitTorrent in 2011

Wii Game Downloads on BitTorrent in 2011

Xbox 360 Game Downloads on BitTorrent in 2011