Surprise! Modern Warfare 2 Most Stolen Game of 2009
Website TorrentFreak has made it an annual treat to declare an award for the most pirated game of the year. And this year, it is little to no surprise that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 takes the cake as Most Pirated Game of 2009.
Based on BitTorrent data, it’s estimated that Modern Warfare 2 was illegally downloaded roughly 5,070,000 times. With first day sales of 4.7 million units and estimated 6.7 million total sales to date across all consoles and the PC the comparison of legitimately licensed copies of the game in the marketplace in comparison to those illegally downloaded is quite an eye opener. Obviously a production companies ultimate goal is to see zero piracy, but if they had to see piracy they may hope for a 10:1 ratio. They are certainly not excited to see a 3:2 ratio of game sold to illegally downloaded.
When you consider that the games worldwide sales in the first five days were in the neighborhood of $550 million, and essentially the same number of games were illegally downloaded, the possibility of loosing close to half a billion dollars in sales becomes very real.
Now realistically some of those illegal downloaders would never have bought the game even if the illegal download wasn’t available. And some of the illegal downloaders may have purchased the game later, or received it for Christmas. But this would have been a fraction of the total illegal downloads. This is not to mention that what was thought to be a major problem on PC’s is becoming a growing concern on consoles as well.
When this much money is on the line, the problem may eventually simply be the death of PC gaming. If a production company knows that they will take losses, but the losses will be lower on consoles because of the higher difficulty of pirating software, the choice may simply be to only produce for the console and leave the PC behind. Time will tell.
The mythical Console is a safer bet does not exist. I am sorry, but even with Microsoft’s latest attempt to purge the XBox Live world of modders and pirates seems to only flared the tempers of those more honest and only created better pirates.
I don’t think the Game Development community will ever get it.
1. The more you clamp down on the game, the more you entice hackers to crack you warez.
2. The more you open up and involve the community, the more you can get out of the community.
Hackers are tools that can be used for good or for evil, vilify them and you create enemies. Ally with them, and you get a few tools.
Modern Warfare 2 was a huge fail as far as PC gaming is concerned.
Personally, considered the situation of Demigod and Stardock Games, having a 1 legit copy to 10 pirated copies would have been a win. For having more sales than pirated copies, consider it a win.
I will repeat though, the console market is not a safer route, but in this day and age, it is a more lucrative route. PC gamers aren’t what they used to be. People are tired of spending $600 dollars on a video card only to find out that they apparently need to spend $300 on a power supply.
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