Legal Niches

Pirates Love Modern Warfare 2

By John Keefer

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 raked in more than $550 million in its first week of sales, making it the most popular entertainment launch in history. That popularity has also shown up in the number of unauthorized downloads, topping the charts as the most pirated game of 2009.

According to numbers posted at TorrentFreak, as of November, the PC version of MW2 had been downloaded from BitTorrent more than 4.1 million times, with the Xbox 360 version being downloaded another 970,000 times. Those numbers far exceed Spore on the PC and Street Fighter IV on the 360, both coming in second.

According to the article:

The overall trend across all platforms is that, unlike last year, all of the games are 2009 releases. What makes Modern Warfare 2's chart-topping even more impressive is that this has been achieved after just two months of availability. We further see that the figures for the most downloaded titles have more than doubled compared to last year, equaling the growth in uTorrent users.

The top Wii game to be downloaded was New Super Mario Bros. with 1.15 million downloads.

(Thanks to DarkSaber for the tip, since we know he loves posts on MW2 and Activision)

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on December 30, 2009 (boomark / email).