Infinity Ward's
Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 ended up as the most pirated game via BitTorrent in 2009, according to media reports, with 4.1 million unauthorized downloads of the PC version alone.
A
report from BitTorrent-related site TorrentFreak compiled its own estimates from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers.
Due to its distributed nature, with peers seeding data to each other, BitTorrent sites have proved relatively difficult to stamp out as a source of game and other media piracy -- though authorities moved against major illegal BitTorrent centers such as The Pirate Bay in 2009.
According to TorrentFreak's data 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."
The full top five most-downloaded per system across the tracked BitTorrent networks for 2009 -- with raw amounts and month of the game's release -- read as follows:
PC Unauthorized BitTorrent Downloads, 2009
1.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (4,100,000, Nov. 2009)
2.
The Sims 3 (3,200,000, June 2009)
3.
Prototype (2,350,000, June 2009)
4.
Need For Speed Shift (2,100,000, Sept. 2009)
5.
Street Fighter IV (1,850,000, July 2009)
Xbox 360 Unauthorized BitTorrent Downloads, 2009
1.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (970,000, Nov. 2009)
2.
Street Fighter IV(840,000, July 2009)
3.
Prototype (810,000, Feb. 2009)
4.
Dirt 2 (790,000, Sept. 2009)
5.
UFC 2009 Undisputed (720,000, Mar. 2009)
Wii Unauthorized BitTorrent Downloads, 2009
1.
New Super Mario Bros (1,150,000, Nov. 2009)
2.
Punch-Out!! (950,000, May. 2009)
3.
Wii Sports Resort (920,000, July 2009)
4.
The House of the Dead: Overkill (860,000, Feb. 2009)
5.
Mario Power Tennis (830,000, Mar. 2009)
Other sometimes-pirated portable systems such as PSP and DS were not tracked by TorrentFreak in this set of charts. (PlayStation 3 piracy was also not tracked, due to the Blu-ray disc size and anti-piracy technology making PS3 piracy more difficult than other systems.)
