[Source Kotaku]

Spore Easily Leads Top 10 Torrented Games of 2008

TorrentFreak put up a list of the top 10 games copied and shared over BitTorrent for the year 2008, and Spore, quite unsurprisingly, leads them all by a country mile.

Naturally, the hard feelings and retaliation over its DRM inclusion helped boost the number of torrents for this game, already downloaded half a million times by 10 days after its September release, and 1.7 million times as of now.

TorrentFreak insists its stats don't include downloads of malicious or malfunctioning torrents (a figure it puts at 1 percent of all available torrents). Spore's 1.7 million has it well in first. The Sims 2 was No. 2 with 1.15 million. The Sims 2 was released in 2004. Fallout 3's 645,000 downloads was the next highest among any 2008 game, good for eighth. Full list below.

1. Spore (1,700,000, released Sept. 2008)
2. The Sims 2 (1,150,000, Sept. 2004)
3. Assassins Creed (1,070,000, Nov. 2007)
4. Crysis (940,000, Nov. 2007)
5. Command & Conquer 3 (860,000, March 2007)
6. Call of Duty 4 (830,000, Nov. 2007)
7. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (740,000, June 2005)
8. Fallout 3 (645,000, Oct. 2008)
9. Far Cry 2 (585,000, Oct. 2008)
10. Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 (470,000, Oct. 2008)

And people say piracy doesn't affect anything. Even the 10 spot is easily the different between a game that makes money and a game that doesn't.

i think they have done this chart too soon, GTA4 just released on PC, i am sure it will beat Spore

Assumed that every single of those downloader would buy the game (which is in over 50% not the case)

Even if they weren't going to buy the game (which is a bullshit excuse) they are still enabling others so it still hurts the developers just as bad.

I'm not sure if you understood what I wanted to tell you with my post...

And I can proudly say that I didn't torrent any of them....

Hell, I've just realised that I've purchased all my games this year (and all bar CoD4 last year... but I had already paid for that on both PS3 and 360).

Oh man I didn't know torrentfreak put those numbers up. Haven't been there in a while. I use their top torrented DVDs to know what's a good movie to go rent and what movie to avoid.

P.S. Spore was a demonstration against DRM and GTAIV might be as well. Also Crysis and C&C3 were definitely not worth a buy at all.

I don't know if it's exactly allowed to say this but let's see.

I downloaded a few of them. Spore was bad, and I wouldn't have bought it anyway because of DRM and EA. Crysis didn't run on my computer, though it wasn't bad. It wasn't good enough to buy anyway, and there was even less reason to do so because of EA. San Andreas is old; decent, but definitely not worth buying. Currently I'm gettin Fallout 3 and might actually buy it if it's a lot better than Oblivion was (I seriously hated the vanilla game and the mods didn't make it much better). Oh, and it must not have any DRM either. I would have pre-ordered Far Cry 2 if not for the DRM; luckily I didn't, as the game is a bit too repetitive and it has too little to do besides missions.

I'm not a complete pirate, though. I have downloaded fewer and fewer games, and even downloading Fallout 3 was a big decision. I've already bought MGS4 and LBP new this year (and Fallout 2, though I have yet to try it), and in addition I've bought several games second-hand. I think I'm also buying either Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI, Rome: Total War Gold Edition or Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops this year. Of those I've pirated RoTK XI and Rome before, but I'm definitely planning to get them both sooner or later as they both deserve it (well, RoTK has the KOEI factor but I guess it isn't as bad as the EA factor).

If you say I'm a bad person because I haven't bought many new games, it's because they aren't good enough. I only buy good games. Oh, and I've never played a bad game I've pirated for a long time. Which reminds me, I must buy Deus Ex from somewhere.

Given how old GTA is some of those might just be people re-getting the game after their copy got lost/broken. Still pretty sad state of affairs overalll. The biggest point made is that you can't force people to buy the game through draconian DRM. Hopefully this inspires someone to come up with a better way to combat privacy.