As 2008 is slowly moving toward its end, Torrentfreak.com took a look at the most pirated game titles for this year. It makes for pretty interesting reading, especially as the good games with poor Digital Rights Management are the top of the list! Spore is interesting, as the DRM is the contraversial SecuROM software, which effectively spies on your activities and does it's best to block you copying the game... and everything else... on your computer. EA is currently bieng sued over SecuROM, we'll have to see where that one goes.

The list is a very rough guide but it although it is very insightful, with 1.7 million downloads of Spore, this amounts to a huge £51 million estimate loss. No wonder they are resorting privacy invading software such as DRM when they are making losses on such a huge scale. Perhaps most surprisingly on the list is The Sims 2, with 1.1 million downloads. The "strategic lifestyle simulator" was originally released just over 4 years ago in late 2004. I am sure this list will provoke a response from game publishers!

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DarkVain   |Administrator |2008-12-11 10:57:23 "this amounts to a huge £51 million estimate loss" Their estimate is completely wrong. Everyone knows that all of those people wouldnt go out and buy spore if it wasnt available on the intertubes. "In its first three weeks on sale, the game sold 2 million copies, according to Electronic Arts." so a rough guess is they sold for about £55 million during the first three weeks. A guess out of the blue from my side puts production cost of spore at about £15 million. So a total profit of £40 million. Just during the first three weeks.. And still they are chasing these poor pimpled teens who cant afford every single game and downloads them instead?

Goatherder   |SAdministrator |2008-12-11 12:16:05 Never thought of it like that! In general i'm for paying the people who develop software, music, graphics, images etc. I do think that piracy does drive some people out of business, and thats a real shame. However, like you say - it's hardly worth shedding a tear if a company has already made a whacking great profit and is looking for more when half the "pirates" would never buy the game anyway! A very grey issue and stormy sea

Claw   |Manager |2008-12-11 13:34:38 1.7 million people downloading it doesn't mean 1.7 million people also don't buy it. I downloaded it first and after that I bought it. Also lots of people kinda played it a bit and found out it wasn't worth to buy it so they didn't, which is kinda fair imho.m

D0rkL0rd™   |Manager |2008-12-13 14:53:13 If there is no demo (there are hardly any demos for games anymore!), I really think if they made more demos, they would have more buyers. No really, just think you have no idea how the game is, you maybe read something in a magazine. But well it's only one persons opinion. So you'd like to try it, but there is no demo, so you download it. You see its really good (now some may buy it) or you just think its crap. And delete it again. Dear Publishers: Make DEMOS!!

Goatherder   |SAdministrator |2008-12-17 16:14:49 There are quite a few demo's still out there, L4D and Red Alert spring to mind, but it's true, most people who download a game only do so because they were never that interested in buying it. If they really like a game they will go buy it.

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