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Spore the Most Pirated Game of 2008
TorrentFreak has posted some statistics on the most pirated games of the past year. Leading the list by a large margin is Spore, made infamous even before its release for the draconian DRM attached to the game. It was downloaded through BitTorrent roughly 1.7 million times, with The Sims 2 and Assassin's Creed following at just over a million each. (It's worth noting that Spore came out in September, so that figure is essentially for a mere three months.) GameSetWatch has posted a related piece discussing the countermeasures involved in dealing with piracy. It's the second article in a series about piracy; we discussed the first a couple days ago.
Can't we stop it with using the term pirate? Yes, it might be a humurous label amongst us geeks, but by going along with it, instead of actively resisting it, we help to fuel in the minds of those who only hear one side of the story, that people who violate copyright law are bad evil pirates. Let's try using more accurate terms like copyright infringers, or something that doesn't have so much obvious bias in it.
It is rather funny though that a game known perhaps more for it's crazy DRM (heck I don't know what the actual game is about...) than anything else, is the game that has had the most unauthorised downloads.
correlation != caustion, I'll concede that DRM probably had some affect on the download count but not to this magnitude. Spore was over-hyped and that was probably the main reason people downloaded this game. How many think that Batman will be one of the highest illegally downloaded movie ? DRM ? (don't get me wrong, most DRM implementation is idiotic)