Report: The Most Pirated Games Of 2009
By Luke Plunkett, Kotaku.com, December 29, 2009

Sales figures can be an impressive thing, but so too can the figures showing how many times a game has been pirated. OK, maybe not "impressive". "Disappointing" might be a more suitable term.

Actually, looking at the sheer scale of numbers on display here, change that to "very disappointing". TorrentFreak have hit up all the major public BitTorrent trackers and recorded how many times a particular game has been downloaded, and the figures are, if correct, frightening.

Modern Warfare 2 on PC, for example, may have disappointed at the register, but according to TorrentFreak's figures it's been downloaded 4.1 million times.

Now, that's not to say there are 4.1 million illegal copies out there. There's bound to be duplicates and errors in the tracking. Nor is it suggesting that Activision have somehow missed out on 4.1 million sales of the game, because as common sense dictates, a copy pirated does not equate to a lost sale.

But still.

Add in the 970,000 copies illegally downloaded on Xbox 360 and you're looking at a lot of people playing the game for free.

Other popular titles with pirates in 2009 were The Sims 3, Street Fighter IV, Prototype and New Super Mario Bros.

TorrentFreak's charts can be found below, though for some reason (because the PS3 games can't be easily copied?) PS3 games were not included.

Modern Warfare 2 Most Pirated Game of 2009 [TorrentFreak, via IGN]