December 28th, 2010 
As 2010 comes to an end, we follow up our most pirated movies chart by taking a look at the most pirated games of the year. Call of Duty: Black Ops is the absolute winner in the PC games category this year. On Xbox 360 Dante’s Inferno receives the same honor, while Super Mario Galaxy 2 scoops the title of most pirated Wii game of 2010.
Call of Duty: Black Ops has already broken quite a few records this year. With 5.6 million copies sold in the 24 hours following its release, the game surpassed Modern Warfare 2 as the largest entertainment launch in history.
Therefore, it would come as no surprise if the game repeated this success on BitTorrent. And indeed, Black Ops takes the honor of most pirated game on the PC this year, a title which went to Modern Warfare in 2009. Even though it has only been available for a few weeks, the game beat Battlefield: Bad Company 2 by a wide margin with 4,270,000 downloads in total.
Despite this ‘success’, Black Ops does not lead the Xbox 360 and Wii lists.
As expected, Mario and Donkey Kong are in high demand on the Wii with a 1st and 3rd place respectively. Wii Party is listed in second place with well over a million downloads, while Black Ops fell a few thousand downloads short to make it into the top 5.
On the Xbox 360 the title of most pirated game goes to Dante’s Inferno. This game was released in February and amassed a total of 1,280,000 downloads, beating Black Ops which ended up in 5th place with 930,000 downloads. The latter, however, did make the headlines several times due to an early leak.
Weeks before the official release of Black Ops, reports came in that the Xbox 360 version had already leaked to BitTorrent. Although not all “leaks” turned out to be legit, a copy of the game did eventually come out a week before it hit the stores. This, despite efforts from Treyarch’s community manager Josh Olin to stop it.
As can be seen from the three lists below, 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. Overall, the number of downloads of the top titles in each category grew a little compared to last year.
The data for these lists is collected by us from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers. All the data is carefully checked and possible inaccuracies are systematically corrected.
PC Game Downloads on BitTorrent in 2010
| # | Game | Downloads | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Call of Duty: Black Ops | (4,270,000) | (Nov. 2010) |
| 2 | Battlefield: Bad Company 2 | (3,960,000) | (Mar. 2010) |
| 3 | Mafia 2 | (3,550,000) | (Aug. 2010) |
| 4 | Mass Effect 2 | (3,240,000) | (Jan. 2010) |
| 5 | Starcraft II | (3,120,000) | (Jul. 2010) |
Wii Game Downloads on BitTorrent in 2010
| # | Game | Downloads | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Super Mario Galaxy 2 | (1,470,000) | (May. 2010) |
| 2 | Wii Party | (1,220,000) | (Oct. 2010) |
| 3 | Donkey Kong Country Returns | (920,000) | (Nov. 2010) |
| 4 | Kirbys Epic Yarn | (880,000) | (Oct. 2010) |
| 5 | Red Steel 2 | (850,000) | (Mar. 2010) |
Xbox 360 Game Downloads on BitTorrent in 2010
| # | Game | Downloads | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dante’s Inferno | (1,280,000) | (Feb. 2010) |
| 2 | Alan Wake | (1,140,000) | (May. 2010) |
| 3 | Red Dead Redemption | (1.060,000) | (May. 2010) |
| 4 | Halo Reach | (990,000) | (Sept. 2010) |
| 5 | Call of Duty: Black Ops | (930,000) | (Nov. 2010 |
