Fallout 3, one of the most anticipated titles of the fall, can be illegally downloaded from various torrent sites. In a world where piracy is rampant, this is not too surprising. The big news is that the pirates are not targeting the PC version of the game. The torrents are, at the moment, only available for the Xbox 360 version of Fallout 3.

Piracy is rarer on consoles mainly because a hardware device, called a “mod chip”, has to be attached to a machine before it can run pirated games. The chip breaks the warranty and is illegal, but there are thousands and thousands of users who have one installed. It seems that the Fallout 3 pirated version has already been successfully downloaded at least a couple of thousand times. It appears that this is the gold version of the title and the leak could have originated at a plant where the game is supposed to be transferred on disks which then go on sale.

Bethesda are probably not too happy about the development and they are likely to be looking to pinpoint the source of the leak. Over a similar incident regarding videogames, Ubisoft sued the game disk manufacturer.

Lately, a host of publishers and developers said that developing for the PC is a risk because of rampant piracy. Crytek even stated that it is abandoning PC exclusives and that it plans to release a PC version of its games after a certain delay so that the console versions are not threatened by piracy. Fallout 3 is not pirated on the PC and it will be interesting to see if and when a pirated version comes out.

Fallout 3 is set to launch later in October and can be played on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.