14 DAY TRIAL // Call of Duty: Black Ops is the most successful video game of the year, managing to sell a huge number of units since it was released at the beginning of November, but the record breaking doesn't stop here, as a new statistic shows that Black Ops is the most pirated PC game of the year.
As the 2010 draws to a close, companies like to flaunt their sales figures, but illegal bittorrent sites also like to chart how "well" games handled themselves in the last 12 months against piracy.
As such, TorrentFreak has chronicled the most pirated games on the PC, Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360.
Even if it was launched just a few months, Call of Duty: Black Ops leads the PC chart, with over 4.2 million illegal downloads, overtaking EA's Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which "only" managed to reach 3.9 million downloads.
Next up we have Mafia 2, with 3.5 million, Mass Effect 2, with 3.2 million and StarCraft II, which, despite Blizzard's efforts, managed to accumulate 3.1 million downloads.
Before you say that the PC platform is the only one affected by piracy, people also downloaded lots of games for the Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360 illegally.
On the Nintendo console, Super Mario Galaxy 2 was the big "winner," with 1.4 million, followed by Wii Party (1.2m), Donkey Kong Country Returns (920,000), Kirby's Epic Yarn (880k) and Red Steel 2 (850k).
The Xbox 360 shows a pretty surprising leader, with Dante's Inferno reaching 1.2 million downloads, followed by Alan Wake (1.1m), Red Dead Redemption (1m), Halo: Reach (990k) and Call of Duty: Black Ops (930k).
As you can see, it's been a pretty good year for pirates, as many people opted to illegally download a game rather than pay for it.
While most of these games probably shrugged the piracy off because of their impressive retail sales (especially Black Ops), this really affects the development studios and the franchises, in cases like Alan Wake or Dante's Inferno.
Hopefully, pirates will figure out what harm they're doing to the games they download and opt to support them by buying it legally.