Torrent Freak has released its annual report, revealing the most pirated games of last year.
Crysis 2 clinches the dubious honour for the most pilfered PC game of 2011, with an estimated 3.92 million illegal downloads.
An advance copy of the game was leaked onto the Internet back in February, a month ahead of its official release. But instead of snapping up this incomplete version, the majority of downloads came once the full retail version had been released. The usual suspects - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, and FIFA 12 - also rank highly on PC.
On Xbox 360 the most popular game to download using torrents was the platform exclusive Gears of War 3, with around 890,000 downloads. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 appear at number 2 and 3, with other Xbox exclusives - Forza 4 and Kinect Sports: Season Two - rounding off the top 5.
Meanwhile, Super Mario Galaxy 2 remained the most pirated Wii game for the second year running.
Tellingly, Xenoblade Chronicles - arguably the definitive JRPG of this generation (read IGN's 9.0 review) - is the third most pirated title for Nintendo's console with almost a million downloads. In August a celebrated regionalised version of the game was released in Europe, but it's not coming to the US until later this year, which possibly explains the high instance of piracy. It seems for many - almost 950,000 - the desire to play the game exceeded quibbles about legality. Of course, many of those who downloaded the game would probably not have shelled out for a retail copy, but we can reasonably infer that a lot of those downloads might have been sales if things had been different.
It can only be hoped that Nintendo of America sees these figures and doesn't let the same thing happen with The Last Story, another Japanese RPG that is not being released in the US despite coming out in Europe in just a few weeks' time.
Piracy rates are much lower on other formats, including PlayStation 3 thanks to its famously draconian security, so no list was compiled for that platform.
(Also, quite fittingly, Lego Pirates of the Caribbean was the fourth most snatched title on Wii.)
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