Long awaited sequel StarCraft II has gone on to become the fastest selling RTS of all time, but it’s just garnered another accolade – It’s now one of the most pirated games in the multiverse.
According to TorrentFreak, which keeps this sort of information, StarCraft II has been downloaded an insane 2.3 million times. While not every single one of those downloads can be directly converted to lost income, that’s a fair bit of money that Activision-Blizzard’s lost out on.
StarCraft II’s 2.3 million downloads, at 7.19 GB per torrent translates to a whopping, record 15.77 Petabytes of transferred data. That’s a lot of illegitimate Zerg rushes. Blizzard’s removal of LAN from StarCraft II – instead using Battle.net and a perpetual online connection for multiplayer was intended to reduce piracy; but that apparently wasn’t all that successful.
Once again, this just demonstrates that DRM is woefully inadequate at safeguarding against piracy, and that it’s the consumer that ends up being affected by draconian software locks. Your game’s going to end up being pirated anyway – why make the paying customer suffer for the pirates?
Source : TorrentFreak (Via Eurogamer)
Last Updated: November 16, 2010
koldFU5iON
November 16, 2010 at 15:47
Do these pirated copies even have MP?
Steve Hofmeyr
November 16, 2010 at 16:44
Online is 90% of the experience in SC2 so pirates are missing out.
Dark
November 16, 2010 at 16:54
Exactly its about achievements!!!! These pirates suck and are n00bish 😉
Aequitas
November 16, 2010 at 17:04
There may be a way for pirates to play SP, but it’s impossible to play MP without logging in to bnet
piet
November 17, 2010 at 08:24
Exactly!