Every step of the way, onlookers have been watching to see if "Call of Duty: Black Ops" would be able to hit or surpass the benchmarks that "Modern Warfare 2" set one year ago. This week, Activision and Treyarch succeeded in crossing at least one more one title of distinction off their list — Most Pirated Game of the Year. Infinity Ward's previous installment for the series claimed the same honor in 2009, and now 2010 officially belong to "Black Ops."
As of December 26, 2010, "Black Ops" had been downloaded via BiTorrent at least 4,270,000 times, according to a 2010 recap report on TorrentFreak. The game may have been beat out on the Xbox 360 by four games, namely "Dante’s Inferno," "Alan Wake," "Red Dead Redemption" and "Halo: Reach," but its 930,000 downloads for that platform put its combined PC/360 numbers just over the 5 million mark.
Granted, that's probably not a statistic that you're going to see plastered across billboards and television advertisements, but it does how many people out there are willing to risk running afoul of the law to pick up the year's most popular first-person shooter.
Rounding off the rest of the Top 5 list for the PC were "Battlefield: Bad Company 2" at 3,960,000 downloads, "Mafia 2" with 3,550,000, "Mass Effect 2" at 3,240,000 and "Starcraft 2" at 3,120,000, despite Blizzard's anti-piracy efforts through Battle.net.
As for Wii games, "Super Mario Galaxy 2" led the pack on that front with 1,470,000 downloads. It beat out "Wii Party" "Donkey Kong Country Returns," "Kirbys Epic Yarn" and "Red Steel 2."
Those numbers could make for quite the jailhouse LAN and Mario parties if publishers and the legal system ever catch up with everyone. The real pressure will be on next year, however, to see if Activision can three-peat.
Are you surprised to see how many times "Black Ops" was illegally downloaded this year? Everything look about like you thought it would? Share your opinions with us in the comment section below.