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PC sales charts? Bloody useless. What good are sales charts when every second PC gamer just pirates games for nothing? Exactly. So Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Kieron Gillen has done a little digging through a single day's worth of downloads from bittorrent site Mininova and come up with some charts that help show what many PC users are actually playing, if not buying.
1) Assassin's Creed - 25734
2) Frontlines: Fuel of War - 12688
3) Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat - 8792
4) Dark Messiah of Might and Magic - 8402
5) Lost: Via Domus - 5883
6) Turning Point: Fall of Liberty - 5183
7) Sims 2 - 4026
8 ) The Club - 3672
9) Bioshock - 3489
10) The Witcher - 3121
11) Need for Speed ProStreet - 3061
12) Crysis - 2847
13) Conflict: Denied Ops - 2085
14) Neverwinter Nights 2 - 1893
15) Hellgate: London - 1750
16) World in Conflict - 1531
17) Stranglehold - 1459
18) The Orange Box - 1341
19) Age of Empires - 1099
20) Flat Out 2 - 1074
Couple of things to note: first, the copy of Assassin's Creed is a preview build of the game that won't let you into Jerusalem. So it's more a demo than a game. Second, Gillen's maths skills show just why piracy makes Call of Duty 4 devs Infinity Ward so sad:
Thirdly, let's try a little really rough - if conservative - maths. Call of Duty 4 has been on sale for 113 days, assuming day zero piracy. A seven gig torrent, assuming a 100k download speed, takes just under a day to download. Assuming that the rate of downloads now is constant across those whole three and a bit months - which is incredibly conservative, of course, as it'd have been much higher upon release - that means 993496 copies will have been illegally downloaded via Mininova alone.
While it's true a million games pirated doesn't mean a million sales lost, those are still some big numbers. Frightening numbers, really, if you're a PC developer or publisher.
The Yarr-ts: Piracy Snapshot 5.3.2008 [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]
