StarCraft 2, the best-selling PC-exclusive game of the year, is also one of the most pirated, with more than 2.3 million downloads adding up to almost 16 petabytes of data.
According to TorrentFreak, StarCraft 2 has set a new record for the amount of data transferred by a single torrent, with the most popular torrent file moving 15.77 petabytes of data across 2.3 million downloads. A petabyte, for those who don’t know (and full disclosure, I had to Google it myself) is a billion megabytes. 15.77 billion megabytes of data. That’s a lot.
Not that there’s much danger of Blizzard going under as a result of the losses. StarCraft 2 was released near the end of July and by September had sold more than three million copies worldwide, excellent numbers for any game and particularly so for a PC exclusive. At the same time, this is apparently just the most popular torrent being measured so actual piracy numbers are almost certainly higher, and the fact that Blizzard can afford to absorb the loss doesn’t mean it should have to.
TorrentFreak also pointed out that while 15.77 petas is a pile, Blizzard’s own BitTorrent system may have actually moved more data through the distribution of legitimate copies of the game, although numbers to confirm that speculation aren’t made available to the public.
