Posted on May 28, 2014, Jeff Mills Wolfenstein: The New Order Has Been Illegally Downloaded 100k Times

Copyright news site TorrentFreak reports that the latest Nazi killing game, Wolfenstein: The New Order, has been downloaded through torrents over 100,000 times.

A game has been pirated? That much isn’t exactly news. Every game on every system has been pirated to some level. However, this time the pirates encountered something they weren’t expecting – a 43 gig download. Remarkably, a number of would-be pirate’s were dissuaded from downloading the game due to its sheer size.

“43GB, the hell? No thanks, guess I will buy this when the price drops to £29.99,” said user u2konline.

“I have to uninstall like 10 games to play this shit!!” added ucci4life.

It seems that the sheer size of this game was all that was needed to discourage software piracy. Those looking to torrent the game were looking at multiple day long download times. It seems that the convenience of downloading the title from Steam in just a few hours by comparison was worth the money for some.

“I was gonna get this torrent but I saw the size and how long it would take me to download it, I said fuck it I’m getting it from Steam,” said user Caxtilteca. “Took me 2 hours to download 40GB including the day one update.”

The other problem is that with a game this large, the amount you’re uploading while downloading the title from seeders and fellow leechers is something I doubt you’d want your ISP to notice.

“38 hours later I finally finish my download and have uploaded 122.15 GB,” speed157 wrote.

122 gigs uploaded to others is not a small number. Many ISPs will flag an account that has uploaded this amount, especially when it appears to be equal to, or larger than the amount you’ve downloaded. It’s an easy way to find out if someone is downloading illegal content.

If this was some sort of copy protection idea, it’s definitely a clever one. It’s been suggested that the uncompressed textures are the reason for the large installer, however, a rumor is going around that Bethesda deliberately inflated the files with junk to make the game installer much larger than it had to be. It’s an interesting theory, at least.

But 100,000 downloads isn’t a small number, either. A lot of people downloaded this game illegally and, thanks to them, I’m sure we’ll hear more about how terrible it is releasing games on the PC due to software piracy even if more people would purchase the game than grab it off a torrent.