Looks like pirates really like their Super Mario Galaxy 2. For the second year in a row, the mustached plumber's second foray into space was the most bootlegged Wii game, according to TorrentFreak. Gears of War 3 was the most plundered Xbox 360 game and looks like those PC pirates fancied themselves Crysis 2. Apparently the PlayStation 3 doesn't bear enough traffic through torrent downloads to warrant a place on that list. It's not surprising given the lengths Sony goes to combat piracy.
Of course, Xenoblade Chronicles is on the list of Wii games. I wonder if there would have been substantially fewer copies of the game pirated if Nintendo announced plans to release it in the U.S. earlier. Check the jump for the full list and some hard numbers.
Remember: The number of downloads listed next to each title are estimates based on reports from several trackers.
2011's most pirated PC games through BitTorrent
Crysis 2 - 3,920,000
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - 3,650,000
Battlefield 3 - 3,510,000
FIFA '12 - 3,390,000
Portal 2 - 3,240,000
2011's most pirated Wii games through BitTorrent
Super Mario Galaxy 2 - 1,280,000
Mario Sports Mix - 1,090,000
Xenoblade Chronicles - 950,000
Lego Pirates of the Caribbean - 870,000
FIFA '12 - 860,000
2011's most pirated Xbox 360 games through BitTorrent
Gears of War 3 - 890,000
Call of Duty 3: Modern Warfare - 830,000
Battlefield 3 - 760,000
Forza Motorsport 4 - 720,000
Kinect Sports: Season Two - 690,000
A look at some rough sales numbers also puts things in a bit of perspective here. Take Modern Warfare 3, for example. According to VG Chartz, the title has sold nearly 11.5 million copies on the Xbox 360. Add the 830,000 pirated copies and there were approximately 11.98 million units of the game being played since its release. So a little more than 4 percent of the folks playing Modern Warfare 3 on their Xbox 360 at any given time were doing so through a bootlegged copy. Although the figure may seem like peanuts to some, you can bet Microsoft and Activision see things a bit differently.