Call of Duty 4 has been getting great reviews and good word of mouth hype, so it should come as no surprise that the PC version has been pirated extensively.

Infinity Ward’s community blog has an update on just how much it’s been pirated though, and the numbers are apparently quite large. No matter how bad this is for Infinity Ward, a large number of pirated keys means a larger community out on the Internet.

I’m not defending software piracy, but just look at this from my perspective (I ONLY play multiplayer games; no singleplayer for me). After having played competitively and casually in a fairly large amount of games, I’d say the biggest obstacle that multiplayer games in general face with regards to longevity is a lack of players.

Communities spring up around new games and promptly disappear. People are transient and move from game to game, but certain players fall in love with a game or small number of games and stick with them — forever. Despite that, you can’t play a multiplayer title on your own.

Still in Italy! You have to have someone to beat or get beaten by, and that’s the issue when you love a game, regardless of the platform. When the Johnny-come-lately bandwagoner casual players leave CoD4, there will still be a hardcore community competing and scrimming in the game. And I guarantee that some of the players keeping it alive will have never paid for the game because they couldn’t afford it or just didn’t want to buy it.

The same thing happened in Quake 3 and (the ultimate free experiment) RTCW:Enemy Territory.

In the end, though, pirates may have just ruined it for everyone. There’s a good reason that some publishers and developers don’t bother with the PC platform anymore, and it has an eyepatch and a pegleg. So in the short term, games may maintain communities based on software pirates, but in the big picture, we may all lose out on some great PC games as a result.

Here’s the quote from IW:

They Wonder Why People Don’t Make PC Games Any More

On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn’t fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).

[T]he amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding. It blows me away at the amount of people willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it’s not physical or it’s on the safety of the internet to do.

Visit the IW community blog.