Starcraft II-data is the largest slice of torrent traffic pie

PC game Starcraft II enjoys a huge success. In the first month after release, 3.3 million copies of the game were sold worldwide. However, there are a lot more Starcraft fans out there than this sales figure suggests. On torrent sites, the game is also very popular. A quick survey by Torrentfreak revealed that the most popular copy of Starcraft II in the torrent scene was downloaded 2.3 million times between now and launch three months ago.

Mind you, that is by no means the total number of downloaded instances of the game, only of the most popular file. Many different copies of the game pop up in torrent search engines. The total number of downloads will therefore be quite a lot higher.

Still, this particular popular copy broke all data transfer records and now has the dubious honour of being the file that has resulted in the most data transfer. The file measures about 7.19 GB. Multiplied by 2.3 million, this equals to 15.77 Petabytes worth of data.

Interestingly enough, Blizzard employs the same torrent technology for distributing the legal copies. In order to allow users to efficiently download the game and patches, without having to invest too heavily in servers, Blizzard has developed a torrent tracker of it’s own. A great example of how this technology can be used by the producers of content.