The most pirated PC game of 2011 wasn't Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 or Skyrim - it was Crysis 2.
Specialist site TorrentFreak estimated, using several sources of data, that Crysis 2 was downloaded illegally nearly 4 million times (3.92 million).
Modern Warfare 3 was the second most pirated PC game, having been downloaded 3.65 million times. Battlefield 3 was third, with an illegal download count of 3.51 million.
Downloadable action game Bastion has sold over half-a-million copies, developer Supergiant Games has announced.
It sailed past the impressive sales milestone last week - just over five months after it launched on Xbox Live Arcade.
Bastion subsequently launched on PC (Steam) in August, then, last month, on web browser Google Chrome (via the Chrome Web Store).
Huge BioWare MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic is estimated to have as many as 350,000 gamers playing together at once.
That peak concurrent number comes from Baird Equity Research. Colin Sebastian, an analyst there, believes the "early success" of SWTOR proves that "multiple million-user MMOs" can co-exist within the genre.
"We view the early success of Star Wars as an indication of a healthy MMO market," Sebastian told GamesIndustry.biz.
You'd probably prefer it if I didn't mention World of Warcraft in this review. Seven years on and it's getting boring, I have to agree. But that's tough for both of us, because Star Wars: The Old Republic wouldn't exist without Blizzard's online world, and it's impossible to discuss without referring to it. There are two elephants in this room.
The Old Republic is largely made in WOW's image, and it's the latest and probably the last attempt by a cowed and frustrated industry to unseat it. Never has a game stopped an entire genre in its tracks like WOW has with massively multiplayer online gaming.
With the Star Wars and BioWare brands attached and an unimaginable amount of effort and money expended on its making - this Herculean project would make James Cameron or Cecil B De Mille blanch - The Old Republic has been given every chance of success. It has the timing right too, arriving just as WOW players' ennui has finally begun to outweigh Blizzard's genius for reinvention, and the old warhorse's subscriber numbers have started to fall. Could we really have a contender here?
As you've probably spotted, we've spent the last week since we broke up for Christmas publishing personal accounts of some of our favourite games of the last 12 months, and we've also named our overall Game of the Year for 2011: Valve's wonderful Portal 2.
Traditionally though we leave it to you to bring order to the chaos of the year just ended by voting for your top games and giving us your reasons. We take your top-five lists and scientifically jumble them all together to create the Eurogamer Readers' Top 50 Games, and then publish it all in one go along with a selection of your comments.
This year we had our largest ever response and we also received far more comments than before - and far more than we have been able to use here, so apologies if you submitted something that we weren't able to use. We did read all of them while compiling the list, and it was fascinating to see where you agreed and disagreed on the games included. The comments we did include are a snapshot of the range of views expressed.
Was 2011 a great year for gaming or wasn't it? Regardless of where you stand on that particular debate, it's been responsible for some of the medium's finest efforts. Going through our Games of 2011 has provided some heartening reading, and the likes of Bastion, Quarrel and Clash of Heroes HD go to show that when it comes to "Actual New Games" we've had our fair share over the last 12 months.
But it's the sequels and new instalments in long-running series that have, perhaps predictably, taken the limelight, and they've presented fascinating insights into how different developers approach the sometimes sticky business of iteration. Eidos Montreal pulled off a commendable balancing act with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, managing to replicate the 1999 original while offering an entirely new vision, while Nintendo once again revived and renewed its two most well-worn mascots with the dizzying one-two punch of Super Mario 3D Land and Skyward Sword.
Elsewhere, Dark Souls spread the punishing formula of its predecessor over a wider, more intricate world - and Skyrim trumped its own forebears by creating the most sumptuous and expansive world that the Elder Scrolls have ever unfurled in.
Did you know that there's a new Mission: Impossible film out this Christmas? I had no idea until the other day. I assume they must have masses of advertising running for that on TV, in cinemas, online and "outdoors" (I eventually spotted it on a train station poster), but despite spending most of my life hanging off the digital world like a conjoined foetus, somehow its existence had passed me by.
So that's something to say for video games in 2011, because if nothing else they have been very noticeable. Professional footballers spend their Saturday afternoons sprinting across pitches ring-fenced by ubiquitous adverts for FIFA 12, and we stare at them through screens adorned with ball possession statistics brought to us by EA Sports.
Meanwhile, every other ad break during the X Factor - you'd cry if you knew how much they charged for 30 seconds - is a succession of Wii and Kinect adverts, occasionally interspersed by Saints Row: The Third or Modern Warfare. Battlefield 3 was one of Google's fastest-rising search terms of 2011, and every bus shelter on my way to work shouts at me about Uncharted 3's "gripping" gameplay, and has done for the past four weeks.
It's Nottingham, the end of a crisp autumn day, and Eric Chahi's smile is as bright as the late October sun - although his is a face that seems reluctant to ever frown.
His eyes are permanently smiling and a playful grin is always ready to flicker across his features. His hair rinsed a blue that matches the shade of his suede shoes, he's delighting in the reactions of those sampling his own take on molecular gastronomy at this year's GameCity. It's another of Eric's many interests, and in the luminescent desserts and stereoscopic starters there's a combination of playfulness, curiosity and eccentricity that'll be familiar to anyone who's played his games.
When Heart of Darkness finally came out in 1998, six troubled years on from the game that made Chahi's name, it perhaps shouldn't be have come as a surprise that his next game was well over a decade away, that this talent would be lost to videogames for thirteen years.
SPOILER ALERT!: This piece contains story spoilers - from the very first sentence onwards.
My guilty little secret: I reloaded my quicksave about 30 times to try and save Faridah Malik when her helicopter's shot down and then assaulted by Belltower goons late in the game. Having played a stealthy, non-lethal character throughout the game, I was as much use as an asthmatic kitten in a straight-up firefight, so the rush of robots and heavily-armoured thugs that swarmed the downed bird made mincemeat of me the second I showed my goateed face. Trouble was, I couldn't sneak about doing careful silent takedowns, because after a few harrowing moments Faridah would be so much augmented toast. And while I did have the option of spamming the whole scene with explosives, I didn't want to compromise my 'no fatalities' ethos. What to do, what to do?
Well, cheat. Cheat within the confines of the game - quicksave, quickload, quicksave, quickload, incrementally creeping closer to an idealised set of circumstances wherein I'd made it to point X without being killed, had non-fatally taken out assault cannon-toting guard Y before he could pepper the chopper, hidden deftly at point Z then dropped an EMP grenade under robot Ω. No-one dead (unless you count robots), Faridah was rescued in time and I came it through it all with nary a scratch. That's my story. That's how the game records it. That's why I'm a bloody hero, right?
