While many were complaining about the rather harsh DRM methods implemented to keep people from pirating Spore, somewhere near two million people were doing just that. According to download data collected from peer-to-peer downloading program BitTorrent, Spore was downloaded over 1,700,000 times this year.

Sadly for Maxis not only do the number of pirated downloads approach the total number of copies sold (over two million), The Sims 2 is second on the list, Unfortunately many surmise that the vast amount of Spore piracy is due to the DRM they instituted on the extremely anticipated game.

While many question the future of PC gaming given the extremely high rates of piracy for these and other games, the continued success of World of Warcraft and other MMOs shows that the future of PC gaming is likely in that genre, given that the constant online access includes whatever DRM measures are necessary.