Pirates release Xbox 360 version of Mass Effect 2 online

Sad news for Bioware and EA Games, pirates have already found Mass Effect 2 and begun distributing it illegally online. People managed to find a copy of the Xbox 360 version of the game, crack any kind of anti-piracy protection and then share it with millions of internet users. The fact that this happened probably isn’t too surprising in a world where game piracy is a fairly common affair, but Mass Effect 2 isn’t supposed to be out until January 26, 2010.

To give an example of how easy it would be for someone to obtain Mass Effect 2 by illegal means, I plugged the search terms “Mass Effect 2,” “Xbox 360″ and torrent into Google exactly as shown. Out of the first eight results, seven were pages with functioning torrents. The other result was the N4G listing for NextGen‘s story on the torrents being available. Even just typing in Mass Effect 2 and the word torrent without any quotes will give you a flood of results.

To make things even more disheartening, most of the pages found from search results provides a list of multiple people providing seeds to allow others to download the game. When checking one said torrent directory, there were multiple 13gb Mass Effect 2 torrents. There were also quite a few illegal copies of the Mass Effect 2 200mb soundtrack as well.

Hopefully, EA and Bioware will find a way to create some sort of mandatory patch for the game that could render illegal copies of the game useless. It’s horrible to see something like this happen to a good game.

Read [NextGen]