A huge piracy ring in Taiwan has been brought down by the Intellectual Property Rights Police and the National Police Agency. This is reportedly the biggest bust in the area’s history. The pirates were producing illegal copies of PlayStation 2, Xbox and Wii games.

Epic Games was a major player in PC gaming in the past. The company now focuses its attention on developing for consoles. Epic’s president Mike Capps told Edge Magazine the console market is more lucrative than the PC market. Piracy played a huge role in this change. Capps recognized piracy led to the demise of many developers which could have hurt Epic’s bottom line.

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…

One of the main things that hurts the video game industry is piracy. Some individuals know how to hack Xbox 360 or PSP consoles and play illegal copies of games on them with relative ease. There are DRM protection methods to help curb piracy on PC but consoles are quickly becoming another avenue for pirates to pillage.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) isn’t taking this problem lightly as it had in a recent raid in Guadalajara, Mexico. With the help of Mexican authorities, the ESA recovered a treasure cove of illegal games.

The San Juan de Dios Market was the target…