Part of the final PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is already circulating among pirate-based web sites, according to a report on Venture Beat. The next game in the highly popular first person shooter series isn't even due to be officially released until November 8 by publisher Activision.
While console game builds are also pirated on the Internet, it's always easier to obtain a pirated copy of a PC game and this would seem to continue that trend. However the PC port for previous Call of Duty games never sell as many copies as the Xbox 360 or PS3 versions.
Even still, the fact that the content for one of the PC version's disks has found its way onto the Internet nearly two weeks before the game is supposed to come out has to be troubling for Activision. It means that someone in the distribution chain for Modern Warfare 3 (in this case, an unnamed employee at a Fresno, California warehouse) decided to upload the files onto a FTP or web server.
Activision, and indeed all game publishers, keeps running into this problem of games being leaked before they ship and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it from happening. While we don't think that PC games should have oppressive DRM set-ups (such as, for example, requiring an "Always On" Internet connection) we definitely agree that publishers have the right to keep their games from being pirated, especially before they are scheduled to ship.
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