Wolfenstein: The New Order had a great week at UK retail last week, clocking up enough sales to be the second biggest launch of the year so far (behind Titanfall). The shooter, from Machine Games and Bethesda Softworks, has also had the dubious honour of being downloaded more than 100,000 times in the same period.
TorrentFreak has reported the 100k total, but interestingly the site also suggested that the game's huge file size (of over 43GB) has been done deliberately in order to deter people from downloading the game illegally.
According to the site, the massive file size is due to "uncompressed graphics textures" left in intentionally to frustrate anyone who might download the game illegally, suggesting that Bethesda may have padded out the file size as a smart deterrent.
They back up their suspicions with a few quotes from users, one of whom said:"43GB, the hell? No thanks, guess I will buy this when the price drops to £29.99."
"I was gonna get this torrent but I saw the size and how long it would take me to download it, I said fuck it I'm getting it from Steam," said another user. "Took me 2 hours to download 40GB including the day one update."
If that's true, and Bethesda has bulked up the download to deter potential pirates, it's a clever move, even if it didn't do that much to dissuade some (after all, 100k is a lot of downloads).
We liked the series reboot when we reviewed it last week, saying: "It's not perfect, but despite a slow start, a horrible weapon select setup, and some stupid enemies, we had a really good time with Wolfenstein: The New Order." You can read more by heading in this direction.