Game piracy in 2026 runs on two opposing lines. MUSO counted 185.6 billion visits to piracy sites in 2025, the sharpest annual fall since 2020. Over the same window the copy protection guarding PC releases stopped holding. Below: traffic by content sector, the measured revenue effect, GitHub takedown volumes, and what United States courts have actually awarded.
Game Piracy Statistics
- MUSO tracked 185.6 billion visits to piracy websites across five content sectors in 2025, down 14.2% year on year.
- Software piracy visits, the sector holding PC games, fell to 14.88 billion in 2024 from 15.2 billion in 2023.
- A community list of Denuvo-protected non-VR games showed zero uncracked titles on 26 April 2026.
- Piracy cuts mean total PC game revenue by 20% when Denuvo is cracked quickly, and by roughly zero when it holds 12 weeks.
- Seven Nintendo DMCA notices processed by GitHub on 17 August 2026 removed more than 400 emulator repositories.
How Much Game Piracy Traffic Did MUSO Measure?
MUSO measures visits to piracy domains across 192 countries and sorts them into five content sectors. The 2025 total is 185.6 billion visits, which MUSO calls the steepest annual decline since 2020.
These are site visits, not users and not downloads. One person can generate many visits.
| Year | Total piracy site visits | Change on prior year |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 229.4 billion | Not stated |
| 2024 | 216.3 billion | -5.72% |
| 2025 | 185.6 billion | -14.2% |
Source: MUSO Piracy Trends and Insights reports, full years 2023 to 2025
Game Piracy By Content Sector
MUSO has not published a 2025 sector split, so 2024 is the most recent complete breakdown. Software declined 2.1%, the smallest drop of the five sectors, while film and music both fell more than 18%.
Software is the bucket that contains PC games. MUSO does not break games out as their own line, so this figure covers applications and other software too, not games alone. Mobile storefront revenue data sits outside this dataset entirely.
| Sector | 2023 visits (B) | 2024 visits (B) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| TV | 103.85 | 96.79 | -6.8% |
| Publishing | 63.62 | 66.38 | +4.3% |
| Film | 29.61 | 24.27 | -18.0% |
| Software | 15.20 | 14.88 | -2.1% |
| Music | 17.16 | 13.98 | -18.6% |
Source: MUSO 2024 Piracy Trends and Insights, visits by media sector, full years 2023 and 2024
Share Of All Game Piracy And Media Piracy Visits
Software accounted for 6.9% of all piracy visits MUSO measured in 2024. Publishing took 30.7%, driven by manga, which MUSO puts at 70.15% of publishing piracy traffic that year.
Source: MUSO 2024 Piracy Trends and Insights, content share by industry, full year 2024
Does Game Piracy Reduce PC Game Revenue?
The one peer-reviewed estimate comes from William M. Volckmann II, published in Entertainment Computing. He examined 86 Denuvo-protected games released on Steam between September 2014 and the end of 2022.
Timing decides the outcome. The paper also reports that a game’s characteristics cannot explain its likelihood of being cracked, so publishers cannot price the risk per title. Budgets absorbing that gap are already strained, as figures on development crunch hours show.
| Scenario | Effect on mean total PC game revenue |
|---|---|
| Denuvo cracked quickly after launch | -20% |
| Denuvo survives 12 weeks or more | Zero mean loss |
| Revenue protected across the dataset | Mean 15%, median 20% |
Source: Volckmann, Revenue effects of Denuvo digital rights management on PC video games, Entertainment Computing, 2024; sample period September 2014 to end 2022
Denuvo And The 2026 Game Piracy Timeline
Denuvo held the PC market for a decade. In early 2026 crackers moved to hypervisor bypasses running at Ring -1, below the level Windows security can observe, which intercept Denuvo’s CPU instructions and return false data.
TorrentFreak reported on 31 March 2026 that the leak of Resident Evil Requiem arrived hours after the game’s release, and that Crimson Desert, Life is Strange: Reunion and Assassin’s Creed Shadows had all fallen to the method.
| Event | Date | Method |
|---|---|---|
| Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC release | 20 March 2025 | Denuvo protected |
| First AC Shadows bypass published | February 2026 | Hypervisor bypass |
| Resident Evil Requiem leak | Hours after launch, February 2026 | Hypervisor bypass |
| Resident Evil Requiem DRM stripped | 40 days after launch, April 2026 | Traditional crack |
| AC Shadows cracked without hypervisor | Mid-July 2026 | Traditional crack |
| Uncracked non-VR Denuvo list reaches zero | 26 April 2026 | Both methods |
Source: TorrentFreak, Tom’s Hardware, TweakTown and DSOGaming reporting, February to July 2026
The bypass carries a cost to the user. Irdeto’s head of communications Daniel Butschek told TorrentFreak that running one requires disabling Virtualization-Based Security, Hypervisor-Enforced Code Integrity and driver signature enforcement.
Butschek also said Irdeto is building updated security versions for affected games and will not move Denuvo into Ring -1. How fast those reach players depends on release cadence, which patch and update frequency data tracks.
Game Piracy Takedowns On GitHub
Nintendo’s enforcement targets emulators rather than cracked PC builds. On 17 August 2026 GitHub processed seven Nintendo DMCA anti-circumvention notices covering more than 400 repositories in a single day.
One rule explains the scale. When a reported fork network exceeds 100 repositories, GitHub disables the whole tree rather than assessing each fork. Emulation overlaps with preservation demand for older titles, a pattern visible in retro game rankings and in browser-based retro game libraries.
| Parent repository | Project | Repositories | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| vstyler96/suyu | suyu | 311 | Full network |
| skyline-emu/skyline | Skyline | 29 | Full network |
| NicolasArvani/yuzu | yuzu fork | 14 | Full network |
| liushuyu/yuzu-android | yuzu Android port | 8 | Full network |
| exverge-0/yuzu-EA4176 | yuzu Early Access 4176 | 21 | Forks listed in notice |
| irlbunny-archive/MonoNX | MonoNX | 17 | Forks listed in notice |
| IpwnedU/yuzu-master | yuzu fork | Parent only | Named in notice |
Source: GitHub DMCA notices via TorrentFreak, processed 17 August 2026
Nintendo’s argument in every notice is anti-circumvention, not plain copying: it says the emulators use unauthorised copies of its cryptographic keys to decrypt games at runtime. An earlier notice in February 2026 named 13 emulator projects including Citron, Eden, Kenji-NX, MeloNX, Ryujinx, Skyline, Sudachi, Suyu and Yuzu.
GitHub DMCA Volume Behind The Game Piracy Notices
Nintendo’s sweeps sit inside a rising platform-wide total. GitHub’s 2025 transparency report records record levels on two separate counts.
| Metric | Figure | Period |
|---|---|---|
| DMCA takedown notices processed | 2,661 | Full year 2025 |
| Repositories affected by takedowns | 47,228 | Full year 2025 |
| Change in repositories affected | +51.6% | 2024 to 2025 |
| Circumvention claims received | 645 | Full year 2025 |
| Circumvention claims received | 63 | Full year 2020 |
Source: GitHub Transparency Center, DMCA data, full years 2020 and 2025
Game Piracy Damages In United States Courts
Four Nintendo actions since 2024 show the spread. The gap between the largest and smallest figure tracks distribution scale rather than personal use.
Jesse Keighin’s $17,500 breaks down as $10,000 for one copyright infringement plus $7,500 in circumvention damages, calculated at $500 across 15 violations. Nintendo elected not to seek damages for the other nine works it had established liability on.
| Case | Date | Type | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nintendo v. Tropic Haze (Yuzu) | March 2024 | Settlement | $2,400,000 |
| Nintendo v. Ryan Daly (Modded Hardware) | 5 September 2025 | Stipulated judgment | $2,000,000 |
| Nintendo v. Jesse Keighin | October 2025 | Default judgment | $17,500 |
| Nintendo v. James Williams (Archbox) | October 2025 | Damages sought | $4,500,000 |
Source: US District Court filings for W.D. Washington and D. Colorado, reported by TorrentFreak, Engadget and Nintendo Life, March 2024 to October 2025
The Williams figure is a request, not an award. Nintendo limited its claim to 30 works at the $150,000 statutory maximum for willful infringement and declined to pursue separate DMCA trafficking damages. Hardware attachment patterns that make a console library worth pirating appear in console attach rate data.
The Tropic Haze settlement also required surrender of the Yuzu domain. Both the Tropic Haze judgment and the Keighin judgment are cited as precedent in Nintendo’s August 2026 GitHub notices, though neither case tested emulator circumvention on the merits.
FAQs
How much game piracy was there in 2026?
MUSO recorded 185.6 billion visits to piracy websites across five content sectors in 2025, down 14.2%. It has not published a 2025 software split. Software piracy drew 14.88 billion visits in 2024.
Does game piracy actually reduce sales?
Yes, when protection breaks early. The Entertainment Computing study found piracy cuts mean total PC game revenue by 20% when Denuvo is cracked quickly, and causes zero mean loss when Denuvo holds 12 weeks.
Has every Denuvo game been cracked?
The community-maintained list of uncracked non-VR Denuvo games reached zero on 26 April 2026. Irdeto says it is building updated security versions for affected titles and will not move Denuvo below the Windows kernel.
Why did Nintendo sue a Reddit moderator over game piracy?
Nintendo alleges James Williams, a lead moderator of the r/SwitchPirates subreddit, ran pirate shops distributing Switch games. It filed for a $4,500,000 default judgment in October 2025, covering 30 works at $150,000 each.
How many emulator repositories has Nintendo removed from GitHub?
Seven Nintendo notices processed on 17 August 2026 removed more than 400 repositories, 311 of them in the suyu network. A single May 2024 notice had removed 8,535 Yuzu-linked repositories.
Sources
https://www.muso.com/muso-2025-piracy-trends-and-insights-report
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1875952124002532
https://transparencycenter.github.com/dmca/
https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-wipes-out-400-switch-emulator-repos-in-single-day-github-sweep/