Of course, bandits have plagued the information highway for years. In 2004, prior to its release, Doom 3 snuck onto file-sharing networks and was downloaded to over 50,000 home PCs in the space of a few hours, translating tonearly 3million dollars in lost sales. On the infofilter.net game torrent chart, Command & Conquer 3 is hot property with 1,010 traders, although (weirdly) Backgammon Pro MultiPack takes first place with 9,120 traders.

Like the music industry, pre-release leaks are PC gaming's bugbear. Before Funcom's epic adventure Dreamfall reached sh♓elves in Europe,💯 over 200,000 illegal copies of the game had been downloaded.

"We first launched in the US and just days after rel🌞ease it was cracked, so everyone who wanted it in Europe and Asia could download it illegally prior to release," says Jørgen Tharaldsen. "It's a strang꧃e feeling being 'download of the week' when you launched in retail only a few days before."

Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi tells his war story. "During the development of Half-Life 2, we had a security breach on 🍸our network and the source code for the project was stolen. Gabe (Newell, Valve boss) reached out to the community, asking folks to help us find the person(s) responsible. After a few months of working with community members alongside va💙rious international authorities, arrests were made."

Above: Frustration over the delayed release of Half-Life 2 culminates in the game's code theft. A 21-year-old German programmer is arrested on recommendation of the Feds for having created the Phatbot Trojan, linked to the leak. A patsy, we think.