Mercs213 regularly interacts with the legions waiting for the next upload. He prefers buying games from GOG, which prides itself on selling games without DRM. Some of the games he’s uploading come from the piracy scene, others are ones he’s legitimately bought. So here I am sharing games with the world.” “I promised myself I would become a torrent uploader and do the same. “When I was young I always enjoyed the games people would provide which I could not afford but wanted to experience,” he told me. He estimates spending about five hours per week creating and uploading torrents. When he’s not building computers for friends or family, he’s playing games (mostly RPGs). He’s a 23-year-old working for a “company that provides networking opportunities for CEOs” and spends most of his time fiddling with tech. (Between writing a draft of this story and hitting publish, he’d uploaded 10 more.) Mercs213 has, as of this writing, uploaded 1015 torrents, including ones for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Stardew Valley. Stardew Valley, one of the many torrents started by mercs213. It’s a much cheaper and more efficient way to distribute large files to a lot of people.Įvery uploader in this story declined to provide their real name, choosing to be addressed by their pseudonym used on KickAssTorrents. Rather than a website hosting a file and paying for bandwidth as each individual downloads it, torrents allow groups to collectively shoulder the burden. Torrents are the most popular way to share pirated material these days, though the technology is hardly exclusive to piracy. One told me his dream was “sharing games with the world”, while another declared piracy as just “part of the game”. The vast majority of uploaders ignored my request - not exactly shocking - but those that did were more than happy to talk about being part of the piracy community. I recently sent private messages to more than 30 uploaders at KickAssTorrents, ranked by Torrent Freak as the most popular torrent site in 2015, hoping some would talk to me. I’ve talked with a few of them, and here’s what they had to say. There’s a person at the start of that process, an individual who decides to share a game with the world for free.

But a torrent doesn’t appear out of thin air. AAA or indie, Fallout 4 or Super Meat Boy, it doesn’t matter. Nearly 200 people are downloading right now, as I write this. On a popular torrent site, Fallout 4 has been downloaded nearly 140,000 times.

Fallout 4 torrent retail