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The Last of Us is the most pirated show of the year

Game of Thrones held this dubious honor for years, and House of the Dragon picked it up last year. The award remains in the HBO family.

By Dan Selcke

Sarah in The Last of Us
Sarah in The Last of Us /
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Every year, TorrentFreak releases their list of the most pirated TV shows of the year downloaded on BitTorrent, and every year, we look at it and go, "That looks about right." This year was no exception.

So what shows were people pirating in 2023? Check out the top 10 list below:

  1. The Last of Us (HBO)
  2. The Mandalorian (Disney+)
  3. Loki (Disney+)
  4. Ahsoka (Disney+)
  5. Secret Invasion (Disney+)
  6. Silo (Apple TV+)
  7. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (Apple TV+)
  8. Tulsa King (Paramount+)
  9. Gen V (Amazon Prime Video)
  10. Ted Lasso (Apple TV+)

Okay, maybe there a couple surprises on here. People were bothering to pirate Secret Invasion? Better that than wasting money to watch it, I guess.

HBO claims the top spot with its zombie drama The Last of Us, adapted from the video game of the same name by Naughty Dog. This was to be expected; The Last of Us came around at the beginning of the year and was more or less universally beloved by critics and audiences alike. It also continues a long tradition of HBO having the most pirated show of the year. In 2022 that "honor" went to House of the Dragon. Back in the day, Game of Thrones reliably snagged the top spot every year. HBO took a break in 2020 and 2021, when the most pirated shows were WandaVision and The Mandalorian respectively.

There are no Netflix shows on the list, probably because everyone already has a subscription to Netflix so no piracy is needed. As Dextero notes, Netflix has 247 million paying subscribers around the world. Who's left?

The final caveat to this list is that it's based purely on BitTorrent traffic, which represents an increasingly smaller portion of the piracy landscape in a world where more and more people pirate shows by watching them on streaming sites and services which don't report their traffic. Still, even if we had a wider picture, I'm betting the results would basically be the same.

GRRM. George R.R. Martin doesn't see the TV versions of Game of Thrones characters when he writes The Winds of Winter. dark. Next

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