The Entertainment Software Association has filed its nominations for this year's Notorious Markets list, and it has put a number on the damage. For repacked games distributed under the FitGirl name, the trade body estimates 15,484,145 users in peer-to-peer swarms between March and August 2026, and an estimated lost value of $1,083,735,308.55.
The association says the figure is based on a retail price of $69.99 per user.
The Notorious Markets list is compiled each year by the Office of the United States Trade Representative from nominations submitted by rightsholders, identifying foreign sites and services they regard as significant sources of infringement. It has traditionally covered torrent sites, cyberlockers and streaming portals, with hosting companies and other intermediaries added in recent years. The previous edition was published in March.
The ESA asked for FitGirl to be listed again, citing its inclusion in the 2024 and 2025 lists. It also nominated DODI-Repacks, RuTracker, Anbernic.com, G2A, FunPay, Eldorado.gg and Cronus Zen, which the association says sells cheats.
Its submission sets out compliance rates for each. Of FitGirl, the ESA writes that "ESA's takedown notices to the site are ignored, with zero links removed between August 2025 and August 2026". It says DODI-Repacks removed 22 per cent of reported links and that RuTracker complied with 3 per cent of its notices over the past year. The FitGirl site is blocked in Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, and recorded 41.77 million visits in August.
The most unusual nomination has no address. The ESA asked the Trade Representative to designate "voices38", an anonymous operation that specialises in defeating the Denuvo Anti-Tamper protection used by at least nine ESA members, even though it has no website and no traditional homepage. Reddit's r/CrackWatch index attributes roughly two dozen titles to it. "Each crack therefore unlocks an entire downstream market for an unauthorized copy of that title," the submission argues.
The association also suggests following cryptocurrency transactions through to platforms that carry identity checks.
The billion-dollar figure, though, repays a short division, and this newspaper has performed it. $1,083,735,308.55 divided by 15,484,145 is $69.99. Exactly $69.99. There is no remainder.
The estimate therefore contains no observation beyond the two numbers it multiplies. Every one of the 15,484,145 would have paid the full retail price. None would have waited for a sale, used a regional price, taken a bundle, borrowed it from a friend, played it once or decided against it.
That is a population of more than fifteen million people with identical budgets and no price sensitivity of any kind. It is the most uniform consumer cohort ever documented, and comfortably the most attractive.
The last two digits deserve particular respect. The 55 cents is the only part of the figure not attributable to a whole person. At $69.99 a head it represents 0.0079 of a user, which makes it the most precisely specified fraction of a human being currently before United States trade policy.
And because the arithmetic is exact, the figure is not a measurement of a loss. It is a multiplication table with a dollar sign in front of it.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has applied the same method to this newspaper. Our readers owe us whatever we decide to charge them, multiplied by all of them, and we reserve the right to revise the price upwards at any point.
The method does not require us to publish anything.