Christmas has come early for video game pirates, as an early build of Gears of War 3 has been leaked onto bittorrent sites over the weekend, for the Xbox 360 platform, months before its scheduled release this September.

Gears of War 3 is set to end the trilogy of third-person shooters made by Epic Games that appeared almost exclusively on the Xbox 360 since 2006.

The game is eagerly anticipated by many gamers for its story, which is set to be the most extensive one made by Epic, its competitive multiplayer, which was demoed through a special beta stage, and its cooperative Horde mode, which got plenty of details a few weeks ago.

Now, it seems that Gears of War 3, or at least an early build of the game, has been leaked onto torrent websites by an unknown source.

The copy of the game works only on specially modified Xbox 360 consoles, the JTAG ones, which have been essentially turned into developer kits and can run any sort of applications put on their hard drives.

While these consoles are rare, plenty of pirates are already enjoying the leaked copy, and videos of its gameplay are popping up all over video sharing websites like YouTube.

Microsoft has already released a statement to IGN, saying that it is aware of the leak and is working closely with security and law enforcement agencies to track down those who downloaded the early build and uncover the source of the leak.

"We have seen the reports of Gears of War 3 content being propped on the Web and working closely with our security teams and law enforcement to address the situation," Microsoft told IGN. "This content is not from a final build and is not representative of what fans will enjoy when the game launches."

We've seen quite a lot of early leaks this year, from a 10-hour build of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, to another early beta version of Crysis 2. Still, this new Gears of War 3 leak takes the cake, as there are still about three months separating us from its official release date of September 20.