Just days after Crysis 2 was leaked onto the internet, the PC Gaming Alliance have come out claiming that PC piracy is actually in decline.

Talking to Gamasutra , president of PCGA Matt Ployhar said: "What's really interesting [according to PCGA research,] is piracy was largely, historically rampant when you had an optical drive or a piece of physical media," Read on for more of his comments.

"People would go and download the crack for [pirated games]. In some cases the crack was done days before the game ever even hit retail shelves. Now what's happening is piracy was so bad in other geographies - it's kind of bad everywhere but there are certain places where it spikes - that it was an equation of survival of the fittest.

"The only PC gaming business models that existed and continued to thrive and that could continue to live were MMOs. They do really well. You can still pirate them but they're an order of magnitude harder to pirate.

"And then there are free to play games. You can't really pirate free to play. You can but it doesn't make a lot of sense. So what's happening is game design is shifting and as a result of shifting game design, piracy, at least on the PC side, is actually declining as a result."

Such comments coming so soon after the Crysis 2 leak seem a little hard to swallow, and we can be sure that even if no one else disagrees with the Alliance's research, Cevat Yerli certainly will.

In related news, the PC Gaming Alliance appears to have lost two of it's founding members. Microsoft and Nvidia are now missing from the Alliance's website. Major player AMD also seem to have shuffled within the ranks, with their position dropping from top tier 'Promoter' down to a contributing member.

[via Eurogamer and Big Download ]