A crazy amount of people pirated the Game of Thrones season eight premiere

You wouldn't last long in Westeros doing this...

Game of Thrones is back. You may have noticed. Since returning at the start of the week, the HBO fantasy epic has been met with major excitement from fans across the globe. It has also provoked a slew of social media posts from people bragging that they've never watched a single episode. Then you had people getting annoyed at those people and posting about that in an endless screed of really boring hot takes. Somewhere in the middle, the show itself. You can go here for our review of the season opener, here for a deep dive into the symbols in Game of Thrones and what they could mean about the White Walkers, and here for an explanation of one of the most popular fan theories doing the rounds. It's a pretty big deal, really, as evidenced by the astonishing amount of times that the season eight kick-off was illegally downloaded in the first 24 hours of the show's return. The Verge reports that 'Winterfell' was pirated over 55 million times in that timeframe, with the most-pirated views coming from India (approximately 10 million). China takes second place with roughly five million pirated views, while America, in comparison, where HBO is arguably the easiest to access via legal means, is in third spot on four million. In spite of this, HBO continues to break its own ratings record via Game of Thrones, but that is still quite the jaw-dropping amount of illegal impressions.