Its the full retail version, with a box, instructions, and everything else. I know some people at videogame publishing companies, I will just leave it at that. Also, Lionelman is right, there are tons of backup versions of the retail copy that I own available for download. When I was on last night there was almost 30K people playing online, so its obviously out there in pretty big numbers. I don't really think that piracy is too big a deal in videogaming, only because it takes awhile to download a 7 gig file, the media used to burn the games is expensive (dual layer DVD-R) and you always run the risk of getting your console banned from XBOX live, although that risk is pretty much non-existent if you know what you are doing.