The Sims 3, due out on 5 June, has already been leaked onto the Internet. And analysis of its download popularity from peer-to-peer file sharing sites shows that it is suffering worse piracy even than recent EA title Spore.
According to BigChampagne, a company that monitors file-sharing, quoted by Bloomberg, the pre-release version of The Sims 3 that is available on file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent was downloaded over 180,000 times in the first three days it was available. Electronic Arts’ other recent sim-game Spore (made by The Sims creator Will Wright) took three weeks to reach 400,000 downloads. Although it did go on to become the most downloaded game of 2008, with around 1.7 million illegal downloads, according to TorrentFreak.
Spore was initially released with highly-restrictive digital rights management (DRM) anti-piracy measures, that were soon cracked. The very restrictive DRM caused massive anger amongst many gamers and led to a public campaign of intentional piracy. So, will the lack of DRM on The Sims 3 appease gamers? Not if these initial figures are anything to go by. Given that, will Electronic Arts revert to more restrictive DRM measures for its next PC games?
There is one thing that might persuade early The Sims 3 downloaders to swap for a paid-for copy of the game, though: “The pirated version is a buggy, pre-final build of the game,” an Electronic Arts spokesperson told Bloomberg. “It’s not the full game. Half the world – an entire city – is missing.” Of course, that’ll only be the case until someone gets a full retail version of the game and uploads it to a file-sharing network…
Out now | from £40 | The Sims 3 (available at Game.co.uk)
