I know a guy who knows a guy whose brother heard that an unfinished version ofThe Sims 3leaked onto the Internet fairly recently. Perhaps you heard the same?
Anyway,Next Generation found outfrom a file sharing monitor company called BigChampagne that from May 18 through May 21, the game was pirated upwards of 180,000 times. When asked to comment, an EA rep explained that the torrent “is a buggy, pre-final build of the game … Half the world — an entire city — is missing from the pirated copy.”
Although you could try and calculate how much lost revenue the leak will ultimately cost EA, it could be argued that many of the people who illegally downloadedThe Sims 3were never going purchase the game, even if it didn’t leak out.
At any rate,Sporewas the most pirated game of 2008, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this game take that honor for 2009. For what it’s worth,The Sims 3will officially launch next Tuesday, so the wait for paying customers isn’t long now.
