I know a guy who knows a guy whose brother heard that an unfinished version of The Sims 3 leaked onto the Internet fairly recently. Perhaps you heard the same?
Anyway, Next Generation found out from 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 downloaded The Sims 3 were never going purchase the game, even if it didn't leak out.
At any rate, Spore was 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 3 will officially launch next Tuesday, so the wait for paying customers isn't long now.
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Contest:
10:20 AM on 05.28.2009
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I'm still on the fence about getting this game , I F'ing loved the first one but the second left me bitter.
I think I'm not-gonna play it with a not-unfinished version and buy it if I like it or... not....
The Sims 2 with tiny little additions? Sounds like EA's the real theif here. Heyoh!
From what I've heard, it's significantly improved over The Sims 2, with a proper social environment (Sims can freely travel between houses and all locations in the entire world can be visited in real time), true Sim goals and a Spore-inspired character-builder.
Basically, if The Sims is your game, it's worth buying. As for the rest of us, pirate it till your hearts content because EA are going to make fucking bazillions off it anyway!
Also, if EA are even telling the truth, that refers to the old copy. There is a retail version of the game available out there. However, it seems EA has finally figured out how encourage sales; you get free money to spend on items in the in-game store (or however it works) if you have a legit game. So pirates who like the game, may just have to buy it.
If EA released the pre-release on torrent sites (dual layer disc game... like 10 gigs after decompression?) then it was a smart move on their part, since the pirates weren't gonna buy it there's at least a good chunk of them that would have but are just too cheap.
This is where the cheap part comes in: After downloading 10 gigs worth of game and it's just a pre-release they won't want to download the full game when it comes out 'cause they've wasted 10 of bandwidth already and they'll need the rest of it for the rest of the month or mommy and daddy will yell at them for going over the ISP limit.
And since they're cheap they'd have a crappy internet connection so it would take another (week? few days?) to download the game again so they wouldn't do it since the pre-release left a terrible taste in their mouths.
Gorram EA you sly bastards.
The Sims 3 will have no DRM, besides a disc-check, I think.
Anyway, The Sims and Sims 2 are some of the worst-pirated games in history, and yet are two of the best-selling games in history. Anyone who would ever want Sims 3 enough to pay money for it will buy it, often because they don't know how or wouldn't bother to spend time torrenting, mounting and cracking it. That's ridiculously easy for us, but not necessarily the average Sims player.
I doubt EA will be sunk by this.
http://www.gamershell.com/news_75864.html
it went gold on may 9th.
Of course, I could be wrong. But it's not like these fools are ever going to put out the data required to make that determination.
Kathos: You're a fucking idiot. If you actually knew anything at all you'd realize that "piracy" is part of the free market, which I'd bet you'd claim to love. A thing that is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. For some people that price is $0. It's all about finding the value proposition that will make those people pay money for the product. Unfortunately (and maybe it is because they are cheap, being the only claim you made that's even similar to intelligence) the cost of creating that value proposition is probably more than what those people are ever going to pay for it. So what you do is fucking let them go since they're only costing you money by trying to stop them and costing you nothing by leaving them alone.
But then you'd know that if you weren't so fucking stupid. Also, move to a real country, who the fuck worries about 10GB against a download cap?
Also, pirates don't have crappy internet. If you're a pirate then one of your most important assets is internet so you wouldn't cheap out on it. Even so, we don't have the most expensive and it took me under 2 hours to download.
And to others, I'd say it's not a full-version. I have crashes somewhat regularly and have lost saves due to game corruption due to crashes (though there's a way to retrieve a backup of them). Before you say my PC just can't handle it... http://www.evga.com/community/ModsRigs/comment.asp?sysid=14780
I'm just glad I only have to wait 5 more days to get my copy so I can re-install with a legit, updated version.
However technically, it IS like an extended demo, much like most pirates use as justification. Personally, I was waiting for it like, 3 months ago, so I'm going to grab the frigging thing as soon as possible. That much of a delay was HARSH.
Oh and slightly unrelated, but I heard there was a mesh importer in the PROPER version, can anyone confirm/deny this?
I'm sure the world is about one file or folder. Don't you think that would get released later when the official thing is released?
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