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.
