052809: Electronic Arts' 'Sims 3' hit by piracy ahead of sale

Electronic Arts’ ‘Sims 3’ hit by piracy ahead of sale

Technology

Wednesday, 27 May 2009 23:56

PIRACY, long a scourge of the music and movie industries, is taking aim at one of the biggest videogame releases of the year. Electronic Arts Inc.’s The Sims 3, scheduled to go on sale on June 2, was downloaded at least 180,000 times from May 18 to May 21, according to BigChampagne Llc., a company that monitors file sharing. That outpaces the 400,000 downloads over three weeks for Electronic Arts’ Spore, the most-pirated game of 2008. “That’s an impressive number,” said Joe Fleischer, the head of marketing and cofounder of Beverly Hills, California-based BigChampagne. “If people want the content and can download it on the Internet, which is pretty much all content types, they are going to do it.” Sims games have sold more than 100 million copies since 2000, more than any other titles for the personal computer. The availability of Sims 3 on the Internet highlights the difficulty videogame companies have keeping products under wraps until the official release, just like their counterparts in film and music. “That’s the nature of the business these days,” said Evan Wilson, an industry analyst at Pacific Crest Securities Inc. in Portland, Oregon. “Personal computer [PC] games are available before they are released. That’s an issue they have been dealing with for some time.” Last year, piracy accounted for 41 percent of installed PC software, according to the Business Software Alliance. On the Pirate Bay file-sharing site, users traded comments on downloading The Sims 3, a game in which users build and maintain virtual communities. “More Sims! Can’t… afford… buying,” a downloader named “Pengy” wrote in a comment on May 20. “Great upload thanks,” user “tj01” wrote on May 19. “Still going to buy it when it comes out though.” Copies of the game available on file-sharing web sites aren’t the full version, Electronic Arts said. “The pirated version is a buggy, pre-final build of the game,” Holly Rockwood, a company spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement. “It’s not the full game. Half the world—an entire city—is missing from the pirated copy.” The company chose to release the game without Digital Rights Management, coding that makes software harder to copy. Electronic Arts, based in Redwood City, California, came under criticism from users last year when Spore, a game designed by Sims creator Will Wright, included protections that limited the number of copies. The code was cracked and Spore became the most-pirated title of 2008 with 1.7 million downloads, according to TorrentFreak.com, a German web site that tracks downloads. The Sims 2, released in September 2004, was second with 1.15 million downloads last year and Ubisoft Entertainment SA’s Assassin’s Creed was third with 1.07 million downloads. The current number of illegal downloads of The Sims 3 suggests lost retail sales of $9 million to date, based on the $49.99 starting price. The Sims 3 is the biggest computer-game release of the year, Pacific Crest’s Wilson said. He projects Electronic Arts will sell 2.5 million copies in June, fewer than the 3 million Sims 2 sold in the first two weeks, in part because of piracy. PC games were 12 percent of Electronic Art’s revenue last year. The Entertainment Software Association, the Washington-based trade group for the videogame industry, estimates file-sharing costs companies billions of dollars a year. “Piracy is the single greatest threat to the development and release of innovative and creative entertainment software,” Michael Gallagher, chief executive officer of the group, said in an April 17 statement supporting the prison sentence given to the operators of Pirate Bay. News Corp.’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked a month before the film hit theaters. A copy of U2’s latest record No Line on the Horizon also was available on file-sharing sites before reaching stores. The number of people who are downloading The Sims 3 is impressive because the file is at least five times larger than a movie, said BigChampagne’s Fleischer. “It’s an enormous file,” Fleisher said. “You’re waiting a long time to download this game.” (Bloomberg)

 

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