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The Sims 3 Racks Up Over 180,000 Downloads Prior To Release
Bloomberg reports that pirated versions of EA's The Sims 3 were downloaded over 180,000 times between May 18 and May 21. The game will not be officially released until June 2nd, and it does not make use of SecuROM for DRM. Quoting:
"That outpaces the 400,000 downloads over three weeks for Electronic Arts' Spore, the most-pirated game of 2008. ... 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 spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement. 'It's not the full game. Half the world — an entire city — is missing from the pirated copy.'"
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Ill just wait and pirate the full copy when it comes out then. Thanks for the heads up EA i wouldnt wanna pirate a substandard version.
Nice move not using DRM, its a shame its still the most retarded "game" i can think of.
But hey not everybody can be cool like me and get 9000 head shots on Counterstrike.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
People who pirate games on the average will never buy the real game, unless there is strong incentive to play online / multiplayer on an authenticated server.
I don't think I ever bought a PC game that I didn't HAVE to have a valid code for online play back when I was into Warez other than the Civ series which I expected to be great. Civ 4 was the last game I bought and gave it to a friend after loading the largest world with most opponents and it crashed at over 1GB of used memory 10 hours into it.
... pretending you have a life.
839*929
and if so HOW many can i wear?
Slashdot must tackle the big questions.
Sims? As someone with NO download limit I would still feel it a huge waste to download this (master)piece of crap. I mean come on! Wake up people! You're being turned into minless zombie sheep! Wouldn't play it even if they paid me for it...
Given the choise between Hitler and RIAA/MPAA I'd go for the first one - at least he knew when to shoot himself.
"Holly Rockwood" -- awesome name.
The game's target audience (twelve-year-old girls) probably wouldn't even know how to pirate it, they'll just ask their daddies to get it from the mall. Those who have now downloaded it are probably the bunch who download anything new on TPB as soon as it appears and never pay for anything anyway.
Actually, the original release (referred to in TFS, which was beta code) was propered earlier this week - the "current" pirated release is the RTM code.
Pirated copy is version 0.5 - it has half of the world. So the full version will be 1.0 - it has the whole world. When EA provides version 1.1 will I get 10% of world extra for free?
The other city wont "ship" with the game either, its a free download from the yet to launch DLC store. The leaked version is final, anything else they say is ass-covering.
Yeah, I said it. This actually hurt sales of TheSims3 this time. I was going to pre-order it, then heard there was a pirate version before release. One of my friends tried it and she said it was awful. Not enough items, too small, buggy, etc etc. At that point, I decided not only to not pirate it, but not to pre-order it either.
Now, if I don't hear rave reviews about it, I'm not going to buy it. And I'm not going to bother pirating it, either, for that matter.
So it's quite possible they'd lost my sale on the game... Only being extremely good will save it. (Without this, being merely 'good' would have been enough.) I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I downloaded it and liked it. I'd like to buy a copy next time I'm at fry's but will probably download the full version when they have it up. It kind of made me miss the good days of shareware and demo's. Game makers stopped doing it because people would try out the game and not buy it because it didn't live up to the hype. Or the game just flat out sucked. This games lives up to the hype and I will buy it. For some it might not have lived up to the hype so they will not buy it. So the download numbers are not a good sample to prove that people that downloaded it liked it and should therefore buy it.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
They actually made a good reason to buy the non-pirated game. Kudos to the developers and marketing.
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
As opposed to screwing YOUR wife, because that whore has an inflated opinion of how much she's worth. Of course everyone's going to go for the more reasonably priced alternative.
How many people who downloaded the leaked version will go out and buy the real thing?
Compare to DRM-crippled software, where there is a strong dis-incentive to take the thing out of the shrink wrap if you did buy it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Thanks, fuck off.
That game comes out on Tuesday for Fucks Sake.
I don't understand where you come with 12 year old girl argument but The Sims is really an adult game, adult doesn't neccessarily mean porn btw.
I have seen 40-50 and even 60+ years old people play it, in fact for some people it was the first and only game they purchased. People still buy content for the game, even the first release still being played.
Can you imagine the level of security in such potentially billion dollar project?
If I was EA investigating it, I would check who would benefit from such leakage. They may come up with very interesting results.
I can tell as a person who had to carry betacam originals of some ordinary TV shows in a steel case, with guards hired to help and put them in bank safe myself, a hit like The Sims 3 won't leak that easy.
I laughed until I hiccup'ed on this one. You are a dead man sir... but I must imagine the punishment you will receive will be worth it.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
I did that once, made myself and my then-fiancee.
Sim-me spent the days wandering around seeking human interaction (mostly from Sim-fiancee) while she was really busy.
Then real fiancee went away to school in the Caribbean and pretty much dropped all contact; I saw her twice in a year and a half.*
I don't play the Sims anymore. It's like a virtual ouija board.
(So I started dating someone else...who is now my wife.)
I see it now-- the new business model for games will be to embed advertising in the game itself and then allow it to be pirated. Those billboards in Sim 4 won't interfere with your ability to play or copy the game, they're just there to sell you other stuff you don't need, non-digital stuff you can't download from PirateBay, like graphics cards, video monitors, faster motherboards and diet sodas...
I got nearly all the expansion packs for the original, (I think Makin' Magic was the only one I missed) and three for the Sims 2.
The only two activities I ever really got out of the games were house designing, and trying to also create buildings which allowed the AI to perform optimally/doing stuff to mess with it. Trying to model the faces of famous people in the Body Shop in the Sims 2 and then upload said faces was a reasonably enjoyable method of wasting time, as well.
Apart from that, the Sims really doesn't offer anything at all unless you're playing it with someone else. If you're playing it alone, however, the boredom can literally become physically painful. To make it even worse, at least the Sims 2 only ran on Windows; Wine couldn't run the version of DirectX it used.
If you're going to buy the Sims 3, you will get the most out of the game by either a) not going into Live mode, or b) if you do go into Live mode, realising that what you're essentially doing is directing/producing your own soap opera. I can see that having limited appeal for women, but I would have thought that even for them it would get old pretty fast, because there's only so many different kinds of drama that the Sims' interactions can generate.
I'd rather play Nexuiz, or Warsong Gulch in WoW, personally; those games generate much more of an emotional response.
Some of EA's disk copy protections doesn't work through wine, Simcity 3000 as an example, a classic I would like to play every once in a a while. I bought a copy of it for like a penny at Fry's but can't play it :-(
I would buy this new one if it works through wine, no way I am installing any Microsoft crap at home just to play a game.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
So there's a downloadable, crippled version out on the internet that gives you a taste for the game, but if you buy the release in stores or from EA you get all the content.
Coinciding conveniently with ads on tech sites talking about "download to get a full new city!"
Honestly I'm beginning to think l33t warez is quickly becoming the software vendor's guerrilla marketing campaign. Like Adidas giving shoes to the cool kids in high school, make the game accessible to people who will play it and talk.
Still waiting on my Adidas... oh wait...
-Matt
'The pirated version is a buggy, pre-final build of the game,' Holly Rockwood, a company spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement. 'It's not the full game. Half the world -- an entire city -- is missing from the pirated copy.'
So, EA decide to sell a game without making any demos available.
Then an EA employee manages to get a pre-final build of the game, with half the data missing, and posts it on torrent sites.
Then EA complain about piracy of a broken not-even-beta quality build ? I suspect a lot of people who downloaded it thought is *was* a demo, seeing as how it is apparently so broken.
Either it's a publicity stunt to show why we "really need DRM after all", or they have no internal security inside EA when any employee can walk out with in-design code. Or both probably.
I don't do it very often at all; I think I pirated 5 albums in 2008, and no games
Honestly, I wish I'd pirated World of Goo. It was way too short for $20 I thought.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Well, the pirated version sure didn't seem buggy to me.
I am not without decency you fucking asswipe! I am as fucking decent as any motherfucker is, so cram it up your god damn motherfucking asshole you dick face douche bag hore fucking high-o-mighty shithead
That's what they've always told us.
Or is it the other way around?
Time will tell...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Demos have consistently made me a legit customer several times over the years, where are the demos?
More importantly, I hate EA/Maxis's expansion pack system. Gotta be like $220 if you want all the new stuff. No game franchise punishes first adopters like The Sims.
I have seen the "Demo" out there and let me just say it is NOT worth the money they are charging. It is obvious that a lot of stuff was taken out of the game to be nickled and dimed to the public. If you buy it, you are getting ripped off big time, I suggest holding off a few years until they released a sims3 complete package for 20 dollars.
"Woops! We had someone steal the game from us... So - instead of charging you down the road for an expansion, we'll play dumb and just throw it in with the official release."
Yes, yes, it is the other way around.
why this board so fucking slow? And messed up to boot?
Most probably half of the downloads were media agencies, anti-piracy groups and EA employees trying to investigate the leak ;)
On a serious note, I have pre-ordered the Sims 3 for my wife as a surprise. She said to me "I won't bother buying it... i'm sick of this software having to hammer my CD/DVD reader... I'd rather the pirated copy instead - I can play that one without the discs.".
I guess that's a bit like my kid's DVDs that I bought. The first minute is "copyright notices" from around the world, the next two minutes are an extremely loud video (that agitages the kids) that says "you're a thief because YOU steal movies and break into cars" and then I sit through four minutes of crap adds before I have to press "start" to get the movies going. On the other hand, I can download the same thing from the net without being insulted - and without having the kids pissed off for waiting over 5 minutes to watch the movie.
For the record, we bought the sims and sims2 sets of games over the years. I've stopped buying most CDs and DVDs because i'm just sick of being f***ed around as a legitimate consumer.
I sincerely apologize to the artists for any lost revenue.
Go figure....
AC
PS F*** the RIAA/MPAA/FAST/etc.
Then explain why my anti-virus gone crazy when I tried to run the game with the original .exe. Prompts popped all over the place asking me to allow some "SecuROM" thing to mess with my registry.
If you wanna test that by yourself, try to run the game with the uncracked "TS3.exe" (not the launcher). You won't be able to enter the game obviously, but you'll see that SecuROM exists, and is trying to do something.
Why does it matter the number of people that pirated the game?
That's irrelevant.
The question is, what effect does that have on Sales of the game? To date, no one can answer that question, and no publishers have been intelligent enough to do the research that answers that question.
Will the Sims 3 be available for digital download worldwide on release day? Will it cost 200% more outside the US to download the game if it is available?
Publishers are either disingenuous about DRM and Piracy or they are run by stupid and shortsighted people. It's probably actually a combination of the two.
And now the media, ever the bastions of Independent,intelligent and responsible reporting have begun to parrot statistics on how many copies are pirated. It's easier to find out the number of copies that are pirated than to find out how many copies were actually sold, if that number ever gets reported.
And that too is indicative of the underlying problems which never get addressed.
-Gel214th
I have no doubt the pirated version is buggy. The official release is buggy to the point of being unplayable.