VIDEO GAME PIRACY

By Adam Satariano
BLOOMBERG NEWS
Saturday, May 23, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — Piracy, long a scourge of the music and movie industries, has beset one of the biggest video game releases of the year.

Electronic Arts Inc.'s "The Sims 3," scheduled to go on sale June 2, was downloaded at least 180,000 times from May 18 to May 21, according to BigChampagne, 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 co-founder of 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 personal computers.

The availability of "Sims 3" on the Internet highlights the difficulty that video game 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," Evan Wilson, an industry analyst at Pacific Crest Securities Inc. "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, according to Electronic Arts.

"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."

The company chose to release the game without digital rights management, coding that makes software harder to copy. Electronic Arts 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 1.1 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.

The Entertainment Software Association, the trade group for the video game industry, estimates file-sharing costs companies billions of dollars a year.

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," Fleischer said. "You're waiting a long time to download this game."

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My personal Comment:

I love computer games XD!

My second Comment:

The Sims is always one of the greatest games in my entire life :)

My third Comment:

No worries Will Wright, I will definitely pay you even though I dled it :P
I am wonderfully glad and willing to pay for good games =) Sims, Hitman, Warcraft and more! :D