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Comments: 187 +- Games: The Sims 3 Racks Up Over 180,000 Downloads Prior To Release on Friday May 29 2009, @07:28AM
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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 then (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Ill just wait then (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm so it sounds like they released/leaked what amounts to a demo, maybe company's could start getting back into the habit of releasing _realistic_, _representative_ demos of games. It would be nice, then I wouldn't need to get a pirated copy just too try and see if it sucks (which it usually does).
Parent
Re:Ill just wait then (Score:5, Funny)
The pirated version is a buggy, pre-final build of the game
Sounds like the standard retail version to me.
Parent
Finally game for /. crowd... (Score:4, Funny)
Holly Rockwood (Score:2)
"Holly Rockwood" -- awesome name.
Let's be honest... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I know....I don't understand its popularity either....
It's popular with women (of all ages). To understand it's popularity you would have to under stand women, and quite frankly trying to understand women is all but impossible. I think we are doomed to never know.
Re:Let's be honest... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an RPG without the geekyness.
There. Get it now?
You make a sim, you lvl up your skills, you progress in your job, you get quests, you group with others. In the end you die and make a new character. Repeat.
It's an RPG. You do understand why people like RPGs right?
A lot of people claim that sims is a "time managment" game. That's simply not true, managing your time is just the backdrop for the main goal of character advancment.
Oh and guess what, Sims 3 is an amazing RPG in that it's completley open ended. You make your own story, do your own thing. You can play the entire game without ever getting a job, looting other peoples trash for money and sleeping in their homes. Or you can play a typical recluse and never leave the house, chat online for all social interaction and hack for money.
If you don't see what the appeal is of a game that lets you do whatever you want, I'm not sure I can help you.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't see what the appeal is of a game that lets you do whatever you want, I'm not sure I can help you.
Can you kill your family? Can you fuck your dog? Can you construct an atomic bomb and detonate it?
Seriously, I'm asking out of ignorance. If I can do any one of those things, I'll preorder the damn thing right now.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In previous Sims you could, but had to be roundabout about it: for example, set the kitchen on fire so they'll burn, don't buy any food and let them starve, keep them from sleeping and then have them take a swim so they'll fall asleep in the pool. Or just sell the pool ladders while they're there >:). In Sims 2, you could also keep them from getting into their coffin if they're vampires, so they'll die from sunburn. Or the ever-popular trick of selling the only door of the room
Re:Let's be honest... (Score:5, Funny)
If you don't see what the appeal is of a game that lets you do whatever you want, I'm not sure I can help you.
Can you kill your family? Can you fuck your dog? Can you construct an atomic bomb and detonate it?
Not really. but the sims 2 did allow for a lot entertaining sadism [somethingawful.com]. In all honesty, comparing it to an RPG is going a bit too far. I like to think of it as a micro-management less-god-game, where you don't really have a lot of freedom (because you're stuck with the "dialogue" options/careers/whatnot the programmers made for you), but it has a lot of a meta-game aspect to it.
A woman I once dated for a while really enjoyed the sims 2. She probably had a dozen or so families in her own little town, with meticulously designed houses and carefully balanced schedules heading for that maximum on the career ladder. She was quite the control freak when it came to the game, making sure that most sims stayed the same age as other sims, so she would switch families every time she played for a while. At some point I found myself alone at home with her laptop and the irresistable urge to introduce a little chaos into that perfectly ordered world.
After taking a backup of the savegames I created a character named Eugene Frankensausage, carefully crafted to be a bald bearded fat man wearing worn out jeans and what looked to be a dirty shirt. His house was a concrete square block adorned only by the mailbox in front of it and a single pink flamingo ornament in the yard. In the first few hours he got to know the neighbours, had sex with them which resulted in a fight, asked one of them to move in, then set the house on fire. This unfortunate process repeated itself quite a few times until he finally learned how to cook at which point the game became a lot more dull. By the end of a boring evening the neatly and carefully organized world had a lot of separated families, widowers, and people generally being in distress. There were also 3 people maneuvering through a small labyrinth in the yard with the end point being aforementioned pink flamingo lawn ornament.
Now, waiting for her to discover that Eugene Frankensausage had moved into town and not mentioning you had a backup, that was the fun part.
Parent
Re:Let's be honest... (Score:5, Funny)
My wife likes to make me and her in the game and then make them have like eight children together...
This is my life.
Parent
Propered (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the original release (referred to in TFS, which was beta code) was propered earlier this week [rlslog.net] - the "current" pirated release is the RTM code.
Re: (Score:2)
It does make me wonder where they're getting it from. Surely EA can plug the leak? (aka fire the leak)
Re: (Score:2)
The Beta probably came from a QA tester or maybe review code sent to magazines. The "current" release is almost certainly from a retailer - the game goes on sale Tuesday next week so it'll almost certainly have shipped out to stores late last week or early this week.
Problem with versioning (Score:3, Funny)
This actually hurt EA this time (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
So it hurt EA about as much as a demo version would have. If they had put out a demo, people wouldn't have to pirate to try before they buy. Then the only people who would pirate are those who never would have bought it in the first place, so that can't be considered lost sales.
Releasing a demo version should encourage peopl
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
so they played a pre-release incomplete version with half the content missing, and bitched that it was no good.
*sigh*...
download numbers are not good statistics (Score:2)
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 numbe
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
So guys, you kept saying everyone pirates because of DRM. Well, this doesnt have one now. What excuse should we use now?
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok. Let me try this excuse:
"I pirated it because I couldn't buy it anywhere."
There. Done. I'm sure a number of people who pirated will end up buying a real copy once it's released so they can get the online content. But right now if you're itching to play the sims 3 or just see what it's like, you have no other options but to wait or pirate. Most people are quite impatient to say the least.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
"I pirated it because I couldn't buy it anywhere."
Boohoo, god forbid that anybody have to wait a few days for something any more. Seriously, unless you are terminally ill and will likely to die before the official street date, why can't you wait. Don't you have anything better to do?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Why wait? What's my incentive here? Oh right - I'd be doing something moraly right. No sorry. Not good enough.
People will always pick the easiest option. Excersising self control for 2 weeks isn't the easiest thing for most people.
If they could pay $50 and do a legitimate download I'm sure that at least 10% of the downloaders would have picked a legitimate copy.
I'm sure 90% would still have pirated it. But that's people who had no interest in buying the game in the first place but may want to mess around wi
Re:What? (Score:4, Funny)
Don't you have anything better to do?
You do realize that we are talking about The Sims players here.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There are a number of reasons why many will pirate it now. For starters, the game is obviously done and is sitting at stores waiting for June 2nd. Due to differences between The Sims 2 and 3 in terms of gameplay, people will want to start experimenting with it early to see if they even want to pay the money for the game. You have those who paid early for the Feb launch, and have lost those deposits(the pre-order coupon they got with their pre-order expired in April).
The list goes on and on, but the p
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And at the low, low price of only $9.99!
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
The old argument was that people pirated because of DRM
Nice straw man, but the real argument is that people who would otherwise have bought legitimate copies pirate because of DRM. Other people would have either pirated or gone without. When making financial decisions, you should ignore these people because nothing you will do will make them pay for your product. Punishing the people who want to buy the legitimate version with DRM does not make people who, as you put it, are just dicks, into customers.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit. I grabbed the final 3 expansions for sims 2 off torrents, tried them out, and promptly deleted them. I learned my lesson after the final sims 1 expansion...
The final expansion in particular. They took the demo concept of sims 3 (apartments, playing your sims while other families are active), tacked on the half assed magic stuff from sims 1, and called it an expansion.
The sims series is interesting and has a lot of potential, but it's really damn obvious the EA execs treat it as nothing mor
Re:What? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm downloading it so that EA feel compelled to put the DRM back in for the expansion packs. I will then start a campaign to boycott DRM laden games which will be so popular that no one will buy any of the $ims 3 expansion packs thereby killing the franchise once and for all.
Parent
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I read in a review they can now get out of swimming pools without ladders. You'll need a room with no windows or doors.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I read in a review they can now get out of swimming pools without ladders.
That should be based on your Sims' BMI.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I am not convinced. A high BMI would give you more mass to haul out of the pool, but it would also make most of that mass much more buoyant. It probably evens out in the end.
I was sort of entertained that in Sims2 they even HAD a BMI. Or at least variation. I always wished I could change their height. A sim version of me doesn't look right unless it's short.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A high BMI would give you more mass to haul out of the pool, but it would also make most of that mass much more buoyant. It probably evens out in the end.
Having experienced a broad range in my life I have to say that no, it doesn't. Having more surface area means that you have more drag, too. It's the muscles that get you out of the pool.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The article says it does not use SecureROM for DRM, not that it doesn't use DRM. Anyone know what it does use for DRM?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The post has disappeared from EA's site, but
The game will have disc-based copy protection - there is a Serial Code just like The Sims 2. To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed.
Google's cache [74.125.155.132]
Re: (Score:2)
No, I "pirate" games that I've bought because of DRM - most notably Bioshock and Mass Effect because of their asinine restrictions on running things like Process Explorer while playing - though to be fair, even the cracked version of Bioshock wouldn't run if Process Explorer had been used since the last reboot.
Re: (Score:2)
It all depends on marketing, if you are good at it, a lot of people will buy & download it free from the net. DRM affects only buying customers and does nothing for the illegal market, this is why we hate DRM.
I don't understand why is so difficulty to understand the fact that you can never stop illegal offline use of your software.
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
This episode shows that pirates get to the game before your average consumer can touch it, meaning that there's a break in the production pipeline inside EA.
Their problem is their employees, contractors and distributors, not their customers.
Put another way: EA's biggest problem is EA. And all the DRM in the world (or none of it, for that matter) can change that.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Nice move not using DRM, its a shame its still the most retarded "game" i can think of.
However I think the market for game actually lowers the piratism rate for The Sims. There will be lots of younger and older girls wanting to play this game aswell, and most of them (or their parents) will probably buy this game. Atleast way more than with other games. Now I must note that I'm waiting for this game too, so I wouldn't count it as girls-only game either. But the market is bigger with this title.
Now what makes me sad is that pirates will keep pushing statistics and sales down for usual games th
Re:It just goes to show... (Score:5, Interesting)
Speak for yourself.
My steam account has about $1,000 worth of games and yet most are not online games that I could have pirated.
Thing is, it's easier for me to get them on steam than it is to pirate them. I don't want to deal with cracks, patches, recracks, etc. Paying the $30-40 for a game on steam is worth it just for the fact that I can download it again in a few months or years when I get the itch to play it again.
The problem with your logic and that of most publishes is that you are trying to prevent a pirated copy from working. This is silly. What they should be trying to do is give incentives to buy a legitimate copy. A few free downloadable content packs that would require online registration is all that's needed to make a number of customers out of pirates. It works for Stardock.
Parent
Re:It just goes to show... (Score:5, Informative)
A few free downloadable content packs that would require online registration is all that's needed to make a number of customers out of pirates. It works for Stardock.
Actually, EA is doing exactly this with The Sims 3. When you register your game as legitly bought you get 1000 free points to download more stuff from their item store. So you get the free downloadable content there aswell.
Parent
Re:It just goes to show... (Score:4, Interesting)
I just found and bought a new copy of the original "Diablo" (originally from 1996). The fact that the game is really easy to pirate and doesn't even need a cd key hasn't stopped me.
What shocked me is that it is a Windows 9x/NT game that works perfectly on modern 64-bit Windows. I don't even need to set 9x compat mode.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait, so you mean version 4 has higher system requirements than version 2? Oh the horror!
There were memory leak issues early on with Civ4, but they got fixed up pretty well with patches.
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Wow you are like so rebellious and really stand out from the minless zombie sheep! I applaud your individuality! Thank you for saving us from the scourg