Sims 3 pirated more than 180,000 times Comments by Tom Bramwell

A good way to stop PC Piracy is charge less online.

I'm on a console protest at the mo and just playing 2nd hand. I decided my PC is a bit unloved these days so invested in that Metaboli site, not bad actually works like a charm and I get a choice of 351 games for £13 a month.

Now that's a good start to combat it but the selection is limited by what they offer, so I browse buy to own. Absolute joke on a lot of retail PC games. I've not used Steam but heard they to charge a lot for new games as well, it's the norm it seems.

Promote more rental sites on PC gaming and charge less for buy to own, job done.

Of course games industry remember some will ALWAYS get stuff on the black market - which is now free to a lot. It's the way of the world and always has been.

I quite want this game. I'm also out-of-love with the consoles at the moment, with World of Warcraft, Left4Dead and ...Peggle keeping me happy on the PC. This would compliment that selection quite nicely.

EDIT: And yes I'll be buying it. Sounds like pirating it in this case is far more of a hassle. Hopefully it'll come out on some digital distribution service, but I can live with the DVD version if I can nocd it.

People will pirate any game regardless of price, availability, developer or DRM

See: World of Goo

If its that much of a hassle, EA would release it over steam and have barely any piracy.

This game will go on to sell millions, definitely making the best selling games list of all time.

Why doesnt EA just release it now? The game was "accidentally" leaked 2-3 weeks before release. Alot of the people who download it are the people who cant wait till release and will buy it anyway).

Wake up EA.

"Why doesnt EA just release it now? The game was "accidentally" leaked 2-3 weeks before release. Alot of the people who download it are the people who cant wait till release and will buy it anyway).

Wake up EA"

The suggestion of an intentional leak conspiracy along with the declaration that someone should 'wake up' makes this sound like a post on a 911 truther forum or something

If its that much of a hassle, EA would release it over steam and have barely any piracy.

Only on Steam you mean? A Sims game? That would be utter madness, considering the huge target audience of this game.

Besides, Steam games get pirated as well.


Why doesnt EA just release it now? The game was "accidentally" leaked 2-3 weeks before release..

Are you suggesting EA leaked it on purpose?

@the_dudefather I was suggesting something else due to the circumstances of the leak (nothing to do with EA, bad use of quotes I guess!

What really, really p*ssed me off this week was that, on a social networking site I use, some 17 year old kid posted a link to the torrent, saying "have fun! why pay when you can get it for free?"

When I pointed out that Piracy was illegal, hurts the industry, hurt the developers, etc, he became extremely abusive. Reported him to the site owners but they did absolutely nothing (which I think is a bit daft as they can be prosectuted for letting someone advertise pirated software on their site).

A lot of other people chipped into the argument, most of them thankfully on the anti-piracy side (though one idiot claimed that "it's a beta. All leaked games are betas and therefore in the public domain and so this is completely legal as they are just using it to help fix the bugs" - wtf?).

The kid then justified his piracy by saying "I pay for my internet connection like anyone else and so if I want to get a game for free I will cos I've already paid for it."

The massive backlash he received though did end up with him deleting his profile from the site in question (after calling everyone narrow-minded retards, of course).

Sadly, with morons like this around, piracy will continue. My point is that far from people downloading the game because they "cant wait" and will buy it anyway, most idiots who pirate games honestly believe they have the right to steal someone else's hard work.

Piracy = might buy, might play = not confirmed purchase

I lot of people are over stepping the mark here some people pirate games because they want to try before they buy

Not many demos out these days on PC are there as many publishers/developers decided that the consoles is a better market for them and don't make the effort no more to push out demos for the PC. I remember in days of yore when I used to read PC Gamer (the best games magazine on the planet until Kierion Gillien left) when there were plenty of demos to try before people bought their games what has happened?

Plus all this focus on PC Piracy makes me laugh have you seen the amount of torrents for 360/Wii there are out there?

Most 360 games are pirated weeks before their release and before the equivalent PC game is pirated

It's time for the industry to wake and smell the coffee. The control is now in the people's hands and not the companies

There is a way out of this just start to think outside the box

No retail channels + Digital distribution = No piracy

If there is no disc to copy there is no file for pirates to download

Looks like the boys and girls at Valve are steaming ahead in this catergory but they do need to set their prices to equivalent e-tailers prices

I Agree with bad09. Why, when you cut out all the middlemen, does a game cost more to download online?

"I Agree with bad09. Why, when you cut out all the middlemen, does a game cost more to download online? "

Because those middlemen are still powerful.

When Sony wanted to release the downloadable version of GT5 Prologue at half the price of retail, retail threw their toys out the pram and threatened not to sell the disc version, so Sony had to give in.

There is one reason and one reason only why new games are so expensive and that reason is not developers driving round in ferraris or Publishers sitting on huge piles of money (look at all the devs that have gone out of business recently and all the publishers who've posted massive losses). That reason is retail with their 40% margin and second hand sales promoted over brand new product.

EA are charging £40 for a fucking digital download. Why would anyone pay that? Play have it for £30 and that comes in a box with a manual and stuff. How can EA justify £10 more for less stuff?

"EA are charging £40 for a fucking digital download. Why would anyone pay that? Play have it for £30 and that comes in a box with a manual and stuff. How can EA justify £10 more for less stuff? "

See lambtron's comment. If EA started selling it online at a lower price than retail, retail would go crazy because everyone would buy it directly from the publisher. And then they would refuse to stock the games in their stores at all - why bother stocking a game if you know more people are going to get it online for a much cheaper price? So the publishers are forced to sell the product direct for roughly the same (or more) than the game costs at retail in order to encourage retail sales.

You'd be amazed how much power places like GAME, Wal-Mart, HMV etc actually have over the industry.

"Piracy research firm"? Really? Wow.

Well, good riddance then to retailers. Retailers should have something to attract customers, like events, but almost none do.

@Bluemagic

Plus all this focus on PC Piracy makes me laugh have you seen the amount of torrents for 360/Wii there are out there?

Most 360 games are pirated weeks before their release and before the equivalent PC game is pirated

True, console games are also pirated, but you need to have a warranty-voiding, possibly illegal modification done to your console in order to play them, so it's mainly more dedicated pirates on the console side, whereas anyone can use pirated PC games. The statistics available also suggest console piracy isn't nearly as serious a problem as PC piracy.

Stardock apparently had 100,000 people trying to connect to the Demigod servers in the first week, despite only selling 18,000 copies of the game, and Infinity Ward claimed a while back that most of the PC copies of CoD4 playing online games were pirated copies.

EA are fortunate that the Sims has such a broad audience that they will still sell masses despite the high piracy rate, but other publishers are not so lucky.

I shed a tear.

Not sure I agree with the retailer margin argument to be fair. EA are well known to charge £37-£40 a unit to buy in their console games, that's why most EA games are £50 on the shelf. GAME have had run ins with EA a few times now over this, a few years ago they took all EA games off the shelf until EA backed down on forcing the price to remain high due to the high buy in price. When Sims came out on the PC a similar thing happened, can't remember the buy in price though.

For some reason, when I heard that you had a whole town to play with in Sims 3 I imagined a GTA4 style open world minus mindless acts of wanton destruction (generally the fun part) but with realistic traffic movement, streets populated with a thriving crowds going about their day, changing weather patterns and just a wealth of minutiae to flesh out the world that we expect from top tier titles in 2009.

Thinking this I then thought, "hmm, this could be really interesting".

I then checked out the trailers and... oh dear, not quite.

The full retail version will end up getting cracked and they'll download that one too.
How'd it get leaked in the first place, that's what they want to check out.
I have mine pre-ordered and looking forward to the creation of an Evil Sim. :)

I personally would move it to a system like steam (even though its had its problems),.. pirates come up with all kinds of excuses, and its only a matter of time before everything goes on a system like steam.

"some people pirate games because they want to try before they buy"

SOME people do, but as a proportion they are very much in the minority. The vast majority of people that pirate a game don't end up paying for it.

"Plus all this focus on PC Piracy makes me laugh have you seen the amount of torrents for 360/Wii there are out there"

The number of torrents is not the issue, the number of actual downloads is. The number of torrents might be equal, but the PC game torrents will get used far more (not least because an unmodified PC can run a pirated game, whereas an unmodified console cannot).

No retail channels + Digital distribution = No piracy

If there is no disc to copy there is no file for pirates to download

Er, what?

@rhubarbandcustard

Seems the main thing out of whack were your expectations for a Sims game. Mindless acts of wanton destruction and changing weather patterns? Really?

Just 'cos a game doesn't contain the contents of your imagination doesn't mean it has failed as a "top tier title in 2009". I'm pretty sure Sims 3 has plenty of stuff going on that GTA is missing. And rightly so, 'cos GTA is a very different game... see.

Come on Unclelou. You aren't thinking outside the box.

"If there is no disc to copy there is no file for pirates to download"

... are you for real?!?

And yet another thread where everyone can assume grim facial expression and nod their heads knowingly saying that statistics show that console games are pirated less because their torrents are downloaded less frequently.
And all that without providing any kind of data backing those claims up.

As a point of interest, I'd like to chip in to this discussion and say that getting your console modified (or finding one that can perform such modification) is almost as easy as getting torrent file. And in most cases people doing those things can fix said console too, if something goes wrong. For less than price charged by certified places.

But anyhow. The point I'd like to make is that arguments justifying overpricing digital downloads by placing blame on retailers are not really valid. From publisher point of view if they don't have to spend extra buck for retailer and just get all the money on digital distribution, that's what they would do. Personally, I'd contribute the equal pricing of boxed and digital version of the game to simple greed. There's an old seller saying. Whatever the price, there's always going to be some fool that buys it. So, as long as people are going to pay what publishers and retailers charge them, not much will change.

At least there are some choices in this matter yet and if one looks, it's possible to find better deals for many games. That's about the only bright side to this whole mess.

"As a point of interest, I'd like to chip in to this discussion and say that getting your console modified (or finding one that can perform such modification) is almost as easy as getting torrent file"

Oh come on. That is utter nonsense and you surely know it. Getting a torrent file involves barely more than firing up a web browser and typing "torrent file" into google.

How would digitial distribution have stopped 180,000 illegal downloads of a game before it's released?

Isn't the Sims the highest selling PC game of all time? Between the games and the expansions they've got over 100 million sales. 180,000 pirated copies is nothing.

You can argue the morales and ethics all you want but EA are still going to make a mint and everyone who worked on the game will get their dues.

@kangaratoo

Contrary to what it might sound like, it's the fact I observed in at least two countries so far, during my travels. That's england and poland. Can't say much about the states: I'm not a console person and didn't really look at those things while I was there.
All I can say is that locating place where you can get your console modified is barely more complicated than asking some of your console owning friends or visiting some of the computer fairs. Which is why I'm constantly surprised by general assumption that piracy is problem restricted to pc sales. All I saw points to the fact that piracy affects pc's and consoles in, perhaps, comparable degree.
Consider the fact of all the console games torrents being available. They wouldn't be if number of people looking for them was small.
As far as I can see, piracy became a convinient culprit for publishers of pc games, taking blame for poor sales. Nice excuse, masking many instances of shoddy coding, bad game design, sloppy ports and outrageous 'anti piracy' measures that are real factors affecting game sales.

There is a new version circluating since this week claiming to be the real deal.
Therefore I shed two tears for EA (one for each version).