The long awaited Sims 3 were expected to be officially worldwide launched on 2nd June. Electronic Arts, following the outcry against DRM within Spore, decided to stay with its usual disc activation without online authentication.

It seems that this gesture of good will was not sufficient. The game is already available on P2P networks. It leaked beginning of this week. The version seems to work (at least when reading the comments) and is delivered with the crack. Three versions seem available. The 5.6Gb Iso file has already more than 3.000 seeders. No doubt that it will be a success in the download top ten.

After the leak of “Wolverine”, it is the turn of EA. Unfortunately, this is a final version. Will that impact the sales? It is sure that this game was waited for a very long time by aficionados. It became even worse when EA announced a multi-month delay. For sure, eagerness to get the hand on the game asap will push people to download it. How many of them will turn back to the official version once available?

The game industry has the same issue than the movie industry with the leak before release. Finding efficient solutions is probably more difficult for games. Date enforcement and traitor tracing should be interesting topics to investigate.

Let’s wait the 2nd July to see the impact. By the way, the comments of downloaders are extremely positive on the game itself. :Happy: