All too often we make claims that piracy does not do much harm and that the actions of content owners are bizarrely aggrandized compared to the crimes committed by individuals (hundred thousand dollar fines for downloading ten songs is a bit much). But today when The Sims 3, the next installment in one of the best selling game series of all time, leaked onto torrent sites, we have found a real instance of something which could cause significant harm to the game’s sales. The original story mentions how piracy raised awareness of the draconian digital rights management (DRM) in Spore, Electronic Arts’ big game of last year, which thus harmed the game’s reception, but in the case of The Sims 3, as with most games, the concern is not so much the perception of DRM as the perception of the quality of the game.
Pirates are the people who get the game first almost everytime, so they are the first ones writing posts on online message boards and in other communities detailing their opinions. So if the pirates do not like the game, their criticisms have a big impact on sales; when someone does a Google search to find impressions on software he’s considering purchasing and finds lots of negative reviews, the chances of his buying said software significantly decrease.
This is only exacerbated by the fact that pirates almost always use buggier versions of games than the consumers would. Games released on file sharing sites before the actual sales release of the game are often not final sale builds. Rather, they are earlier prerelease versions of the game that still contain a considerable amount of glitches. If pirates promulgate that The Sims 3 is a buggy, incomplete product, it may have a critical impact on EA’s earnings for this year.
