Tue, Jun 23, 2009 | 07:35 BST

Sims 3 leak was “demo program,” says Riccitiello

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The pirated version of The Sims 3 acted as a demo to some, EA boss John Riccitiello has joked. He’s a funny guy.

“You identified our secret marketing campaign!” Riccitiello told IndustryGamers. “That was a very large scale – concentrated on Poland and China – demo program.

“In the game that was pirated there’s [only] one city [out of two]… and Sims 3 has a massive amount of content, and a lot of it is downloaded once you register with EA… and join the online community” he elaborates. “So you get that content in addition to the second city [which is downloadable for people who register], and that’s a major component… A huge amount of the gameplay is an overlay for the community, where you are sampling assets created by other people”.

Sims 3 has beaten Spore as the most pirated game of all time, having been downloaded more than 200,000 times before it came out. There’s more through there.

Thanks, Kotaku.

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4 comments

Shatner
23/06/09, 7:51 am

Looks like it’s paving the way for more and more commercial games to be presented as a ‘starter pack’ to the game with the meat of the content only accessible if you’re a legitimate customer who registers their product and has an internet connection.

Neat of Riccitiello to turn acknowledgement of piracy into a Nelson “hah hah!” nod to the pirates AND a sales pitch in the same statement.

EA know what they’re doing. Bless ‘em.

Jadeskye
23/06/09, 8:13 am

so now my ISP is going to throttle me (for piracy) for downloading a ‘demo’ on a p2p network?

I’m not a pirate but the lines are getting very blurry between piracy and P2P.

Shatner
23/06/09, 8:52 am

Well, you could always go out and buy the game and save your allotted bandwidth for downloading the extra content for legitimate users.

It’s so crazy it just might work.

Heh, I also love lines that start with “I’m not a pirate but..”