So much for our piracy argument: though Electronic Arts (EA) wonderfully elected not to use heavy digital rights management (DRM) in its retail versions of The Sims 3, pirates leaked the game weeks early and have uploaded it over 180,000 times between May 18 and May 21, according to BigChampagne LCC, a file sharing monitoring company. The number downloads within this period alone represent $9 million in theoretical sales.

At this rate, the game is being pirated more quickly than Spore was, notoriously the most pirated game of 2008.

EA has since stated the game is not the full version, and is a "buggy, pre-final build".

Author's opinion: While everyone is obviously eager to play the game, it's doubtful a majority of the pirates will purchase it  upon release, although sales will be high besides. In either case, this sends a really poor message right now to EA about DRM. They really seemed to put a lot of faith in what much of the community was telling them by abandoning SecuROM, but by the looks of things at this point, their justification for using it had at least some merit to it after all. While the game would've been cracked and pirated even with the DRM, this doesn't mean EA won't take this as incentive to use it in the future, and in a way it's hard to blame them.