Though suffering $1 billion in losses over the last year and laying off over 1,100 people, Electronic Arts (EA) appears to be back on its feet thanks to to flagship series The Sims. Their new CEO John Pleasants previously stated the hits they've taken the past while have been due to a lack of blockbuster titles, however The Sims 3, the latest game in the multimillion selling franchise, has sold over 1.4 million copies in its first week alone, making for $70m in revenue. This have proved to be the biggest PC game launch in the company's history, so it seems this fiscal year will be a much different picture then last. Of course, the game's delay afforded EA the time to make it Mac compatible as well, so that certainly didn't hurt.

Further on that, the iPhone/iPod Touch version of the game, despite selling for $9.99, is the number one title on Apple's App Store in 37 countries, and has stayed that way since launch.

EA has put a lot of work into the community features for The Sims 3, too, and the efforts have certainly paid off: over 7 million downloads from the "Exchange" (where players share their custom-made content) have been racked up currently (hey, the leafy dress was very pretty, don't judge us!); curiously, nothing in the press release mentions the Store, where content requires moolah -- perhaps this is the start of a new financial model for The Sims.

New producer for the series and head of the EA Play label (the team behind the game) Rod Humble had this to say of the success:

"With more than a dozen press awards, strong reviewer scores and positive feedback from The Sims community, we are thrilled with the success of The Sims 3 launch and the early sales indicate that we have another hit on our hands. The volume of items created with The Sims 3 and downloaded online is a testament to how passionate The Sims players are. It's their world now, we can't wait to see everything players create and share."

Naturally, we can't resist writing about piracy and digital rights management (DRM) with this news: as mentioned before, there was a very low level of protection on the game (just a disk check and serial key), and piracy for the game was very high; while this still appears to be going fairly strong, as we can see, it's not terribly relevant at this point.

True, everyone plays The Sims, but even so the figures are surprising and should send a good message to EA about, first, supporting the PC, and second, using DRM -- that is, if you make a quality title that is not only something you can be proud of, but is what fans want too (most of them, anyway), piracy won't matter much, and DRM won't be necessary. Here's our hope the company continues down this road going into the future (and other companies follow), to which end we wish them the best.