The Sims 3 is Leaked! (On Purpose?!)

I don’t know about you, but I am becoming increasingly wary of the legitimacy of “leaked” content these days. Ever since Radiohead’s Kid A was leaked, resulting in the popularity of the band skyrocketing, it seems that these so-called “leaked” albums, movies or video games always end up selling pretty well. Better, perhaps, then they might should have.

Take the latest Wolverine movie, for example. It was leaked, albeit in unfinished form, a full month before it hit theaters. The leak was highly publicized across the Internet and news media and, in my opinion, probably boosted Wolverine ticket sales a tremendous amount. Actually, I saw the movie and that’s the only reason I can come up with as to why it did so well at the box office. It wasn’t a good movie. This begs the question: Was this leak planned just to create hype for the movie? If, by releasing a half-assed version of the movie for “illegally”, the studio could boost public awareness and thus sales, would they? I think they would.

The Electronic Arts game The Sims 3 is another example. An article (via Slashdot) over at Bloomberg.com on May 22nd documents the “leak” of The Sims 3 a full week and a half before its release, scheduled for June 2. I wasn’t even aware that the game was coming out and, now, thanks to media headlines, I know that the game is being “Hit By Piracy Ahead of Sale.” But wait! Is it the full game being pirated? Not according to company spokeswoman Holly Rockwood.

“The pirated version is a buggy, pre-final build of the game. It’s not the full game. Half the world -- an entire city -- is missing from the pirated copy.”

Yet this copy has been downloaded “an impressive” 180,000 times! To me, that’s a huge amount of free publicity for EA. The downloaders are, of course, using BitTorrent, so EA pays exactly zero distributing costs.

And consider the hype over downloading it!

It’s illegal! It’s exciting! You’re a PIRATE! You lawbreaker, you!

I didn’t even know the game existed, and now I desperately want to try it out!

EA would normally have had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for this publicity, but by intentionally leaking (according to me) an incomplete version of their software, they get all of the publicity - by way of calling “foul!” - and almost none of the negative effects of actually releasing the full thing for free. People are still going to line up to buy the game even if they downloaded it because no one who actually likes the game will settle for less. I’m guessing a huge percentage of those 180,000 will not be playing the leaked copy in two weeks’ time.

What, then, should we as the consuming public do if indeed my theory turns out to be true? Will we tolerate this underhanded marketing technique? After all, if EA did indeed leak their game on purpose, their crying "foul!" would be lying and misleading - a mere stunt to get their game featured in headlines. And that’s really what it’s all about. With so much news and information saturating the Internet, it’s amazing that anything important gets prominently noticed at all. Unless your video game is either incredibly offensive or Duke Nukem Forever, it will almost never see any mainstream press coverage. These companies are desperate for anything, and this just might be the ticket. If it is, though, and this kind of secretly-leaking-incomplete-games activity keeps up, I’m the one who will cry “foul!”



_DZ