Posts Tagged ‘BitTorrent’
The Sims 3 Proves Piracy Is No Threat To Sales
Before the era of P2P file sharing if you wanted to get a game for free you had a few options. First if you had a buddy with the right knowhow he could send a disc your way with the game and a crack program on it. If none of your friends were quite that delinquently minded you only had one choice: to hunt through ‘warez’ sites which were generally just spawning grounds for popups, viruses and porn advertisements.
Peer to peer downloading programs changed that and Bittorrent has been one of the most popular downloading programs in years. Though the first protests came from the music industry thanks to Napster, the video games industry has gotten in on the act, with many companies complaining that developing for PCs has become nearly impossible due to rampant piracy. Those who do often institute draconian DRM measures, frustrating players and anarchists everywhere.
The Sims 3 was leaked and downloaded over 180,000 times from May 18th to May 21st, yet the DRM-free game has sold over 1.4 million copies in its first week, making it one of the most successful launches in EA’s history. EA has been one of the main proponents of the argument that piracy is killing the PC gaming industry, but their arguments seem to have been invalidated by this.
My guess is that the theory behind piracy goes like this: you’ve got a small subsection of the market who will pirate a game no matter what. Then you’ve got people who are willing to pay full price for a robust, well-crafted experience, but don’t want to pay full price for something that they think might be cool yet is only netting five or six out of ten on the reviews. In the end even if the panic-mongers at EA are right and piracy is a huge problem, the industry will simply evolve into an online focus where verification is built into games and money will be made by subscription fees or optional VIP packages in free games.
Sims 3 gets leaked
EA’s The Sims 3 isn’t set to hit store shelves until June 2nd but it seems a group by the name of RELOADED has gone ahead and leaked the game to the masses.
Clocking in at 5.3GB, The Sims 3 leak has been spread to just about every major BitTorrent tracker there is. Several posters have confirmed that this is in fact the official release but will EA care? I mean, The Sims franchise is one of the best selling PC franchises of all time. And, with all of the new features being added to number 3 it’s sure to sell like hotcakes.
Of course, Digitalbattle doesn’t condone illegally downloading games so do so at your own risk.
Halo Wars leaked to torrent sites
Well it was only a matter of time, Halo Wars has been unofficially leaked and spread across the legion of BitTorrent websites.
If you really feel the need to break just about every copyright law there is you could head over to your favorite BitTorrent tracker and snag the ~7GB file which was apparently released by a group called ‘GLoBAL’.
Of course, we don’t recommend or endorse this practice. This is too bad for the late Ensemble Studios, hopefully it won’t hinder sales and Halo Wars recieves the acclaim it deserves.
Read (XboxInsider)
Spore #1 Most Pirated Title
While many were complaining about the rather harsh DRM methods implemented to keep people from pirating Spore, somewhere near two million people were doing just that. According to download data collected from peer-to-peer downloading program BitTorrent, Spore was downloaded over 1,700,000 times this year.
Sadly for Maxis not only do the number of pirated downloads approach the total number of copies sold (over two million), The Sims 2 is second on the list, Unfortunately many surmise that the vast amount of Spore piracy is due to the DRM they instituted on the extremely anticipated game.
While many question the future of PC gaming given the extremely high rates of piracy for these and other games, the continued success of World of Warcraft and other MMOs shows that the future of PC gaming is likely in that genre, given that the constant online access includes whatever DRM measures are necessary.