EA viewed the Sims 3 leak as a ‘Demo Product’ I recall I already mentioned this news before – but briefly.* IndustryGamers published a new article with EA CEO John Riccitiello stating that the early leaked version of The Sims 3 (which appeared weeks in advance of its release date) served purpose as a demo product: Although Riccitiello was being facetious, and EA says it did not deliberately leak the code, he noted that the result was basically an inadvertent demo program,*encouraging illegal downloaders to make a purchase to play the full game. “You identified our secret marketing campaign!” joked Riccitiello. “That was a very large scale – concentrated on Poland and China – demo program.” On a serious note, he then continued, “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. 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. So for the pirate consumer, they don’t get the second town, they don’t get all the extra content, and they don’t get the community. It was only concentrated on Poland and China, but I think of it as not being that different than a demo.” Demo or not…Still think it’s a bad move on their part.* I would of thought they would of released CAS in stores like they did for Spore Creature Creator priced at $10.* Even though we’d hear a number of complaints, we’d all be lying to ourselves if we said we wouldn’t of bought it IndustryGamers -EA Views Sims 3 Leak as ‘Demo Program’
