Well, this is old news (to me), but apparently, it's finally being summarized in 1 spot for a proper thread post.

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Pirated Copies Of Sims 3 Are A "Demo Program"

By Luke Plunkett, 9:30 PM on Mon Jun 22 2009, 8,979 views (Edit post, Set to draft, Slurp)

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Prior to the retail release of The Sims 3, the game leaked onto popular torrent sites. Hundreds of thousands of people then illegally downloaded the game. Which you'd think would make publishers EA really cranky.

But it doesn't. Not really cranky, anyway. EA boss John Riccitiello can see the positives in the piracy, and provide a refreshingly realistic outlook on the effects of piracy on a major game release.

"You identified our secret marketing campaign!" Riccitiello says, jokingly, to IndustryGamers. "That was a very large scale – concentrated on Poland and China – demo program."

"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" he elaborates. "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."

Man has an excellent point. It's like the old shareware model that companies like id used to specialise in. Give 'em half the game, get 'em hooked, and they're more likely to buy the rest.

Works for publishers in terms of sales, works for publishers in terms of combating piracy.

EA Views Sims 3 Leak as 'Demo Program' [IndustryGamers]

Now, some of you guys here can pull your head out of the... whatever, and not blame piracy for Sims3 selling only 1.4M week1.

piracy does help sales.
That comes with a huge caveat though.
The game has to be good enough to warrant an actual purchase.

Yeah, it's not like the second city was available to download in every torrent site after a couple of days

Oh, wait, it was.

Concentrated on Poland and China??? Seriously??? That version had every language imaginable to man...

heh, not a bad trick. could have virused the demo, but this way is less prone to law suits

That is FU@(*%)# BRILLIANT. I could never have imagined EA doing something that smart. I don't recall the person, but in another thread the poster mentioned this design. Don't use an iron glove to control pirates, but offer something more for the buyers. I'm sure someone will figure a way to get that content working. The mistake was to actually talk about it. This should have been kept quite. But this is brilliant.

Smartest Copy Protection EVER!!!!!!!!!!!

EA NEEDS to redesign the architecture for this to work with all games and then sell it.

The thing with torrents IIRC is that people tend to download the first release in huge numbers. So if they get there first with their own release they can essentially turn it into a demo like with this release.

I don't really think this is as much as beta as EA says it is since, as already mentioned, all of the DLC was readily available through torrents/various other methods shortly after their release. This just seems like EA taking a positive spin on a leaked copy of The Sims 3.

And yet, it doesn't stop you from being negative about it.

Those that are determined to pirate will not buy the game. The idea is to hook on those that are 50/50.

If the "demo" is large enough to not cripple the game like the regular demo, the future-buyer would be more willing to shell out money for the actual copy.