Bloomberg is reporting that The Sims 3 was downloaded roughly 180,000 times between May 18 – 21. By contrast, Spore was downloaded 400,000 times over three weeks, eventually becoming the the most-pirated game of 2008.

"That's an impressive number," said Joe Fleischer, the head of marketing and co-founder of BigChampagne, a company that monitors file sharing. "If people want the content and can download it on the Internet, which is pretty much all content types, they are going to do it."

While The Sims 3 is not set to ship to retail until June 2, 2009, the game has still been leaked onto file sharing sites. "That's the nature of the business these days," said Evan Wilson, analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. "PC games are available before they are released. That's an issue they have been dealing with for some time."

Still, according to Electronic Arts, the version people are playing is not the final game. "The pirated version is a buggy, pre-final build of the game," said EA rep Holly Rockwood. "It's not the full game. Half the world -- an entire city -- is missing from the pirated copy."

The Sims 3 does not feature DRM software, seemingly a response to the negative reception and ineffective nature of the DRM in Spore.

— —

NOTE: GameDaily BIZ is about to become IndustryGamers.com. In order to receive the newsletter please sign up here.