Sure it's a long title we're suckers for things that rhyme. Apparently Pirates, the non-Somalian ship boarding kind, are suckers for the Sims 3 as it has become pirated faster than last 2008's Spore which was touted as the "most pirated game of the year."

Bloomberg is reporting that the illegal torrent has been downloaded around 180,000 times since it was made available. Now if you calculate the average MSRP per box assuming that each download would have been one purchase then that comes out to around 9 million USD in losses for EA.

Now we must say the reasons the pirate community claimed was the reason for the Spore downloads from last year was due to the the controversial use of SecuROM DRM. It was after said incident that EA dropped the system and The Sims 3 went DRM free. The continued downloading of the program does not put the pirate community in a great spotlight.

Now we're sure that there are arguments on both sides of fence here but we don't know a lot of people who play The Sims that are super tech savvy; and albeit that torrenting isn't super complicated it might be out of the range of the casual gamer. Does this mean people are pirating the game just for the sake of having downloaded it? Do you need the street cred that bad? We don't know anyone who will think you're cool for having downloaded The Sims 3.

EA claims that the leaked version is full of bugs and is not the final code that will be released on the disc available in stores. Could that be some spindoctoring on their part? Perhaps, but one thing we ask only one thing to the Pirate Community "Is there no Pirate's Code anymore?"

Parle?