The leak of The 3 onto the internet ahead of the game's launch earlier this month could have been viewed as a blow to EA, but big boss sees some positives in the thousands of pirated copies dished out via Torrents.

"You identified our secret marketing campaign!" Riccitiello quipped when speaking to IndustryGamers. "That was a very large scale - concentrated on Poland and - 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 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."

If Riccitiello is really undeterred by this epic piracy, then perhaps we could see a return of the shareware days, pioneered by games like back in the day.

By Luke Guttridge