Piracy has already cost Sims 3 $9m

The party that’s sure to follow EA’s release of The Sims 3 next week is likely to be a little subdued thanks to the news that the game is being pirated at a faster rate than ‘the most pirated game of 2008′ Spore.

Bloomberg reports that an illegal version of the game which hit the internet earlier this month was downloaded 180,000 times between its appearance on May 18th and May 21st.

To date this represents around $9m in lost sales – that is if you subscribe to the belief that every person who downloaded the game would have otherwise bought it at retail.

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