Kotaku caught up with EA CEO John Riccitiello during E3 on the subject of EA’s finaces. During the discussion, Riccitiello made note of The Sims 3 leak, downloadable content in games and what they have planned in store for the future:
And speaking of pirates, no matter what EA charges for a game, there will be people who want to make EA’s games free-to-play on their own terms. That’s the nice way of saying what happened to The Sims 3 recently. “We got pirated three weeks before the game launched,” Riccitiello said. “And we were really quite nervous about it. We had a lot of telemetry about what the pirates were doing because the launcher was in the version of the disc [that got out.]… There’s a lot of Chinese and Polish among those consumers. We know what they’re doing. And we finally concluded that we were very happy that almost a million people downloaded the Fight Night demo in the first couple of days we put it out. And in a weird sort of way, the behavior we’re starting to see based on sell-through and registration [with the Sims 3] is that we really might have just put out a really good demo.”
Riccitiello laughed at his own remark, because he doesn’t quite mean it seriously. I pointed out that he might not want to hold his breath waiting for all those Sims 3 pirates to convert to paying customers. “I don’t think they will, based on their geography,” he said. The point he was making, he said, is that EA’s concern over being pirated gave way to a new, more constructive thought: “We were like, ‘I think they’ve demoed the game.’ That’s probably good. We probably should have posted it on our website.”
