May 22 (Bloomberg) -- Piracy, long a scourge of the music and movie industries, is taking aim at one of the biggest video- game releases of the year.

Electronic Arts Inc.’s “The Sims 3,” scheduled to go on sale June 2, was downloaded at least 180,000 times from May 18 to May 21, according to BigChampagne LLC, a company that monitors file sharing. That outpaces the 400,000 downloads over three weeks for Electronic Arts’ “Spore,” the most-pirated game of 2008.

“That’s an impressive number,” said Joe Fleischer, the head of marketing and co-founder of Beverly Hills, California- based BigChampagne. “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.”

“Sims” games have sold more than 100 million copies since 2000, more than any other titles for the personal computer. The availability of “Sims 3” on the Internet highlights the difficulty video-game companies have keeping products under wraps until the official release, just like their counterparts in film and music.

“That’s the nature of the business these days,” Evan Wilson, an industry analyst at Pacific Crest Securities Inc. in Portland, Oregon. “PC games are available before they are released. That’s an issue they have been dealing with for some time.”

Last year, piracy accounted for 41 percent of installed PC software, according to the Business Software Alliance.

‘Can’t… Afford… Buying’

On the Pirate Bay file-sharing site, users traded comments on downloading “The Sims 3,” a game in which users build and maintain virtual communities.

“More Sims! Can’t… afford… buying,” a downloader named “Pengy” wrote in a comment on May 20.

“Great upload thanks,” user “tj01” wrote on May 19. “Still going to buy it when it comes out though.”

Copies of the game available on file-sharing Web sites aren’t the full version, Electronic Arts said.

“The pirated version is a buggy, pre-final build of the game,” Holly Rockwood, a company spokeswoman, said in an e- mailed statement. “It’s not the full game. Half the world -- an entire city -- is missing from the pirated copy.”

Code Cracked

The company chose to release the game without Digital Rights Management, coding that makes software harder to copy. Electronic Arts, based in Redwood City, California, came under criticism from users last year when “Spore,” a game designed by “Sims” creator Will Wright, included protections that limited the number of copies.

The code was cracked and “Spore” became the most-pirated title of 2008 with 1.7 million downloads, according to TorrentFreak.com, a German Web site that tracks downloads. “The Sims 2,” released in September 2004, was second with 1.15 million downloads last year and Ubisoft Entertainment SA’s “Assassin’s Creed” was third with 1.07 million downloads.

Electronic Arts fell 11 cents to $21.90 at 4 p.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have climbed 37 percent this year.

The current number of illegal downloads of “The Sims 3” suggests lost retail sales of $9 million to date, based on the $49.99 starting price.

“The Sims 3” is the biggest computer game release of the year, Pacific Crest’s Wilson said. He projects Electronic Arts will sell 2.5 million copies in June, fewer than the 3 million “Sims 2” sold in the first two weeks, in part because of piracy. PC games were 12 percent of Electronic Art’s revenue last year.

‘Single Greatest Threat’

The Entertainment Software Association, the Washington- based trade group for the video-game industry, estimates file- sharing costs companies billions of dollars a year.

“Piracy is the single greatest threat to the development and release of innovative and creative entertainment software,” Michael Gallagher, chief executive officer of the group, said in an April 17 statement supporting the prison sentence given to the operators of Pirate Bay.

News Corp.’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” leaked a month before the film hit theaters. A copy of U2’s latest record “No Line on the Horizon” also was available on file-sharing sites before reaching stores.

The number of people who are downloading “The Sims 3” is impressive because the file is at least five times larger than a movie, said BigChampagne’s Fleischer.

“It’s an enormous file,” Fleisher said. “You’re waiting a long time to download this game.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Adam Satariano in San Francisco at asatariano1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: May 22, 2009 16:21 EDT