Electronic Arts aren’t going to be in the best frame of mind at the moment.

The Register today posted that according to P2P download counting firm, BigChampagne (yes, I’m a little confused about the name too), The Sims 3 has been downloaded 180,000 times in just 3 days (May 18th-May 21st) by means of file sharing sites.

Now I’ve just been doing a few little calculations here. Say every single one of those 180,000 people bought a copy of The Sims 3 legally, and each copy cost £39.99. The total cost of those 180,000 copies comes to £7,198,200. That means that EA has lost just over £7 million in just 3 days.

It does make you wonder a little bit about how bad piracy is.

And then you have to think about who uploaded the file in the first place. Somebody has to – it doesn’t just magically appear. It would have had to have been someone related to EA in some way. The general public can’t get copies of The Sims 3 until June 5th, so something has gone wrong there.

As I have mentioned many times on GEEK!, I don’t like to get involved with piracy. I will certainly be getting my copy of The Sims 3 legally – besides I want a physical copy of the disc and box (I’m that kinda sad guy who likes to have the original box and discs – I still have my Sims Deluxe Edition and Sims 2 discs in their original box).

If you are going to wait for the legal copy, then its in stores on June 5th.