I never understood the whole "It's crap, I refuse to pay for it! So I'll pirate it instead!" argument.
If a game sucks, then you shouldn't want to play it period. If you play it and get any enjoyment out of it, you kind of owe it to the developer/publisher who created it.
It's a poor attempt to justify their sense of entitlement.
Maybe so but there appears to be no effort on the part of the industry to police itself in anyway. There is a lot of false advertisement in the gaming industry and absolutely no consequence when you get home, open up the box, pop in the disc and find out the game doesn't work or the features listed aren't even present. I am not talking about games that aren't fun to play, I am talking about games where English versions have poor translations and errors messages left in German and Russian, multiplayer games that don't work if you have any latency whatsoever, features listed on the box and on the website that are then pushed into an expansion pack instead, and the games that only ever get a beta patch, if they are patched at all, because the company has shifted its resource to something else that will make them money.
Once you buy a game, you are stuck with it and out of your money. And if you wind up buying a game that didn't sell well, there is no support. Speaking of support, I can't tell how many times I contacted customer support for a game I legally purchased only to be told to wipe my hard drive and reinstall windows. I am going to reinstall windows just because two units that don’t' ever meet in 50% of my games don't calculate their battles properly?
So to sum it up we've got false advertisement, terrible translation work, lack of customer support for a game that may or may not have good game play and two types of people playing the game, those who paid and are brushed off by the company who (the customer) wind up losing time and money, and those who pirated it who didn't lose their money and seem to have way too much time on their hands and probably aren't expecting customer no service anyway.
Having said that. I purchased Sims 1 and most of its expansion packs. Sims 2 and most of its expansion packs. Ignored Sims 3 after EA announced it's Securom policy, and just started looking at it again after they backed off. EA's games are pretty well supported, including the Sims series, only ever encountered a problem with one of their other games that required me to alter the .ini file. I don't pre-order from anyone and reading reviews and, more importantly, info on forums keeps me from buying the worse games on the market.
People who are pirating the Sims 3 aren't fans, are just cheap and getting back at EA is just a child's tantrum excuse since it is not using the DRM many rebelled against.