Jason Preston's posterous

What's interesting about these sales is that they follow a torrent (pun intended) of pirated downloads from a leaked version of the game prior to release.  Rather than lamenting the piracy, EA execs suggested that internally, they shifted the viewpoint to seeing the leaked version as an "extended demo."  The reason behind this was the sheer volume of additional content exclusive to registered users that didn't ship on the retail disk.

Fascinating approach to digital piracy.