Miles Jacobson, studio head over at Sports Interactive has stated that Football Manager 2013 has been illegally downloaded well over 10.1 million times, during his talk at the London Games Conference.
How did they get this number? According to Jacobson the crack had a ‘Home’ flaw which allowed the developers to trace and track IP addresses of the pirates. So which country had the most pirated copies of the game? Not surprising it was China with 3.2 million downloads followed by Turkey with 1.05 million.
Out of the 547,000 people that downloaded the game in Italy was from Vatican City, I’m assuming downloading pirated software is not shunned by God. Of course just because they pirated the game doesn’t mean they lost a sale, which Sports Interactive seems to agree. They do say they lost 176,000 sales (their figure) due to pirates. That would mean that 1.74% of pirates would have purchased the game, but didn’t due to them getting it for free. How much did SEGA lose? $3.7 million in revenue. They say that this lead to the team creating harder to crack DRM for Football Manager 2014.
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Is there even ever been one, just one game that has never been eventually cracked by pirates, they always eventually break into the system anyway, these ‘harder to crack’ systems merely postpone the inevitable.
Yep, they know that. I think the point is that if they can keep it uncracked for a few weeks, they get those ‘I want the game!’ sales.
Out of the 547,000 people that downloaded the game in Italy was from Vatican City, I’m assuming downloading pirated software is not shunned by God.
Thou shalt nor steal!….unless it’s virtual since that doesn’t count. 😛