Football Manager boss Miles Jacobson has revealed the true extent of video game piracy on PC.

10.1m people have illegally downloaded Football Manager 2013, he said on stage at London Games Conference 2013.

The game was cracked on May 12th this year, but the crack featured a flaw called Home, which allowed Jacobson and his team to track the IP address of everybody who illegally downloaded the game.

Out of those 10.1m people, most came from China, which accounted for 3.2m of the illegal downloads. Turkey was in second place with 1.05m followed by Portugal with 781,785 games.

Italy was also a hotbed for PC piracy, with 547,000 in the country (plus one in the Vatican).

Jacobson said that he does not believe that one pirated game equals one lost sale "That would be ridiculous to think," he said. But based on the drop in activations, he estimated piracy cost them 176,000 lost sales. He added that 1.74 per cent of illegal downloaders would potentially purchase the game had no crack been available, which would have meant $3.7m in revenue. Revenue he would have spent hiring new members to the team.

He told the audience that sales dropped off heavily once the game was cracked.

He said 18 per cent of people who downloaded illegally played the games five times or more, so that's around 1.8m gamers regularly playing a game they did not pay for.

He admitted that there was little that can be done about this piracy "crackers are going to crack and people will download". But hopes this data will help publishers and developers understand the true state of illegal downloading in the world.

Source

That is a very interesting Statistic. i wonder if this a another side affect of yearly releases as FM has been following the same formula since FM 07.

Also 1 person in the Vatican.

The pope plays FM = Confirmed.

To be honest with the prices for games in China its not surprising that we have most pirated copies in here. 10 mil for a pretty specific type of game is crazy.

This has always been the case for this series. Didn't know it was this bad though.

I'm reminded of I believe it was Tom Hollenshead of id Software was in convention talking about Piracy. And he went on how the piracy of video games were helping fund terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. I thought it was a bit of an exaggeration, but in poor countries it's easy to find a small kiosk in a mall just selling burnt CDs or DVDs of current games.

China don't care (about the video game industry).

So long as they sell enough copies to keep on truckin', it doesn't really matter.

I wonder how different these numbers would have been had they not implemented any DRM. Would they have still sold enough to get by?

How do we know that this isn't one person downloading the game 10 million times? Traveling across countries to dodge law enforcement?

The Football Manager games have always had a huge issue with piracy. Although I'm surprised the piracy rate wasn't higher in Germany, where the game is not available to buy due to licensing issues.

Really? The pirates were from countries where the game isn't easily available/for sale at all?

That's crazy talk.

On the bright side, 10.1m people were interested in this.

Seems like the kind of game that would work better if it was browser based and like MMORPG's, half the information was server-side. I'm pretty sure that's the only real method of that curves piracy. Though eventually people are able to create private servers but they're never the same.

China has the biggest population out of all those mentioned so 3.2m isn't that bad when they have over 1 billion people in the country.

But it does matter. He could have hired a couple of more people if there were ~200k more sales. Those people could arguably make the next version better, leading to increased sales in the future and so on. Sure, the studio is "getting by" but you'll never attract investors or make greater games if you're not growing.

Ugh, no thanks. A large part of FM has been the ability for users to create leagues that aren't in the game with the editor provided by SI. I just don't see the large community who buy the game legally being benefited by this server side thing & always online at all.

There was definitely a time in the past where I'd buy the Football Manager games one year & pirate it the next, but then I realised I don't need to play it every damn year. And after a spell of going back to buying every new edition each year at around Xmas time, having last bought it in 2012, I've come to the realisation that maybe, just maybe, I don't need Football Manager in my life at all. Which is some revelation, I've been playing Championship Manager & then Football Manager going back to Championship Manager 2. I think Steam is to thank/blame to some degree, because I just have so many more PC games now in my Steam library from sales etc that I just don't play one game as much as I would have played FM2010 for example.

I am surprised Germany is not up there since it is not allowed to sell this game in Germany because of licensing issues^^

@psychopenguin: There's no way to equate piracy into lost sales. If the piracy didn't happen; the sales could well be exactly the same, which means the existence of piracy doesn't matter with regard to sales.

what do these people need with football manager? are there really that many football fans in china? it smells like a weird scheme to me

THIS! THIS MAN WINS THE INTERNET TODAY!

@cabbages said:

This is a good point. I crunched the numbers. The 2012 estimates put China's population at 1.35 billion. If the 3.2 million is accurate, then 1 in every 423 people in China illegally downloaded FM2013.

Compare that to Portugal - a population of 10.48 million (est.), 781,785 illegal downloads equals 1 in every 13 people in Portugal. That's insane. In Turkey, it's 1 in 72 people, and for Italy it's 1 in 109. So for the ones we have (somewhat) reliable data for, China is actually the least piratical when it comes to football management sims, and by a long way.

@jakob187 said:

:D me!?

Sucks but pirates dont care. They too evil........ and broke/cheap.

I honestly had no idea this game was THIS popular. 10 million people is a LOT of people playing what I thought was a niche game. Then there is still all of the people who bought it.

I did rather enjoy your comment, cheerio good duder.

Well Portugal is an european country, and southern one. The population loves football, and with the economic crisis it is in with serious cuts in wages and pensions, and the lack of any cultural incentive not to pirate, it is no wonder.