Developer Sports Interactive has spoken out on its piracy woes, revealing the PC version of Football Manager 2013 was illegally downloaded a staggering 10 million times.
Speaking at the London Games Conference 2013, Sports Interactive’s director Miles Jacobson announced that illegally pirated versions of Football Manager 2013 were downloaded by 10.1 million people, including a single soul within the Vatican.
Although Jacobson has dismissed the notion that one pirated download equates to one lost sale as “ridiculous”, he claimed that the 10.1 million downloads will work out to be about 176,000 sales of the game lost. This 1.74 per cent loss of sales will have cost the developer in the region of £2.3 million.
With Chinese nationals the biggest offenders accounting for 3.2 million illegal downloads, Turkey and Portugal rounded out the podium positions for those in need of slapped wrists, accounting for 1.05 million and 781,785 pirated downloads respectively.
These precise figures were made possible by a flaw left behind when the game was cracked back on May 12. Dubbed ‘Home’, this flaw allowed Sports Interactive to track the IP address of everyone who illegally downloaded a copy of the game.
Despite being downloaded 10.1 million times, just 18 per cent of those pirating Football Manager 2013 played the game more than five times.
Having recently been superseded, Football Manager 2014 was officially released back on October 30.
Read More: Best Games 2013
Via: MCV
