Football Manager 2013 pirated by over 10 million people, claims Sports Interactive

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Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson recently gave a London Games Conference presentation on the piracy of Football Manager 2013. The figures he quotes may well be enough to wipe the shout off the mouth of their faceless manager man. According to Jacobson, over 10 million unique IPs have been reported as using an unregistered copy of the game. That's despite FM2013 having not been cracked until over six months after its initial release last year.

Refreshingly, Jacobson didn't resort to claiming that one pirate copy equated to one lost sale. He did, however, break down the figures in a slightly speculative way. "We believe that Football Manager 2013 enjoyed an uplift of 144,000 units prior to the crack and lost a potential 32,000 extra sales post-crack," explained the conclusion. "Therefore, the difference between the game never being cracked and being cracked on day one can be calculated as 176,000 in unit sales or, in financial terms, a potential variance of $3,700,000 in net revenue."

As always, it's hard to be sure how accurate these numbers are, even if SI's methodology seems more based in reality than most. But does the system take Dynamic IPs into account, or can a single pirate be calling from multiple addresses? And how much of the sales decline after the crack is a natural result of a six-month old game not selling as well as before?

Phil Savage
Phil Savage
Editor-in-Chief

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.