Football Manager 2013 Pirated 10 Million Times

[Steven Bogos]

Football Manager 2013 Pirated 10 Million Times

A feature in the game's crack has allowed the developer to track the IP addresses of every person who pirated the game.

Are you one of the 10.1 million people who pirated Football Manager 2013? If so, developer Sports Interactive knows where you live! The game's crack, which surfaced around May, had a feature which allowed Sports Interactive to track the IP address of everyone who pirated the game, allowing them to gather some interesting statistics about where the world's biggest pirates are. The devs were, however, relatively good humored about the staggering statistics, stating that it is "ridiculous" to equate the piracy with lost sales.

The figures revealed, somewhat unsurprisingly, that China had the most pirates, clocking in at 3.2 million copies. Another 1.05 million were from Turkey, and Portugal game in third at 781,785. A single illegal download was logged from inside the Vatican City. Even men of God are tempted by Football Manager's addictive management gameplay.

Football Manager producer Miles Jacobs said only about 1.74% of pirates would have purchased the game had a crack not been available. This is a small percentage, but it does adds up to $3.7 million in lost revenue. Based on decreased activations, Jacobson believes 176,000 sales were lost as a direct result of the crack, a negligible percent of the 10.1 million.

He also stated that only around 18% of people who pirated the game have played it more than five times, showing that the vast majority of pirates simply pirate a game to try it out.

Source: VG24/7 [http://www.vg247.com/2013/11/14/football-manager-2013-pirated-over-10-million-times/]

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[Ferisar]

Obviously most of them didn't play it because they realized it wasn't actual football.

ha

haha

-looks up the game-
...

FUCK ME

 

[Reed Spacer]

Hey, I run under the personal credo 'Never buy what you can borrow; never borrow what you can steal', so...

 

[katuysha]

It's nice too see a developer use some hard numbers and not just a knee-jerk reaction about piracy, although I wonder where the 1,74% estimate is from.

 

[Saulkar]

This is interesting but I am wary over how something like this can be exploited for less than benign purposes.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Where are they getting that 1.74% number from?

If you pull down your trousers while I go and put on a pair of gloves I can demonstrate the process.

 

[Yopaz]

Where are they getting that 1.74% number from?

Probably based on where they live and using statistics from previous games to see how the pirates overlap those who have bought previous installations. China being one of the major pirates is unlikely to have any legitimate customers mostly because buying legally is actually quite difficult over there. Even if you pay for a game it's most likely not a legal version. Then there's those who only played it once which can be assumed to be curious and find out they don't like it. Those are unlikely customers too.

The number is too specific to make it sound like they're just pulling it out of their ass at random, but I think they have done some statistical magic to get to the number meaning it's just as much bullshit as picking any other number from 0-10 at random since you can't use statistics from the past to determine the present or future condition of the world. It just sounds like they know more than they do.

 

[shintakie10]

Where are they getting that 1.74% number from?

Probably the same place where Ubisoft gets their ridiculous numbers to support their horrendously anti consumer policies.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Are you one of the 10.1 million people who pirated Football Manager 2013?

Yes, but unlike most of the so-called pirates game companies talk about I got it from a ship I hijacked in the Malacca Straits.... along with several dozen hyundais, 25kg of heroin hidden in cheap furniture and an number of asylum seekers that I've since rehoused in Whyalla (because I'm a practicing misanthrope).

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Where are they getting that 1.74% number from?

Probably the same place where Ubisoft gets their ridiculous numbers to support their horrendously anti consumer policies.

An institutionalised paranoid schizophrenic?

 

[Evil Smurf]

I like how the pope is a gamer

 

[Reed Spacer]

Are you one of the 10.1 million people who pirated Football Manager 2013?

Yes, but unlike most of the so-called pirates game companies talk about I got it from a ship I hijacked in the Malacca Straits.... along with several dozen hyundais, 25kg of heroin hidden in cheap furniture and an number of asylum seekers that I've since rehoused in Whyalla (because I'm a practicing misanthrope).

Was my...medication there?

The...special pills I'm on?

 

[josemlopes]

Finally, some somewhat legit data about piracy. Kind of cool that they went on to get it and not use it to sue the pirates but more for the intent of understanding what goes on with it

 

[Entitled]

They have the peoples IPs after all, so they know right around where they live, how close the nearest game stores are, if STEAM is available there ect. They can rule out a lot of potential customers that way, and the crack was sending them info on the games usage they pointed out so they know how often and likely how long you played the game, people who booted it up a few times likely would never have been customers anyway so they can mark them off.

Though they are still missing the bigger picture that way.

Even if they somehow included the sales gained through piracy-as-demo-leading-to-extra-sale (e.g.: 20.5%), counting them as a net gain of piracy, and detracting it from a larger number of piracy-as-payment-aversion (e.g.: 22.24%), to get the 1.74% as the number of how piracy harms them, they are still inevitably missing the more intangible effects that piracy culture had on long term sales.

On one side, even the most responsibly industry-supporting pirates are contributing to piracy staying popular, and making it easier for freeloaders as well.

On the other side, 10 million extra players mean a huge brand recognition, online community support, press interest, etc, various forms of word of mouth. If they could shut out all those 10 million people, it might at first look like a slightly good thing, because their harm slightly outweights their benefit, yet on the longer term lead to the brand's obascurity and decline.


The only real way to measure how different the industry be without piracy, would be to compare the sales of the same game under the same condition, to one in an alternate universe where piracy doesn't exist. The next best thing we can do, is mere speculation and appeals to sane-sounding intuitions.

 

[Caiphus]

Interesting data about piracy. It's not immediately obvious where they got the 1.74% figure from, but I'm more inclined to believe it because it doesn't seem like number they'd manufacture to sell a story about how bad piracy is.
So, yeah.

Anyway, that's an impressive amount of piracy, there. Hmm. What to do about it.

 

[romxxii]

Hey, I run under the personal credo 'Never buy what you can borrow; never borrow what you can steal', so...

So does that mean if someone successfully steals your pants, you won't be pissed? Cool.

Even if they somehow included the sales gained through piracy-as-demo-leading-to-extra-sale

That excuse won't even won't work for this particular game, since it has a demo [steam://install/216530] out on Steam.

 

[el derpenburgo]

Jokes on the pirates, unpatched the game was unwinnable; you'd go on winning streaks then you would hit a terrible run of form for no reason, and you couldn't do anything about it due to the nature of the game. IIRC you could only get the patches through Steam, which has helped combat piracy according to Sports Interactive. There was a huge kerfuffle because most FM players are middle aged men who couldn't really grasp this whole DRM business and protested the Steam activation thing. Apparently the piracy used to be a lot worse.