Pope Football

One person in The Vatican illegally downloaded Football Manager 2013 10.1 million others did too

Football Manager 2014 has only very recently been released, but now that the world has moved on from its predecessor, the developer has spoken out on the problem of piracy for the franchise.

Back on May 12th 2013, Football Manager 2013 was cracked, and made freely available on all manner of sites and services to downloaded illicitly. The crack had a fault though, which allowed developer SI Games to see the IPs of unlawful folk playing the game.

Lots of data was gathered from the flaw, and SI Games’ Miles Jacobson reports that 3.2m of the illegal downloads were China based. Turkey had 1.05m, with Portugal well below the million mark at 781,785.

There was one illegitimate download seen in the Vatican too. The indisputable source that is Wikipedia tells us there are only 839 in Vatican City, so The Pope is suspect #1 in our opinion – he does love football after all.

Jacobson believes that the high number of downloads does not mean a similar loss in sales occured as a result, but he calculates that approximately $3.7m in revenue may have been lost directly because of them.

SI Games hope and pray that Football Manager 2014 does not get cracked.