14 DAY TRIAL // Mile Jacobson, the leader of developer Sports Interactive, says that their Football Manager 2013 has been already pirated more than 10 million times and that the company has access to the IPs of all those who have obtained the game illegally.
The crack for FM 2013 was created in May of this year, a few months after the game was launched (in late 2012).
Apparently, it has a flaw that allows the team to track illegal copies and get access to the IP address of the pirates.
Jacobson says that the biggest number of illegal downloads comes from China, with 3.2 registered infractions, with 1.05 million linked to Turkey and Portugal taking third place in the piracy chart.
The developer says that one illegal download was also registered as coming from an address associated with the Vatican.
Sports Interactive says that only about 18 percent of those who have pirated Football Manager 2013 have played the game more than five times, which means that they were actually interested in the experience.
The company also acknowledges that most of those who stole the title would not have bought it because they lacked the resources to do so.
The studio estimates that 1.74% of them would have ended up buying FM 2013 if a crack would never have been launched, which means that about 3.7 million dollars (2.4 million Euro) were lost to piracy.
Currently, Sports Interactive is not planning to take any legal action against those who have stolen the game.
The development team has recently launched Football Manager 2014, which introduces more than 1,000 of new features, although some of them might not be immediately apparent for casual players.
The biggest modifications have been made to the tactics system, which is now more intuitive.
There’s more information in the Softpedia review of Football Manager 2014.