Football Manager 2013 pirated over 10 million times

Over 10 million people illegally downloaded Football Manager 2013, and its developer knows the IP address of every single one of them.

Speaking at the London Games Conference 2013, as reported by MCV, Football Manager producer Miles Jacobson said the game was cracked in May 2013, but the crack included a feature allowing Sports Interactive to log the IP of everybody who nabbed it illegally.

Of the 10.1 million pirates, Jacobson revealed the largest chunk came from China, with 3.2 million downloads. Another 1.05 million were from Turkey, and Portugal and Turkey came in next with 781,785 and 547,7000 respectively.

One illegal download was apparently made form inside the Vatican.

Sports Interactive is good-humoured about the astounding figures, with Jacobson commenting that it would be "ridiculous" to equate the piracy with lost sales. He said only about 1.74% of pirates would have purchased the game had a crack not been available, which sounds small but 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.

18% of those who downloaded the game illegally played it five times or more, so about 1.8 million players are enjoying a game they didn't pay for.