SEGA and Sports Interactive launched Football Manager 2013. This not only went on to become the biggest-selling game in the history of the long-running series, it also remained ‘uncracked’ until May 12^th 2013. This means that for more than six months, there was no unprotected version of the game available for illegal download.

When an illegal version of the game was eventually made available, the crack contained a flaw which ‘called home’, giving Sports Interactive access to the IP address of every person that downloaded it. Using a collection of analytical tools the Sports Interactive team were able to use the raw data to generate a more accurate picture of illegal downloading and how it has affected sales of FM 2013.

Today at the London Games Conference, Sports Interactive’s Studio Director Miles Jacobson reveals the results of this investigation for the first time.

The accompanying pages contain some of the numbers revealed in this presentation. The majority of these numbers are verifiable facts, while some have been extrapolated using reasonable assumptions.

 

FOOTBALL MANAGER 2013 BY THE NUMBERS

Total Activations

1,184,652

Football Manager 2013 was released on November 2^nd 2012 and remained uncracked until May 12^th 2013… a total of 191 days.

Taking certain variables into consideration (including the sales uplifts delivered by the inclusion of Football Manager Classic and some exceptional promotional activities in Turkey) it is conservatively estimated that the game enjoyed a sales increase of 4.9 per cent during this ‘crack free’ period. In financial terms, this equates to a net revenue of $886,000.

The fact that the illegal version of FM 2013 ‘called home’ delivered a total of just over 10,000,000 unique IP addresses. Further investigation of these IP addresses revealed that 18 per cent of those people who illegally downloaded the game (1.8m) went on to play it five times or more.

Top 10 territories for piracy

 

	Territory	Illegal downloads	Legitimate activation in the post-crack period
1.	China	3,186,227	-60%
2.	Turkey	1,053,302	-87%
3.	Portugal	781,785	-41%
4.	Italy	547,009	+14%
5.	South Korea	385,283	– 50%
6.	Thailand	364,724	+ 7%
7.	Brazil	353,833	– 37%
8.	Poland	322,757	– 59%
9.	Serbia	250,365	– 91%
10.	Croatia	230,261	– 58%

 

In Conclusion

In the period since the illegal version became available, the overall legitimate activation rate has fallen by 17 per cent.

Our calculations suggest that 1.74 per cent of illegal downloaders would purchase the game if no cracked version was available.

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. 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.