For Football Manager dev, piracy is a recurring headache

Sports Interactive's Football Manager series continues to prove popular with paying customers and software pirates alike. At this week's London Games Conference, Sports Interactive director Miles Jacobson said Football Manager 2013 for PC has been illegally downloaded 10.1 million times since the game was cracked in May this year, MCV reports. It's not the first time that Jacobson has run into piracy issues. Last year, he was open about how Football Manager Handheld for Android reached a 9:1 piracy ratio (nine illegal copies to one legitimate copy). At LGC, Jacobson said it'd be "ridiculous" to think that Football Manager 2013 could've had 10.1 million in extra sales, but by measuring a drop in activations he estimated about 176,000 in lost unit sales, or $3.7 million in revenue. "Crackers are going to crack and people will download," he said, admitting that piracy is just a reality developers need to deal with. Jacobson commented on the MCV article, inviting academics to work with him and treat piracy of Sports Interactive's titles as a case study. "That would help legitimize the info and make it able to be used for education purposes - which we'd welcome," he said.