New security measures enabled Football Manager dev to stop illegal file sharing for two weeks
Football Manager 2013 had more staff than ever working on it, because last year’s version was piracy free for two weeks.
Football Manager 2012 sold better during its opening week because new security measures meant it took hackers a little longer to crack the game.
Developer Sports Interactive and publisher Sega then invested the extra revenue into the studio by hiring ‘17 or 18’ staff, which meant this year’s game boasts over 900 new features.
“Last year the measures we took meant the game wasn’t pirated for two weeks,” studio director Miles Jacobson told MCV.
“And the extra sales we got in that two weeks is why we have managed to hire more staff this year. The new game has a new system being used, and as of the time of talking the Beta hadn’t been cracked.
Advertisement
"If we can hold a few more weeks, it would be a benefit to retail and ourselves. And ultimately for the consumer, because once again if we do much better this year, we will invest that back into the studio, take on more people and do more features.”
Football Manager 2013 debuted at No.4 in the charts this week, and Jacobson hopes the game’s new classic mode will encourage gamers with less time on their hands to give the title a go.
“We are expecting this to be the biggest selling Football Manager we ever had,” he added.
This story was originally published on our siter-site, MCV.
I'd be very interested to see the proof behind this claim, as it sounds like it could far too easily be a coincidence. It also doesn't sound like they had much faith in their game; Perhaps they simply had a bigger following or fans of the previous games? Perhaps the game was genuinely just better and more people felt like buying it?
What was the sales comparison anyway, maybe the sales were just doing better than projected? Even if there was a correlation, it certainly doesn't immediately mean there's a direct causal link anyway.
Quite a random and meaningless statement anyway as there is only ever speculation that pirated games link directly to lost sales, something which doesn't seem to actually hold true and is never proven.
It saw a 20% increase over FM11 according to vgchartz.
FM09 sales were most likely down to the fact of the new 3d engine. To truly know if piracy was responsible for the entire 20% increase, or just how much it affected sales can be determined by examining the behaviour of a sample set of pirates over a period of years.
The iPhone app is a factor, as is the success of games such as I AM Playr, which would have undoubtedly raised greater awareness of Football Manager to new players and
The Football Manager series sees roughly the same amount of sales year on year, but anyone serious about piracy is going to wait a few weeks if they really don't want to pay so that's the only reason I was suspicious of this. If sales saw a sudden 17% decrease when it was cracked, then the idea that piracy was the only factor would hold much more weight.
The feature set of FM12 was pretty impressive, so I really wouldn't be surprised if the sales was a result of it just being a good game though you can't ever completely rule out piracy.
Every story I ever hear from these guys is always about piracy. Do they actually update their game or just the DRM?
I wouldn't be surprised if what he says is actually completely true. Piracy is a major concern for companies and a pain for legitimate fans and buyers of games.
Games like Crysis and Football Manager actually suffer from piracy to the point where the number of illegal copies probably outnumbers the numbers of copies bought, and thats sickening.
Pirates are shallow, greedy, over entitled people and more should be done to catch them. If you pirate games your not a gamer your simply a thief.
