An article on MCVUK has revealed that at the London Games Conference 2013, Football Manager boss Miles Jacobson spoke about piracy involving their management sim.

Football Manager 2013 was released in November 2012 on Steam and due to some sneaky programming Sports Interactive managed to track every single copy of the game that went on to be pirated all over the world. The developers hid a small program called Home that fed Sports Interactive the I.P. addresses of every cracked copy of the game that people played. The game was first cracked in May 2013 and the figures that the illegal copies fed back to the developers amounted to 10.1 million copies.

The largest percentage of piracy occurred in China (3.2 million), then Turkey (1.05 million) and Portugal (781,785). According to Jacobson sales figures dropped heavily after the cracked version of the game was released.

By using some mathemagic he counted that of the 10.1 million pirated copies, only 176,000 were actual lost sales. This was based on the drop of game activations post crack release rather than the total number of pirate players. From these figures he concluded that lost sales amounted to $3.7 million.

Jacobson has also been active in the comments on this story and said in regard to the United States and the United Kingdom that the "US was low in comparison to most - as was the UK. Still way too high, but lower percentage wise (as was much of Scandinavia) compared to legitimate activations."

Jacobson's ability to distinguish lost sales from pirate copies is something that was sorely lacking from the gaming industry as little as five years ago. Digital Rights Management software (DRM) was so heavily and clumsily implemented that, in some of its nefarious forms, damaged paying customer's PC's. I had Starforce, the DRM contained on the disc version of UFO: Aftermath, crash my computer and kill my DVD-Rom drive.

It is easy to hate DRM because it is always cracked eventually, and then it is only those who have legitimately bought the software who have to suffer its presence. Although, if sales figures really did plummet after the cracked version of FM13 was released, how much would the game have lost if it used no DRM at all?