We all know by now that Sega’s Football Manager 2013 has reached such heights of craze and addiction that the game was downloaded over 10 million times. However, what you may have missed out on is the fact that even citizens of one of the planet's holiest of cities aren't immune from digital temptation, as even Vatican City citizens grabbed themselves an illegal copy of the game.
Yeah, you read it right. THE Vatican City. Now, we know there will be some crude jokes made at this point with fans pointing at the Pope as a torrent hound, or a Football Manager fanatic but isn’t he human after all? Though, even the Pope might find it hard to justify an illegal download.
Football Manager Chief Miles Jacobson, while recently revealing to the Mirror that the game was actually illegally downloaded over 10 million times after being "cracked" in May, stated that apparently there was one person from the Vatican City itself who downloaded last season’s game in the ever-popular franchise.
While surveying the game’s illegal download numbers, the Sports Interactive team discovered the IP addresses of the illegal downloaders since the game’s crack was embedded with a tracking device called Flaw.
This, in turn, led the team to find out that the largest number of illegal downloads came from China (3.2m), followed by Turkey (1.05m) and then Portugal (781,785). Apparently, the British (547,000) were the fifth worst offenders after Italy.
But that’s not all. The list went down all the way to pointing out the Vatican and revealing that at least one copy was illegally download for there. As far as general knowledge is concerned, Vatican City is the world’s smallest state with little over 800 residents, all of whom are known for their passionate and mad love for the game.
And the Mirror intelligently pointed out: “The less-than-holy act is even more remarkable considering that most Vatican residents are Catholic clergy or workers of the Swiss guard.”
On the topic of illegal downloads itself, the company, via supplementary notes sent to the media, stated: “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," the note added, as scripted by The Guardian.
Football Manager 2013, which was released back in November 2012, arrived with a certain, less known feature that saw cracked copies for the game "call home" when played, and providing Sports Interactive with data on where and how often it was being used.
