Despite his relative popularity, Pope Francis has ruffled the feathers of some conservative Catholics and he may now also find himself in the crosshairs of anti-piracy groups. According to the developers of the popular Football Manager games, at least one person inside the Vatican is stealing games!
The news about the Vatican came alongside broader revelations about the state of software piracy. Speaking at the London Games Conference this week, Football Manager 2013 developer Miles Jacobson told the audience that his team had secretly inserted code that would automatically track the IP addresses of anyone using a pirated copy. The numbers are startling: 10.1 million illegal downloads of the game have been detected thus far.
Of those illegal copies, China unsurprisingly leads the pack with 3.2 million, followed by Turkey (1.05 million), and Portugal (781,785). Perhaps most interestingly, of Italy’s roughly 547,000 illegal downloads, at least one was tracked to the internal IP addresses used by the Vatican.
The entire exercise was intended to educate, not prosecute, but Mr. Jacobson’s approach has been reasonable. Unlike major publishers who frequently count every pirated copy as a lost sale, the Football Manager team realizes that such an analysis is “ridiculous.” Mr. Jacobson revealed that, according to their data, only 1.74 percent of those who pirated the game would have bought it if piracy was not an option. Still, with over 10 million illegal downloads, that 1.74 percent equates to about $3.7 million in potentially lost revenue.
“Crackers are going to crack and people will download,” Mr. Jacobson said, admitting that there’s little that can be done about piracy without draconian DRM that punishes legitimate purchasers. But he hoes that the data collected by his team will help other publishers understand and anticipate the effect that piracy may have on their products.
As for the unknown downloader inside the Vatican, it seems some penance is in order. Start with three Hail Mary’s and four Our Fathers, then we’ll talk.