Last year, Sports Interactive moved its management simulation/obsession Football Manager over to Steam, citing rampant piracy of the game. At the time, figures the developer cited said for every one person who bought Football Manager 09, four others acquired it illegally.
How as Football Manager‘s Steam strategy gone? Miles Jacobson, the studio’s head, told MCV that Football Manager 12 wasn’t pirated the first two weeks of its release. “The extra sales that we got in that time has helped us to get the new members of staff this year,” he said. In concrete terms, that was “17 or 18” new people this year, bringing the staff up to 90.
So, there’s another thing to consider in the never-ending argument over the morality of piracy: Jobs. Sports Interactive says it puts profit from the sale of the game back into development, which means more hires.
“The new game does have a new system and, at the the time of talking, hasn’t been cracked,” Jacobson told MCV. “If we can hold another, three, four weeks, as long as we can really, it will benefit the retailers and ourselves and ultimately, the consumer as well. If we do much better this year, we’ll be investing that back into the studio, take on more people to be able to do more features.”
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