Divine Approval: That Time When The Vatican Pirated Video Games

Too Much Free Time

from the holy-shit dept

So, hey, you know how people who have pirated video games are the devil, the great Satan, beings of pure evil with nothing but ill-will on their minds? You know how the question of piracy and how producers react to it isn’t one of economics, but a question of morality? We may have a problem here. It turns out that last year’s version of Football Manager, a game series that involves the apparently enjoyable task of managing a football (soccer) club, included some code that tracked the IP address of anyone who attained the game through unauthorized channels. When the makers of the game went back recently to study the results, they found that 10-plus million copies of the game were pirated, predominantly within China, Turkey and Portugal, obviously an Axis of Evil Soccer Fans. Then they stumbled across this:

Italy was also up there in the rankings though, and of the 547,000 copies Sega were able to trace to the country, one was from inside the Vatican.

Now, it’s been some time since I was in Sunday School, but it seems to me that if the center of an organization that I was told was run by an infallible man in a giant hat through which God’s official decisions on morality are made is pirating video games, then that’s kosher (editor’s note: damn it, Tim, you’re mixing up religions again).

Okay, okay, so I’m obviously joking. Piracy taking place within the halls of the Vatican of course doesn’t make that action any more right than some of the other terrible things each and every religion has done in the past. We’re all human, after all. And perhaps we should give a tip of our hats to the producers of the game, who seem to be acting a bit more reasonable and human on the piracy subject than many of their peers.

While ten million pirated copies is cause for alarm, Football Manager boss Miles Jacobson is realistic about what it actually meant for his studio, saying that one pirated copy did not equal one sale lost. By their calculations, it added up to 176,000 lost sales, or $3.7 million in revenue.

While I’d still stipulate that I’d like to look at their “calculations”, this is a far cry from the “each pirated copy is a lost sale” claim. So good on you, Miles Jacobson. Perhaps your reasonable words will give you a special spot in Heaven. But if that doesn’t do the trick, I think there’s someone in the Vatican that owes you a favor.

Filed Under: piracy, vatican, video games