Football Manager 2014 breaks PC chart record despite crack

Football Manager 2014 has broken the record for the most consecutive No.1s in the PC charts.

The title has racked up 16 No.1s in a row. If the game can hit 22 No.1s in total (not necessarily consecutively) it will beat the record for the most No.1s of any PC game.

However, Football Manager 14’s sales are slightly down over last year, as it has been cracked and made available to illegally download.

We are slightly lower this year than we were at this time last year. Some of that has moved to digital, but also we unfortunately got cracked a lot earlier this year than last year, so we’ve lost some sales there,” said Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson.

Last year with Football Manager 2013 we were five months uncracked and ended up the year 22 per cent up. This year we are down compared to that but up versus Football Manager 2012. We were cracked within a week and a half this time, which is a normal cracking time. It’s disappointing, but such is life, we were always going to get cracked, it was just a matter of when.

We do budget to be cracked, the people we’ve hired is based on how many we normally sell, not how many we sold last year, which was a bit of anomaly.”

Jacobson said that the game continues to get huge support from the High Street, which explains its decent performance in the charts.

Because of the launch of Xbox One and PS4, there is less shelf space for PC. Shops only have a finite amount of shelf space and they are going to go with the products that are performing well.

The job that Sega and retail have done working together meant Football Manager has had much better coverage than a lot of other PC titles. Being able to get the support we have had from GAME was great and also the supermarkets, we had FSDUs in more stores than we ever have before. And that was very important in reaching the achievements we managed so far.”