Has Steam Reduced FM 2012 Piracy At All?

Just curious about whether anyone has any statistics/information support Sega's decision to force people to use Steam for the latest FM. Personally I already had Steam installed so it wasn't a biggie for me but I'm obviously aware that this was an issue for many fans of the series. Aside from the posts on this forum, many reviews on Amazon seemed to concentrate purely on the Steam factor, neglecting actually reviewing the game itself.

I don't know how coy I need to be in writing this but this morning I typed a very innocent Football Manager orientated phrase into Google (I wanted to enquire about an add-on that includes Kingstonian FC) and the 6th or 7th link would've sent me to a well-known torrent website that claims to bypass the Steam system. I wouldn't claim to know a great deal about computers or hacking but I do know enough to not be surprised to see that people have managed to work their way around Sega's big idea. And looking at the date of the website's link, it didn't take long at all.

Plenty of people made the prediction when the Steam-FM link was first announced that it would make no difference to piracy whatsoever and, indeed, from looking at the amount of comments on said website's link this, on the surface, appears to be the case. I'd love to read some hard facts supporting Sega's decision to make installing FM more difficult for the average fan and I'd honestly like these statistics to prove that the decision was a wise and beneficial one.

Yes, it considerably delayed the piracy of FM and then lead to this http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/290673-Come-and-join-us!

I doubt that SI or SEGA will give a definative answer but it appears that there is little doubt that the steam route delayed the inevitability of the game being pirated till some after the game launch and that was certainly one of the objects of the policy. Opinions have been split on the forums but I suspect that most users will accept that, whether they like it or not, the staem road is the path the game is going to take.