Visit the Steam stats page on any given Friday (or indeed Sunday, or Monday) and you’ll see Football Manager holding its own in the upper echelons of the most-played list. Today it’s the third-most played game on the service, boasting 58,733 players at its peak.
Also today, Sega revealed their financial results and confirmed what we’ve suspected for a while: FM13 has sold by the bucketload. And that Aliens: Colonial Marines has made a much bigger splash than it deserves.
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As this year's Make Something Unreal competition enters the metaphorical big toe of its final leg, all four surviving student teams are under tremendous pressure to produce results.
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In less than three weeks’ time, four teams of Make Something Unreal finalists will be applying the final spit and polish to their genetics-themed UDK games at Gadget Show Live in Birmingham. On-stage to meet them and mumble advice in their ears when they present updates to the crowd will be Peter Molyneux, Miles Jacobson, and Dave ‘GTA’ Jones, alongside a raft of other UK games industry names.
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An entry has appeared in the Steam database that confirms that Football Manager 2014 is on its way, ending absolutely no speculation about the future of the enormously successful management series. We can also confirm that the world is still spinning and we expect the sun to rise tomorrow morning, though the celestial body was not available for comment.
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FM13’s Classic Mode is a wonderful idea; a leaner season playthrough created because Sports Interactive no longer had time to play FM themselves at home. It was actually conceived as a streamlined console Football Manager, akin to Firaxis’ CivRev.
Only, says studio head Miles Jacobson: “The feedback we got was, please don’t put it on console".Read and Comment
Hear every economy in the world breathe a sigh of relief: Football Manager 2013 is to be released on a Friday, saving workplaces from spontaneous mass affliction. That’s Friday November 2nd, simultaneously across the world.Read and Comment
I really couldn’t tell you what the most exciting part of yesterday’s FM 2013 announcement was. But it’s a dead heat between proper Steam multiplayer integration and the addition of the new Classic Mode, which aims to fold as much of the FM experience into eight to ten hours of play.
What we didn’t know yesterday is that Classic Mode was thunk up by Sports Interactive after realising that most of their dev team no longer had the time to play the game themselves.Read and Comment
Steam became the only way to connect to Football Manager as of last year, and was the cause of some riling amongst fans. It was a decision Sports Interactive’s Miles Jacobson wasn’t sure of at the time, but was in retrospect a “very good idea".Read and Comment
At the centre of today’s FM 2013 blowout was a singularity, an unknown quantity amongst iterative improvements. It’s called Classic Mode, and it’s designed to let you play a full season - lean, but satisfying - in eight to ten hours. It’s also to have entirely optional paid-for unlocks, to smooth out progress for those who want it. SI boss Miles Jacobson tells us: “It’s basically allowing people to define the way they want to play the game".Read and Comment
We’ve heard plenty of talk from Sports Interactive’s Miles Jacobson this year, on stage, on dictaphone and on forums, what with it being the 20th anniversary of Championship / Football Manager. But nary a squeak on Football Manager 13, despite rumours that the sim’s newest iteration might be with us by the end of October. And while a big announcement was scheduled for the end of this month, we’re now set to wait a little longer.Read and Comment
Football Manager is to become Watford FC's latest sponsor, following a new partnership between the club, SEGA and Sports Interactive announced today. Watford FC become the second team to partner with SI, joining AFC Wimbledon (whose kit can be seen above) in having the management sim's logo emblazoned 'pon both home and away kits. Watford were last month taken over by Granada and Udinese owners the Pozzo family, ensuring the club's safety in the immediate future. Bit of real world football knowledge, right there.
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It's always awkward running into your ex, unless you're Miles Jacobson, head of Sports Interactive, and your ex (in the metaphorical and business sense, rather than a romantic one) is Ian Livingstone, president of Eidos. The Football Manager developer split from Eidos almost a decade ago (leaving their ex-publishers with nothing but the series' name at the time, Championship Manager), and neither party had spoken openly about the schism until yesterday's GameHorizon conference, where the estranged pair sat down for an on-stage tête-à-tête. Edge has the story, in which a candid Jacobson reveals how their current publisher Sega penned them an offer on the back of a curry house napkin. Brilliant.Read and Comment
As part of our recent chat with Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson, we talked about the forthcoming Football Manager Online, how it relates to Ov Collyer’s sadly-defunct Football Manager Live, and if it's likely to be released outside South Korea.Read and Comment
We caught up with Sports Interactive’s Studio Director Miles Jacobson to talk about his plans for Football Manager’s scouting network. Almost as interesting as the network size and its professional usage was what he wouldn't tell us about. You can find out what it wasn't after the jump. Read and Comment
We caught up with Sports Interactive’s Studio Director Miles Jacobson yesterday. He held forth on everything Steam-related, focussing on Steam Workshop support for Football Manager, the continued dominance of Football Manager 2012 in the charts and whether wearable computing will ever come to Football Manager.Read and Comment
