Football Manager 2013 is selling loads; Colonial Marines is selling far too much
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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.
The changelog for FM 2013’s 13.1.3 patch lists a lot of things, but as I read them I was thinking of something else: Football Manager’s in-match engine has become an incredible complex and powerful beast of a sim, isn’t it?
Perhaps it was the wrecked relationships; the broken lives. Or maybe it was just the bloodshot eyes of their own development team resigned to staring at lines of code, only to spend their spare time with retinas locked to the experience they create. Whatever the motivation, with Football Manager 2013, Sports Interactive decided we needed a new way of playing – a return to the more disposable, dare I say fun, way of experiencing the monster they produce each season.
[Breath, Benson. Breathe, just stick to the facts. No one can complain with the facts] Football is a sport. A sport that is played by men and women. There are two teams. These teams have managers and those managers, er, [you're losing it], er, [keep it together], organise the teams. [Good, if you're running out of facts don't let on] The managers are selected by their ability. There is a footballer called David Peckham. Managers are gauged by their aptitude in a simulation device, Football Manager. Each year's iteration allows new budding managers find work with a team. Footballers eat oranges. There is a demo available for the new Football Manager.
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.
If you like your management sims footbally then all the coverage of Football Manger 2013 has probably fed you to the gills and left you a little drunk with sim-pectation. Well, if you're one into your excess then you'll want to watch the six, yes, six videos of the sim. Each video breaks down a different element of the game's features.
I really couldn’t tell you what the most exciting part of 
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".
At the centre of 
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.
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. 
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. 
