Football Manager 17 has been hit with a wave of negative Steam reviews, thanks to the lack of Chinese localisation for the management sim. Chinese fans have hit out at the game because of what they percieve as a broken promise by Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson.
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Out of the thousand-odd reviews for Football Manager 17 on Steam, only 30% are positive, which isn’t exactly a great stat, especially when the game isn’t actually out until November 4. Many of these negative reviews are seemingly in protest to the lack of a Chinese language option.
In an announcement earlier this month, Sega said they were opening up Steam Workshop to allow people to help translate the game into unsupported languages, but that only seemed to rile up the player base even more. It’s got to the point where Jacobson has received a death threat to his family, which is ridiculous, vile and completely unwarranted.
A tweet by Jacobson back in 2011 (yes), has the Chinese community believing a promise was made about a localisation into their language, because he said it would be possible to allocate the resources required if fewer people pirated.
@Talentconan to do a Chinese translation, we'd need 20k of the people currently pirating to buy the game. And that's not going to happen.
— Miles Jacobson (@milesSI) 25 October 2011
Pointing to Steam Spy data, the community believe that this milestone has been reached, proving that Jacobson lied to them. In his defence, Jacobson says,”I made a commitment in 2011, which would have been for that year’s version of the game. It didn’t happen then. It also still hasn’t happened. We did not sell 20k more copies of FM16 in China than FM12. So at no point have I lied or broken a promise.”
He also pointed out that Steam Spy’s data is inaccurate and incomplete, as it ignores physical editions of the game. He says the data is out by 60%.
It looks like all this pressure has resulted in a win for the Chinese community, however, as Sega have now pledged to offer official Chinese language support for the football sim. “Sega have begun work on translating Football Manager 2017 and Football Manager Touch 2017 into Traditional Chinese,” says the update. “Sega are also considering simplified Chinese options.
“At this moment, there is no solid release date for the localised versions but we would like to reassure our Chinese fan base that a version is coming.”
Cheers, Eurogamer.