FM 25 DEVELOPMENT UPDATE

[Tetsuro P12]

From what's known, the Console version of the game is going to be released? Because one thing is sure, I wont buy the PC version, I'm a console player now and like it slimmed down and fast like the good old Championship Manager.

Late november it's pretty late, but well... I would wait.

[parsdaft1982]

I am not normally one to get involved, but reading this thread is making me laugh.

 

I am loving how people are having a meltdown because weight has been removed from the game. I have been playing the game since this first one in 1885 and it is only now I have noticed that weight is in the game. As for international management, honest I couldn't care less as I do not use that mode.

I think everyone needs to chill out and wait for the screenshots, demo etc before having a meltdown " I will not be buying the game!", " too much has been taken away" " international management has been removed, I have never played this mode but I am angry it has gone" " without an estimated players weight, the game is broken"

 

I personally am looking forward to FM25. A new game engine etc, it is going to be different. A different appearance, experience, features..... I am pretty sure SI, who has been making game for a hundred years, know what they are doing, and have very good reasons for them to remove certain features. 

 

Anyway, that is my rant, back to my Peterhead save 

Edited Sunday at 07:13 by parsdaft1982

[XaW]

9 minutes ago, parsdaft1982 said:

I have been playing the game since this first one in 1885

The first one was 1888, I think... But I did also enjoy that version!  

Spoiler

 

[parsdaft1982]

4 minutes ago, XaW said:

The first one was 1888, I think... But I did also enjoy that version!  

  Reveal hidden contents

 

My apologies, must of been one of the different versions in 1885 😂😂

[jmlima]

1 hour ago, parsdaft1982 said:

...

I think everyone needs to chill out and wait for the screenshots, demo etc before having a meltdown " I will not be buying the game!", " too much has been taken away" " international management has been removed, I have never played this mode but I am angry it has gone" " without an estimated players weight, the game is broken"

...

Welcome to a game's forum, where some people will love and post-rationalize every single developer decision, some will hate every decision, some will be non-committal at every opportunity, all whilst the developers try to navigate between 'we don't need to justify any decision' and 'we need to provide an excruciatingly detailed explanation, including some personal anecdotes' to justify a minor and random thing. All been going strong since the internet came to exist.

[decapitated]

13 hours ago, omerrath said:

How come it has almost been 24h since that ‘leak’ is published , and no one mentioned it here?

 

24th September is definitely in my diary now. 10GB of storage instead of 7GB (if true) is interesting. That might partly be because of the use of the Unity engine but it does bode well for technological advancement of some sort.

[DavutOzkan]

15 hours ago, omerrath said:

How come it has almost been 24h since that ‘leak’ is published , and no one mentioned it here?

 

Because there is nothing to complain about with it is my guess. Although, I'm sure someone will be around any moment now to complain about the extra three GB of space that it needs. 

Edited Sunday at 11:35 by DavutOzkan

[Zek]

25 minutes ago, DavutOzkan said:

Because there is nothing to complain about with it is my guess. Although, I'm sure someone will be around any moment now to complain about the extra three GB of space that it needs. 

I want to complain about it releasing on a Champions League night.

[spursfan]

13 hours ago, Novem9 said:

I played in Uruguay and had a very annoying club owner. I vaguely remember the details, but he irritated me with his tyranny and at the same time it was fun as a change. After his refusals, I was asked at a press conference about the situation in the club. I answered honestly and negatively. When I moved to the next club, the board of this new club made me promise not to criticize them publicly. FM22

Wow, sounds like the interaction has increased your 'controversy' attribute :-p

[Novem9]

1 час назад, spursfan сказал:

Wow, sounds like the interaction has increased your 'controversy' attribute :-p

NO DIDN'T INCREASE

[stevie_G_32201]

7 hours ago, XaW said:

The first one was 1888, I think... But I did also enjoy that version!  

  Hide contents

 

DVD's were out in 1888, wonders never cease. 

[parsdaft1982]

26 minutes ago, stevie_G_32201 said:

DVD's were out in 1888, wonders never cease. 

It was the console version mate 😉

[RandomGuy.]

18 hours ago, Novem9 said:

I played in Uruguay and had a very annoying club owner. I vaguely remember the details, but he irritated me with his tyranny and at the same time it was fun as a change. After his refusals, I was asked at a press conference about the situation in the club. I answered honestly and negatively. When I moved to the next club, the board of this new club made me promise not to criticize them publicly. FM22

There's a lot of wee things like this that people miss while pummelling the space bar to progress through saves as quickly as possible.

It's why the "bloat" needs dropped, so you can slow down playing the game but also play seasons just as quickly, IMO.

There's 100% character within the game that makes every FM special, it's just been buried under endless emails and meetings.

[janrzm]

6 hours ago, RandomGuy. said:

There's a lot of wee things like this that people miss while pummelling the space bar to progress through saves as quickly as possible.

It's why the "bloat" needs dropped, so you can slow down playing the game but also play seasons just as quickly, IMO.

There's 100% character within the game that makes every FM special, it's just been buried under endless emails and meetings.

I'd definitely advocate for slowing down, I think it's something that's easy to lose track of and you can find yourself slowly gathering pace through your save and you eagerly try to get to the next POI so to speak.  

There are also little nuggets as you say and I had a similar experience with Kaiserslautern where having reached the Bundesliga they gave me a ten Euro note for the transfer window and wouldn't budge. That save took an entirely different turn to many others. At the same time the game is still massively lacking in nuance around almost every feature IMO and I'd like to see way more attention paid to that moving forward.

 

[XaW]

12 hours ago, RandomGuy. said:

There's a lot of wee things like this that people miss while pummelling the space bar to progress through saves as quickly as possible.

It's why the "bloat" needs dropped, so you can slow down playing the game but also play seasons just as quickly, IMO.

There's 100% character within the game that makes every FM special, it's just been buried under endless emails and meetings.

I both agree and disagree with a lot of this, and I'll try to explain why.

Firstly, I also think there is too much bloat at times, and unneeded forced screen that you just click through. But I also think the game is somewhat lacking in immersion at times, where I would like to see more info about things happening in my save. Playing in the lower leagues, you don't even register when a World Cup is happening, for example, something that would probably be a big topic around a football club of any size. So the game is set up as an in-between for those who like to fly through seasons and those who like to read all the details and totally immerse themselves, and it's not perfect for either type of player.

So my solution to this would be much more user customization of what screens should show, how often, and when. Now, I know about the Screen flow options, I've even written about how it can be used before, but I think it's too cumbersome to use as well as not enough options. So I will stick with what I've suggested to SI before about how the UI works and how I would want it to change, and say that I think that would be a good way for both types of players since they could chop and change how the UI works to flow with their playstyle.

With FM25 bringing in Unity, I expect a massive UI overhaul, so perhaps some of these things will be implemented there. My biggest wish is still that the game allows us to change it into what we want to see for each type of save we play.

[Micho21]

Am I the only one worried on how this new version will affect the Editor (if it comes out, but I don't want to think it won't)?

It's always hell to adapt some things when small changes are applied, and if this edition will be a mayor overhaul at different levels (as with the addition of futfem), I feel that old DBs will be very hard to integrate in FM25.

I'm not on an optimistic day, I know.

[jcw163]

On 13/09/2024 at 13:31, HighFlyingDwarf said:

On this basis, transfer values for real world players should be removed.

They did that though remember? They're all a range now and based on scouting.

[forameuss]

24 minutes ago, jcw163 said:

They did that though remember? They're all a range now and based on scouting.

Which is actually inadvertently the perfect example.  They changed the specific transfer value to a range that needs you to scout and derive context from it.  With weight, they removed the specific value, and you'll now need to use scouting and view the attributes to get a feel of what sort of build a player is likely to have.  Because those attributes have far more of an effect on what's happening than one number that only 1% of people likely knew existed.

[HighFlyingDwarf]

On 13/09/2024 at 13:57, XaW said:

Weight has none to an almost negligible impact on anything in the game, other than showing it for immersion. Especially seeing as about half the FM24 database doesn't even have a value there. As well as according to the researchers, it's almost impossible to find a good source for it anymore. So they add body type instead and let the game guess.

The comparison of, "If X is removed then Y should too" fails here, where one is a helpful metric for many users, while the other has just about no impact at all. Showing the weight or not is not something I'm bothered about it any way shape or form, but if you want to compare it to something, then I'd say something like hair colour is a much more comparable metric, which incidentally is not shown on the player profile as far as I know.

Hair colour is shown via Facegen though? A feature implemented for the sole purpose of immersion and which is completely irrelevant to performance in game.

And for years we've had our intelligence insulted by the development of features that generate comments like this:

Is it any wonder we're in the position of cutting stuff like international management?

So yeah, I keep getting quoted and having points taken out of what I'm saying but I'm still yet to see any precise answer to what I said.

If the information is relevant to me, as a football manager, in a football management simulation, then why is it being removed?

[H_a_a_k_o_n]

Quote

FM25 is not a continuation of FM24. FM 25 is: 'This is the next generation of Football Manager' - and this is the first chapter in the new book of Football Manager, and will get expanded on.

https://www.eurogamer.net/fm25-is-not-a-continuation-of-fm24-the-big-football-manager-interview

[HighFlyingDwarf]

Just to add, let's be completely honest. SI have a decade long reputation of overpromising and underdelivering on graphics, so anybody hoping that Unity is going to make a massive difference there should temper expectations.

Leaving aside the match engine, the GUI has regressed significantly since the implementation of the changes a few years ago to facilitate FM Console. It's been two years and still the squad planner is an inadequate replacement for the Squad Depth page. I made this post nearly two years ago and the Squad Planner has barely moved forward from implementation.

I look at stuff like this and it's a perfect case in point of how disfunctional the general approach to development of the game is. Chuck in something new, leave it to stew for 10 years with no further work, remove if in favour of something new and shiny. Oooo! Draggable tiles! Etc. etc. etc.

Facegen has repeatedly regressed at a time when we have the technological capability to generate photorealistic faces using AI:

Maybe some of these things are being worked on? But we're about two/three months out from the rubber hitting the road with the new game and there's still nothing to show for it. Give us something at least.

 

 

[frog-kvfb]

I wonder if due to the fact this year is basically a whole new game will we have a longer run with the beta to look for bugs/testing etc

[grade]

On 14/09/2024 at 21:28, omerrath said:

How come it has almost been 24h since that ‘leak’ is published , and no one mentioned it here?

 

Thanks for sharing, but don't take it personally, if it doesn't come from FMFC, it bul...  It's just a rumour.

[roykela]

1 hour ago, HighFlyingDwarf said:

If the information is relevant to me, as a football manager, in a football management simulation, then why is it being removed?

Because the vision and usability for SI's idea of the game supersedes the players'.
If the makers of the game come to the conclusion it's better to change it, in order to better fit their vision of the end result, it'll be irrelevant of what relevancy it has for the players.
They have certainly weighed the risks in towards their decision(-s) though.
If the players' idea of what is relevant for them always would take precedence the game would be a Frankenstein's monster of a game. A jumbled mess.

SI has an idea, a vision of what the game should be and look like. They will incorporate players' ideas the best way they can whilst staying within the frame of their own vision and ideas of how and what it should be. Just because something is relevant for a player doesn't mean it's relevant enough or functional enough for SI.
Their decisions may or may not change with time, but that is for SI to consider.

[HighFlyingDwarf]

14 minutes ago, roykela said:

If the players' idea of what is relevant for them always would take precedence the game would be a Frankenstein's monster of a game. A jumbled mess.

International management?

[XaW]

19 minutes ago, roykela said:

If the players' idea of what is relevant for them always would take precedence the game would be a Frankenstein's monster of a game. A jumbled mess.

As someone who talks a lot to customers, and usually is the ones who tests user suggestions too, I can tell you that most, if not all, products would be messes if the users got their way unchecked!  

[HighFlyingDwarf]

I mean, I am yet to see a company that has ever succeeded by blaming their primary source of income for their ills. No FM fan is responsible for the removal of these features.

There have been so many crap features added by SI completely uninitiated by their user base. Media and player interaction alone would comprise a whole list.

Oh well, we will see the result in due time.

 

[roykela]

13 minutes ago, HighFlyingDwarf said:

International management?

Possibly functionality? Considering how sub-par international management has been, for a while, and having to implement that to a new engine; it would make logical sense to rip it out temporarily.

[roykela]

3 minutes ago, HighFlyingDwarf said:

I mean, I am yet to see a company that has ever succeeded by blaming their primary source of income for their ills. No FM fan is responsible for the removal of these features.

There have been so many crap features added by SI completely uninitiated by their user base. Media and player interaction alone would comprise a whole list.

Oh well, we will see the result in due time.

 

Totally agree with the added features over the years. It's a glorious opportunity to "start from scratch".
Less bloat and make sure wanted features actually work.
Time will tell, indeed.

[decapitated]

https://www.eurogamer.net/fm25-is-not-a-continuation-of-fm24-the-big-football-manager-interview

New interview with Miles

Quote

"Things- things are good," Miles Jacobson tells me, before a pause. "We've taken on a lot, with FM25."

It's early August, late in the afternoon on a Friday, and it's clearly been a long week for Jacobson, head of Football Manager developer Sports Interactive. The studio celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, the same year it aims to reinvent the series with the most significant changes for two decades, but it's noticeable that Jacobson is seeking to ease some expectations for FM25 as we begin to talk.

"What I don't want to do is be sitting here and be overhyping things," he says, "because I don't think it helps anyone."

In fact, keeping the hype in check is a recurring theme throughout our conversation. "This is something that's really important for us to try and get people to understand," he says, "and I'm talking journalists as well as consumers, because maybe we weren't as-" he catches himself and self-corrects, "I think we were clear, but I'm not sure that the message is getting out there fully: FM25 is not a continuation of FM24. FM 25 is: 'This is the next generation of Football Manager' - and this is the first chapter in the new book of Football Manager, and will get expanded on.

Cover image for YouTube videoOfficial Premier League Licence coming to Football Manager
With so much still in flux with FM25, our only video on it so far is from the announcement of the Premier League Licence earlier this summer.Watch on YouTube
"If people are expecting FM24 plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, they're not going to be getting that with FM25."

If regular players have been following the news closely, some of that may well have filtered through. Earlier in the summer, Sports Interactive's first blog on FM25 revealed as much about what wouldn't be making it to the new entry as what would. The social media screen is out; the data chalkboard is out; modes such as Create-a-Club, Challenge Mode, Versus Mode, Fantasy Draft are out too, with returns lined up for some of those over time. One of the biggest, announced at the start of September after we spoke - alongside a slight delay, from its usual early November release to later that month - is the removal of international management this year.

"We've looked really hard at international management in FM and determined that what we were planning to deliver wouldn't reach our initial quality threshold," Jacobson wrote in the development blog. "International management will return in a much more feature-rich way to FM26, FM26 Console and FM26 Touch."

Many of these are based on player data that showed they were very rarely used as modes - Challenge Mode and Versus Mode, for instance, were both played by less than 0.5 percent of FM's audience, and international management 5.6 percent ("which we feel validates our view that we need to do much, much better with the experience," as Jacobson wrote). Others such as social media and the data chalkboard have replacements of sorts in other in-game screens as well. But a couple of other big changes are more surprising.

One of those is the removal of touchline shouts, the in-game commands you can issue to (in theory) motivate your team, calm them down, fire them up, and so on. These are pretty prominent part of the in-match experience - personally, I use these almost every game, and they're also a much-loved meme in the community: a 4-2-3-1 Gegenpress and hammering "Demand More" is ever the winning combo. Jacobson is keen to explain why the function had to go this time.

"The reason we're taking it out, and I'm going to use strong language here," he says, before catching himself again. "I'm going to tone it down a little bit from what I was going to say: it wasn't good enough. It's not up to our standards, it didn't work the way that consumers thought it worked," he continues. "So when we're looking at that and going, well, do we port something across from our old game that isn't good enough? The answer is 'no'."

Doing so, Jacobson explains, "would take one of our best technology teams one, two, three cycles" to get working to the team's standards. "Are we better off having all of their time spent working on getting that done?"

The other headline change - and surely the most immediately noticeable for anyone who's played Football Manager before - is the removal of the Inbox. For the uninitiated, the Inbox is really your main interface with the game, the place where you receive notifications on everything from injuries to transfer negotiations and, as the primary delivery system of 'to-do' tasks like picking squads for upcoming matches, is the main driving factor of what you actually do from moment to moment before clicking that big 'Continue' button to advance time. That's gone in FM25.

"You are still pressing Continue to move the game on," Jacobson reassures me, "we haven't gone real-time, we're still turn-based with what you do." Likewise you still get "messages" in the game, he says, but: "it's very rare that you see a football manager with a laptop" in the real game. "They've got their tablet, and they've got their phone, so we wanted to move into that more. The football world never really had email!"

Instead, Sports Interactive wants to "be doing things the same way that managers do, which is lots of messages via WhatsApp, and lots of conversations - but we also know that conversations are very difficult to do in video games." Instead of email, then, FM25 will have what Jacobson calls the "portal system", with the portal screen now "the most important screen in the game... that's where you're going to be doing stuff from, that is the manager's office. That is where you decide: now I'm going to go to the training ground and coach training, now I'm going to go and look at the tactics boards and go and do the 'on-pitch' stuff."

The "core loop," as he describes it, "that is Football Manager - it looks different. And it does play a little bit differently. But it's still the core loop. You're still reacting to information, you're being told the news that you're being given. And there are just different ways of interacting with it now."

It's interesting to hear Jacobson be keen to offer some reassurance here. Football Manager, given the sheer longevity of it, is a game many players play from sheer muscle memory, be that keyboard shortcuts or simply hovering over the little information "i" symbols, or going through specific, passively-memorised loops of the UI.

"There is a lot of muscle memory involved," he says. "And some of that muscle memory is going to have to be relearned. Some people are going to pick it up straight away, and for some, it's going to be a curve." He mentions bringing some community members into the studio in September to test out the new UI - to get their impressions, of course, but also to find out how long it actually takes players to get used to it, and whether or not that's too long or, curiously, not long enough.

"There are lots of things in the game that take a lot of time to get used to," Jacobson says, "but how rewarding is it when you're used to them and you understand their power and you're using them? For me that's the really exciting side of things, because I don't want everyone to discover everything that's in Football Manager in the first two hours of them playing it. I want them to be discovering stuff 500 hours in, 750 hours in. Going: 'Where's that come from?!' That's what's led to the longevity of what we do."

Much of those big departures from classic Football Manager-isms come from the one truly foundational change Sports Interactive is making this year, in moving away from its own, long-utilised proprietary engine built internally, to the third-party engine Unity. It's something the studio has "been working on for a while; we've known we're going to do it for a while," Jacobson says. But these things are never easy.

Official work in progress FM25 image showing the main Portal screen
Image credit: Sports Interactive / Sega
"When you move to an engine, there are lots of 'known unknowns', and there are lots of 'unknown unknowns'." What that means, in development terms, is changing scope. Some of those scope changes come in the form of those aforementioned cuts this year. But other changes have continued to be up in the air even well into August, around three months before Football Manager's usual November window of release.

"The team at Sports Interactive couldn't be working harder, they've been doing an absolutely incredible job, but we've had to look at scope maybe more than we thought we were going to have to last year," Jacobson says. "We've still got that premise of: if we had our time again, would we do it differently? And we've got the premise of: if we had our time again, would we do it at all?" Both questions Jacobson mentioned in our discussion last year about the big move.

"There then became another part of that, which is: do we actually have time to do this again properly for this version? And then what decision we have to make on that."

Jacobson is wary of giving away too many specifics as we talk, in part because, as he emphasises, much of the decisions are yet to be finalised. "Sometimes it's how things work; sometimes it's whether things are displayed; and sometimes it's how things are displayed."

Those dilemmas come up regularly, with "big debates" at the studio both amongst the team and between Jacobson and the wider team. "Whenever you're developing anything, you have to pivot at points. It doesn't matter how good your game documentation - or your game design documentation - is at the start of the process, or how great the feature set is at the start of the process, you are always going to have to de-scope at points.

"It's not only de-scope. Sometimes it's re-scope, and sometimes up-scope." One example Jacobson did share was the new UI itself, a system of "tiles" and "cards" which, he tells me, the studio had initially aimed to make identical across all platforms, from PC to console and even Netflix or Apple Arcade on mobiles. In the end, those plans have changed quite considerably, with the mobile platforms staying on the old engine for now and moving to Unity with later editions down the line.

"I've de-scoped something today," he says, "that at the time of the [June] dev blog was still in scope. And we re-scoped something last week, and we up-scoped something last week - it's a very fluid process!"

Has there been a specific obstacle, or specific reason there's been so much change on the fly? "I can answer that easily," Jacboson says, "it's our ambition. We are one of the most ambitious dev studios you will find out there - and I know that some people will find that difficult to believe because 'Oh, they only work on iterations, they're making the same bloody game every year'.

"We're trying to improve what is already an awesome game, every year it's what we've tried to do historically. And now, being our harshest critics, we've been looking at all going, 'Well is this actually good enough? It's this part here good enough, to our standards?'"

Another challenge: "the amount of screens that we have in the game. You know, we're not talking 50 screens, not talking 100 screens. You're talking over 500 screens that we had to look at and work out what we were going to do with [regarding] all the data that was on there."

On the topic of large amounts of recurring screens, press conferences, a long-time staple of the series - and sticking point for some, as questions and their related multiple-choice answers begin to repeat on you as playtime extends through the seasons - are an issue that comes up. "There are people out there going, 'Why can't you just get generative AI to do the press conferences, to go through the game and come up with all the questions and then you answer them in whatever way you want to, and then [the in-game journalists and players] are going to react to that?'

"That's something that generative AI is not capable of, and anyone who's ever used a chatbot will know that it's not capable of doing that, and would also go so ridiculously off-piste and be impossible to QA. And impossible to get signed off by legal. And impossible to get signed off by licencing. So we're not using it in this way."

The team "has been looking at ways that we can use AI," however, but that's because "our whole match engine is AI; AI is not new to us." Speaking more broadly, Jacobson adds, "I do think that generative AI has a lot of good uses in the world, and for games as well, but I strongly believe in 'ethical AI', which is using generative AI in a way that isn't going to cost anyone their job."

For all the talk of what hasn't made it into the game this year, there are, thankfully, some big new features coming. Typically, Jacobson is only willing to talk about these "off the record" at the time of our conversation - in part because of that ever-changing scope, which is also part of why the studio is keeping its reveals for much closer to launch than in previous years. But he's happy to talk about one of Sports Interactive's biggest wins in recent times, in its first ever landing of the official Premier League licence. When did it first look like it was finally going to happen?

"Two and a half years ago," Jacobson says, right away. "It's 20 years since we've spoken to them about it - that includes me putting on a charity dinner each year alongside the Premier League," he adds, where a lot of effort was spent building a relationship. "We've been working together for a long time on a lot of things. But the original conversation on the licence was a couple of years ago, it was during the pandemic."

Jacobson received a call from someone at the Premier League, effectively asking, in his words, "So if this was possible, would you be interested? And if you were interested, how much would you be interested?" He gave them a figure in response, "and they laughed."

"They said 'Well, we were thinking 10 times that number.'"

After some back and forth, for some time longer, the two agreed a deal. "A huge effort has gone in over a very long amount of time," Jacobson says, "but yeah, delighted to have that one - and it's not the only new licence that we have for FM25."

That licence is now shared, with the likes of fellow football series EA Sports FC 25 and others. Notably, EAFC has introduced a range of distinctly Football Manager-like features this year, in its revamped tactics system dubbed FC IQ. It features, amongst other things, a new take on formations that brings in a system called Player Roles - a term that'll be familiar to FM players - that goes as far as to use some closely overlapping concepts and terms, such as 'deep-lying playmakers' in defensive midfield.

EA's new 'FC IQ' system for FC25 uses some familiar terms. | Image credit: EA Sports
"Look, I think the EAFC team is awesome, I'm a fan of their work," Jacobson says, when I ask him what he made of the reveal. "There are things that we actually couldn't have done this year without their help. You know, we've made one big licence announcement - that's a licence that has always been exclusive to one partner," meaning EA Sports.

"They could probably have quite easily asked for that to still be the case. But that's not the case. That particular licence, the Premier League licence, is with both us and EAFC" In Jacobson's eyes the two developers "will complement each other" by sharing it. "So I don't see EAFC as rivals, I think they're a really different game. I think it's in the same way as there are lots of games with guns, but some of those games are first-person shooters and some are tactical, and those are very different genres of game."

As for the overlap in terms, "we were influenced by the behind-the-scenes of the football world, when we put player roles in," he says. "The same year that we had them in for the first time, it was actually Gary Neville who started popularising them on Monday Night Football. He started talking about them literally just before we announced them, so we looked super smart by him talking about 'deep-lying playmakers' and things like that," he laughs.

"It's a term that's been in football for a long time, so we've helped popularise those, as have a lot of other football journalists that have been out there who've started bringing those into the parlance. So the fact that EA is doing them now, it's not copying Football Manager, what they're doing; it's bringing them in line with the rest of the football world." So, he continues, "good luck to them for doing it - they didn't use the exact same terms that we use in most cases, so that's good!"

Back to Football Manager, and in those 30 years of development at Sports Interactive (plus three more before then, when it was still made in a bedroom by the two founding brothers, Paul and Oliver Collyer), Jacobson emphasises the amount it had to adapt to survive. For him a huge factor in its growth, from around a million players a decade ago to over 11 million now, has been Football Manager's early presence on subscription platforms such as Game Pass, on which it debuted with FM19 in the summer of 2019, as well as more recently Netflix Games and Apple Arcade. There's a personal anecdote that's partially behind the decision.

"So, 2012 or 2013 - I can't remember exactly which year it was," Jacobson tells me, "we had a year where anyone who was pirating Football Manager, it phoned home. And we knew, and we had their IP addresses." Rather than doing anything to "shut it all down," he says, "we took all of that data and we worked with a load of people, and got it verified by a university as well, to work out what our actual loss of sales were."

The studio realised it had "more than 10 million players on the game then, but 9 million of them are pirating it, and how many of those would have actually bought it?" It turned out to be "a pretty small number," Jacobson said, because they either couldn't afford to, or were young kids "still swapping stuff in playgrounds".

This brings Jacobson onto what, at least in part, convinced the studio to take a punt on the subscription services. "When I was first playing games, one of my friends had a double tape deck and each of us would buy one Spectrum game a month. And the guy with the double tape deck would make 90 minute tapes so that we had copies of all the games," he explains.

"Now, that was wrong. But I wouldn't have got to play those games without it, because I didn't even have the money to buy one game a month." That led, he says, to his decades spent working in the industry, and ultimately "spending a large amount of money on buying games when I did have money." Off the back of those kinds of stories, the studio made the decision to "not make the same mistakes that the music industry and film industry made" at the dawn of streaming and digital platforms. "So it's not an accident we're on Game Pass, and Apple Arcade, and Netflix," Jacobson says, "and it's not an accident we have 11 million players."

Is the studio making as much money as it would if it was selling 11 million copies? No. But then as Jacobson puts it, it wouldn't have sold those copies anyway. "A million's a lot of people - but it's not 10 million." All of the platforms Football Manager is on, meanwhile, are still "on an upward trajectory" in terms of sales.

Change, then, has been at the heart of Football Manager's success throughout its three decades, from the old Championship Manager days up until now. This year sounds like one of the very biggest changes it's made, and judging from my conversation with Jacobson, probably one of the most challenging to get right as well. But what's clear is the studio sees it as necessary.

"Everybody says that they want change, right?" Jacobson says. "People are kind of scared of it at the same time and, when change happens, will sometimes react to it negatively just because it's not what they know. So, 'we want change' and then you deliver change, and then, 'well we didn't want this much change!'" he laughs.

Jacobson likens the series, in that respect, to long-running franchises like Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. "It's a similar dilemma... and people who are working on soap operas - those things that are comfortable that are in your home.

"When Eastenders changed the cameras that they were using, I'm sure there were lots of people out there who go: 'Oh my god it's not the same, this is really bad!' And then got used to it and realised it was better. So it's that weird-" he catches himself, another pause.

"It's been a difficult year. I'll say that over and over and over again-" Jacobson interrupts himself one more time and, a little wryly, adds: "It's been a great learning experience!"

 

[grade]

Read the interview... doesn't reveal much of what we already know.

Well, the click to continue remains.

Edited Monday at 13:08 by grade

[jmlima]

1 hour ago, roykela said:

...
They have certainly weighed the risks in towards their decision(-s) though.
...

100%

But, we need to qualify the risks. The real risk to SI is not that the users suddenly move en-masse to a competitor product. There is none. They may sell marginally less but, less face it, they have a monopoly on  a product with solid demand. Their biggest risk is if Sega Sammy's management decides they are dead wood. Which means, if you have to cut things that may **** 5% of players but that will please your boss because you achieve your (revised) deadline, it shall be done. It's business. I'm actually rather surprised there are not more in-game features going into the 'we are not happy with them so they will be back at a later date' bin. That actually speaks rather highly of how they managed this code transition.

[trevjim]

1 hour ago, decapitated said:

https://www.eurogamer.net/fm25-is-not-a-continuation-of-fm24-the-big-football-manager-interview

New interview with Miles

 

Hmm the replacement of the inbox to the "portal" worries me.

 

It sounds like far more clicks to get things done. They seem to have gone down the route of thinking it would be more immersive and realistic whilst forgetting it's still a game.

Things like conversations and media interactions are guilty of this in the game. They have lost that balance from the glory era of CM/FM and the current ones have leaned a bit towards tedious realism over fun, and I feel the portal sounds a bit more of a lean into that area.

 

Will see what it's all about in the previews though 

[StevehFC]

2 hours ago, grade said:

Read the interview... doesn't reveal much of what we already know.

Well, the click to continue remains.

Didn't notice the Inbox is being removed. 

[Viking]

On 15/09/2024 at 09:23, XaW said:

The first one was 1888, I think... But I did also enjoy that version!  

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Fake. Obviously. FM 1888 was not released on DVD, but rather 864 phonograph cylinders. It was a real pain to install. Better than FM 1802, though. Installed with 1242 miles of punched cards and a steam engine.

 

On a serious note, I am looking forward to FM25, but I get a little bit worried when the first news about the game are negative..My OSD likes to have player weights in the game, and I am among those 1.4%, or whatever, who manages an international team every now and then. 

[decapitated]

This bit interests me

 

Quote

After some back and forth, for some time longer, the two agreed a deal. "A huge effort has gone in over a very long amount of time," Jacobson says, "but yeah, delighted to have that one - and it's not the only new licence that we have for FM25."

Brazil? Italy? Spain? Saudi? I wonder what these new licences are?

[trevjim]

38 minutes ago, decapitated said:

This bit interests me

 

Brazil? Italy? Spain? Saudi? I wonder what these new licences are?

Might just be the women's license 

[grade]

1 hour ago, StevehFC said:

Didn't notice the Inbox is being removed. 

Miles talked about this in the June blog post.

[wazzaflow10]

49 minutes ago, trevjim said:

Hmm the replacement of the inbox to the "portal" worries me.

 

It sounds like far more clicks to get things done. They seem to have gone down the route of thinking it would be more immersive and realistic whilst forgetting it's still a game.

Things like conversations and media interactions are guilty of this in the game. They have lost that balance from the glory era of CM/FM and the current ones have leaned a bit towards tedious realism over fun, and I feel the portal sounds a bit more of a lean into that area.

 

Will see what it's all about in the previews though 

Sounds more like if you click on something time progresses. It might be something like its 10am and time for morning training. You click on the window overlooking the pitch in your office to "go to training". Simulation break and you get a notification that incident a/b/c happens. Could be injuries, bust up, poor performance etc. and you have to deal with it (or not). Might be a modern take on some of the older management sims where a phone was used to call people. A doorway was to go to a new area etc. Compared to what they have now where its a left panel of text.

I've got no idea but I imagine that it's meant to be less fill the inbox and more "interactive" in terms of going somewhere.

[jmlima]

 

8 minutes ago, wazzaflow10 said:

...Might be a modern take on some of the older management sims where a phone was used to call people. A doorway was to go to a new area etc. Compared to what they have now where its a left panel of text.

...

Yeah. I think there's something on that front that could be done with this new push to better the graphics. Even something like having the 3d model of the player on display in their profile page.

Alas, you are probably right in your initial guess and might just be progress-by-torturous-cliking.

[kiwityke1983]

2 hours ago, trevjim said:

Hmm the replacement of the inbox to the "portal" worries me.

 

It sounds like far more clicks to get things done. They seem to have gone down the route of thinking it would be more immersive and realistic whilst forgetting it's still a game.

Things like conversations and media interactions are guilty of this in the game. They have lost that balance from the glory era of CM/FM and the current ones have leaned a bit towards tedious realism over fun, and I feel the portal sounds a bit more of a lean into that area.

I feel like this sums up nearly every new feature over the last 4-5 iterations of FM.

Take an old feature add 3 clicks where there used to be one and call it something new.

[wazzaflow10]

1 minute ago, kiwityke1983 said:

Take an old feature add 3 clicks where there used to be one and call it something new.

In FM16 currently. You can do press conferences from your inbox!

That said there's a few areas of UI that I like better in 24. Tactics screen is much easier to navigate. The Match day experience is an interesting comparison. There's facets of both that I like.

[Novem9]

15 минут назад, kiwityke1983 сказал:

Take an old feature add 3 clicks where there used to be one and call it something new.

Ask about it at every damn press conference

[Fredrik]

12 hours ago, Micho21 said:

Am I the only one worried on how this new version will affect the Editor (if it comes out, but I don't want to think it won't)?

It's always hell to adapt some things when small changes are applied, and if this edition will be a mayor overhaul at different levels (as with the addition of futfem), I feel that old DBs will be very hard to integrate in FM25.

I'm not on an optimistic day, I know.

You're not the only one, if it's the pre-game editor you mean. I won't play without it. 

I see so many small things I want to change every time I play and I do. I also create nation rules in order to play in lower leagues or obscure nations. 

Won't do without the editor. 

 

[samrnpage]

My concern is that Miles and the SI team don't seem to be acting 'excited' about the new change. The way Miles is coming across feels careful, coordinated, and planned.

I work in public relations for a major Fortune 500 company, and in my professional opinion, both of the latest updates are focused on managing public perception and persuasion—essentially, damage control.

My gut feeling is that SI wouldn't be drip feeding negative changes to FM25 in amongst PR spinning statements (For example the whole "would we do it the same way if we had our time again? is full on sympathy PR tactics) if FM25 was well above the basic expectations of even the most causal Football manager fan/customer. 

You can never please everyone, and even the best games ever made had hardcore fans that complain about it, but those anoraks are not the target audience for SI in those updates. 

In a recent interview, Miles said the most worrying line in my opinion

"If people are expecting FM24 plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, they're not going to be getting that with FM25." 

Really do not like that statement......

Onto the end of the month with the actual gameplay reveal and feature releases, hopefully I am completely wrong and they have just been over transparent 

Edited Monday at 20:42 by samrnpage

[Calculating Infinity]

"It's been a difficult year. I'll say that over and over and over again-" Jacobson interrupts himself one more time and, a little wryly, adds: "It's been a great learning experience!"

I've heard that many times before in life... and it's rarely because they are confident in what they have produced. While I know those screenshots are not final, they are also everything i hate about modern UI design.

That interview only made me more nervous. Full of red flags. 

God I hope I am wrong.

Edited Monday at 22:28 by Calculating Infinity

[waraka14]

Truly a sad moment for me personally. End of an era really. FM25 will be the CM5 of this era. Still grateful for all the good years though.

[spursfan]

11 hours ago, decapitated said:

"If people are expecting FM24 plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, they're not going to be getting that with FM25."

Reading and (kinda) dissecting the interview -- top line says is clearly: it's a whole new game for us, like how Civilisation has always been evolving, from a clean slate  and then building further from there.

11 hours ago, decapitated said:

"So when we're looking at that and going, well, do we port something across from our old game that isn't good enough? The answer is 'no'."

This was for Shouts and International Management for instance.

11 hours ago, decapitated said:

"They've got their tablet, and they've got their phone, so we wanted to move into that more. The football world never really had email!"

So the UI will definitely look more tablet like (we've seen a hint of it from the tiles they've posted).

11 hours ago, decapitated said:

"There is a lot of muscle memory involved," he says. "And some of that muscle memory is going to have to be relearned. Some people are going to pick it up straight away, and for some, it's going to be a curve."

So it'll work out kinds similar gameplay wise, just slightly different way to access what we're used to. Hopefully each of us will be able to develop our own style with much more variety (I found out about modifying the default skin late on in FM24, and it's working well for me without needing other packs).

11 hours ago, decapitated said:

"When you move to an engine, there are lots of 'known unknowns', and there are lots of 'unknown unknowns'." What that means, in development terms, is changing scope. Some of those scope changes come in the form of those aforementioned cuts this year.

Unfortunately that's the nature of the Unity beast, or moving to any other platform.

11 hours ago, decapitated said:

"It's not only de-scope. Sometimes it's re-scope, and sometimes up-scope." One example Jacobson did share was the new UI itself, a system of "tiles" and "cards" which, he tells me, the studio had initially aimed to make identical across all platforms, from PC to console and even Netflix or Apple Arcade on mobiles. In the end, those plans have changed quite considerably, with the mobile platforms staying on the old engine for now and moving to Unity with later editions down the line.

So once again for those craving for International Management, there's still FM Mobile (I'll be playing Wales, maybe while waiting for my lagtop to process regular FM) 

11 hours ago, decapitated said:

"That's something that generative AI is not capable of, and anyone who's ever used a chatbot will know that it's not capable of doing that, and would also go so ridiculously off-piste and be impossible to QA. And impossible to get signed off by legal. And impossible to get signed off by licencing. So we're not using it in this way."

So yes quite clearly, not for quite a while.

12 hours ago, decapitated said:

For all the talk of what hasn't made it into the game this year, there are, thankfully, some big new features coming. Typically, Jacobson is only willing to talk about these "off the record"

This is probably the thing we're all waiting for.

12 hours ago, decapitated said:

That licence is now shared, with the likes of fellow football series EA Sports FC 25 and others. Notably, EAFC has introduced a range of distinctly Football Manager-like features this year, in its revamped tactics system dubbed FC IQ. It features, amongst other things, a new take on formations that brings in a system called Player Roles - a term that'll be familiar to FM players - that goes as far as to use some closely overlapping concepts and terms, such as 'deep-lying playmakers' in defensive midfield.

So it's a collaboration to seal the licensing deal, which probably explains why FM is catching up really well with EAFC/Fifa recently.

12 hours ago, decapitated said:

The studio realised it had "more than 10 million players on the game then, but 9 million of them are pirating it, and how many of those would have actually bought it?" It turned out to be "a pretty small number," Jacobson said, because they either couldn't afford to, or were young kids "still swapping stuff in playgrounds".

Interesting history, the landscape is much changed now -- a lot more will be paying (or happily waiting for free and legal GamePass)

12 hours ago, decapitated said:

"Everybody says that they want change, right?" Jacobson says. "People are kind of scared of it at the same time and, when change happens, will sometimes react to it negatively just because it's not what they know. So, 'we want change' and then you deliver change, and then, 'well we didn't want this much change!'" he laughs.

That probably sums it up, so like many things irl, it's happening -- let's stand together and move forward bravely into the new era.

[jmlima]

7 hours ago, waraka14 said:

Truly a sad moment for me personally. End of an era really. FM25 will be the CM5 of this era. Still grateful for all the good years though.

Not sure. CM5 was not that much a break in gaming terms. It was easily recognizable as the same game. This time it seems they are really going for broke into making it a console game first and foremost. I mean, I will probably hate it, which is why I got FM24, but, I understand their plight and it's irrespective if they wanted to do it or not, they had to take this step to move from selling to the declining crusty moaners into selling to the increasing 5mins players. That's the way gaming is going in every single area (even wargaming which the one I know best).

[ForTheLoveOfTheGame]

10 hours ago, Calculating Infinity said:

While I know those screenshots are not final, they are also everything i hate about modern UI design.

Same. Dull, flat, bland, lifeless. Contains no character. The removal of team colours a few years ago has been terrible, and it doesn’t look like it’s about to get any better 

Edited yesterday at 08:46 by ForTheLoveOfTheGame