This sounds like a disaster.
For those who don’t know, Football Manager has a yearly release schedule, and the highlight of the release is that it has a database of nearly every professional player in the world, the club they play for, and an attempt to “scout” them, giving all their various attributes from passing ability, to height and weight, to their determination.
By releasing in March 2025, they’re going to release the game essentially at the end of the 2024/2025 season right before players start moving to new clubs and the database becomes obsolete. Typically, around March is when they’re giving deep discounts on the yearly release because they know there won’t be much remaining interest in playing a game that’s almost out of date.
They really shot themselves in the foot. They could have released a Football Manager 25 that was 100% FM 24 but with an updated database, they’ve done it before. They could have called “Football Manager 25” something like “Football Manager Next Gen” and not tied themselves to a certain season. And, if they do manage to get Football Manager 25 out in March, are they really going to be able to do FM 26 half a year later? Will anybody buy FM 25 if they know there’s a FM 26 coming out so soon?
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I agree, this will really be a shit show. It’s especially scummy that just last week they announced a road map and opened pre orders only to now suddenly delay the whole game by 5 months(!). There’s no way they didn’t know about this last week, why open pre orders then? I know it says you can get a refund but it’s not a good look to do it this way. Sports Interactive is so bad at marketing and timing things it’s insane.
I think this delay will cause problems for both this game and the next one because they’ll either have to focus on FM26 and undercook this one or they’ll focus on this one and release a minor upgrade in FM26. There’s no real solution anymore, all because of how they’ve done things.
Or, just imagine what it says if they actually didn’t know about this last week. That would be even worse, it would mean that the team doing publicity and taking orders didn’t realize that they were half a year away from being done…
But, yeah, I can’t see how this doesn’t result in a disaster. They really do need to release something before then, something with this year’s DBs before they’re irrelevant. They could take the old game, update the DB and just sell it at half price. Or, they could sell it at full price but with a coupon for say 50% off the new game.
The November release date of Football Manager has always been awkward. The FIFA games all come out in late September / early October, right after the teams have been finalized. By the time Football Manager comes out, 1/3 of the season has already been played. IMO their best bet would be to release in the summer before the season starts and then do a post transfer deadline day patch. The initial release could use the squads as they existed at the end of the previous season – probably something a lot of people would want anyway because they could be in charge of all the summer transfers. In fact, I wonder if a release date of early June or something might be ideal.
My guess is that one major motivation for people to buy Football Manager is that they’re saying “I could do a better job of running my team than this bunch of idiots”. And, that feeling is probably strongest right at the end of a season. A Football Manager release at the end of the season might be ideal for people who want to spend the summer doing all the wheeling and dealing they wish their clubs would do well, as they wait for the season to start again.
If they think they can have the new Unity-based game ready and polished in March, just call it FM 26, release it before the season starts, and do a full update once the various transfer windows have all closed and the DBs are all updated. If they don’t do that, who’s going to buy FM 25 when FM 26 will have all the bugs fixed, the new season’s DBs, and is only a few months away?