No plan B for Sports Interactive. Bad news.

I’m not a football/soccer person, but I do feel bad for what happened here. I saw in the article a survey on your favorite management game with a Football Manager title as an option, how are these games if you look at them as management games instead of as sports game?

So update names and jerseys and keep on rolling?

SI just isn’t, or at least hasn’t been, set up to do this kind of step-change development. It’s been streamlined essentially since the split from the Championship Manager series to operate on an iterate-on-what-we-have basis with overlapping one-, two-, and three-year dev cycles geared toward developing annual refreshes of essentially the same game.

Everything from the dev cycle through AA, marketing, publishing, and even licensing is based on that fundamental structure. But that’s a model with an expiry date, and the kind of complete refresh they are currently attempting has been sorely needed for years already.

But they should have just announced a hiatus year at the start to get this done. They were never going to be able to do this within their regular annual cycle.