Football Manager Is Cooked

The game is canceled after multiple release dates and a Unity engine Football Manager will only come out 9 months from now.

Sad.

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[aperrin]

the fm26 delay announcement is gonna hit different

[garybrowne]

Next week: Zealand interviews the sacked SI lead developer in a Hong Kong Hotel like Edward Snowden

[MrSamWilson]

FM26 is now the most important release in the company's history – it HAS to be good or they can kiss goodbye to a lot of those new players Miles has been banging on about for the last few years

[OmegaLukeGaming]

None of us wanted a broken game. But the complete lack of transparency, after declaring you will now be transparent is the most damming thing that sucks with this. That and taking pre-orders and delaying the game the week after

[joshwarren]

I agree with most everything Zealand is saying. However, as a lawyer, most of the stink I’m getting in regard to the smell test relates to parent company legal intermeddling. The legal implications of canceling a game are enormous when you have a parent company as massive as Sega. To me it seems that SI wanted to cancel the instead of delaying it a second time, the delay to March, but was legally bound to Sega to “attempt” to release it by March. Sega did not allow SI to cancel the game until after this earnings call even if SI wanted to cancel it back in November. As part of these obligations, SI most likely couldn’t make any statements even hinting that production was not going well enough to meet the March “target release”. Good chance of some clause that said, "SI shall not make any statement that would reasonably put the public on cause that cancellation of FM25 would be a possibility until after Sega's earning call on February 6, 2025." This explains why SI would be silent as to any bad news or delays as almost any semi-negative statement about the state of the game could be viewed as a breach of their agreement. If SI knew back in November that they planned to cancel the game but could not announce it, it would explain why it haven’t posted any hype or good news. Imagine if they hyped the game over December and January when they knew it would be cancelled. I think that would have made truly irreparable harm with the fan base. I think social media silence was its only viable route and that transparency would have either harmed SI's agreement with its parent company or further harmed its relationship with the fans. SI is still very much at fault for not having the game ready and failing to meet many of its promises. I also think that a lot of our frustrations, specifically around communication and the March release window, are Sega's fault and were out of SI's hands if we could get a glimpse at the contracts/agreements between Sega and SI and their parent-subsidiary agreement. Admitting that they made a mistake also has many legal implications. Refusing to admit their mistake could be SI covering itself, but it could also be Sega's choice not to allow SI to admit its mistake. Sega has certainly invested heavily on this FM transition, so it seems that it has been much more involved/controlling as well.

[alphelix]

This feels like a zealand and zealandism collab

[PhantomHair]

Doesn't surprise me that SI is having trouble working in a new engine, they've been micro-iterating on essentially the same game every year since the Championship manager days.
They're stuck in their own little niche making UI updates to the same spreadsheet manager at the core of the game.
Whatever Unity experienced devs they hired won't have made up the majority of the team who only knows how they've done it in the past.
Management probably severely underestimated the how much work it would take to change decades of inertia at the studio.

[pikappa]

The weird thing is that when they announced FM24 they discussed FM 25 in the same post. They were already “selling” us on FM 25 before we even played FM 24. Someone badly mismanaged the development timeline.

[Ayo]

I rather have a canceling than have a half baked trash game.

[homeless]

Important point to also remember that they publicly admitted to sacrificing their efforts on FM24 to prioritise this massive change. That makes it a few degrees worse imo

[EmmanuelBernard-cc]

I think you should go on a retro era where you look at the older FM games and decide which one is the best

[theqaz]

I bet SI wishes now they could have just released FM25 on the FM24 graphics engine in November now and said "sorry, unity engine not ready, here is a data update at a reduced price"

[TheYurpman]

The worst part about this was them taking pre-orders way back in October/November. If they don't have a finished game now, what did the game look like back then? And they still took people's money.

EDIT: Two points. 1) Reading is hard for some of you, apparently. I never said I personally pre-ordered the game. I didn't. I don't pre-order any games. That doesn't mean what they did was right. Because... 2) If you want a refund for a pre-order, you have to ask for it. It's not like the money is automatically put back into your account. You don't think parents pre-ordered for their kids and have no idea it was canceled because they aren't online? Or if it was purchased as a gift? Or bought through a platform that isn't Steam? It's not as easy as "LOL you get the money back". Most people will, yes. But there will be many who don't for various reasons.

[nicholaswalker]

The worrying thing slightly is that they don't actually mention FM26 by name. Just "creating a new era"

[ianknight]

There is nowhere in that release that mentions FM26 . It mentions the next release but not the year . We could be looking at FM27

[LorenzoRaider]

Phenomenal video Zealand. No one else has said it as straight forward and to the point as you have - that this is a monumental disaster from SI and things have to change. A lot of people are eager to give them a pat on the back and cross their fingers for FM26 where what they really need is to feel the pressure to deliver.

[Icagel]

The cancellation was a good thing IMO, if you can't even show gameplay a month ahead of scheduled release then the product is nowhere ready. That said, the way they handled is absolutely awful. Even if they couldn't announce the full story for legal reasons, they had to at least communicate something on January, even a "keep tuned for info" would have been better than radio silence.
Broken promise after broken promise after no contact whatsoever.

[BlazinBlz]

dayumnnnn, haven't seen Z this pissed since the US rehired Gregg Berhalter then completely failed in the Copa America

[WorldRacing_MJ]

It was almost destined to happen - since the first delay it was a quiet thought of mine. I just didn't see an alternative in the position they are/were in.

[Jef_Vermassen]

This was a really good take Z, harsh but fair. These things needed to be said.
They should soon start telling us what will be in store for FM26 or whatever. Those cancelled features: they need to be in.
They need to up their communication game from non existent to good. As I am sick and tired of corporations spamming us when everything is great but the moment its not they ghost us.