Interesting reading.

"Over the past year or so however, I’ve realised that I no longer get the same enjoyment out of writing the game; for me the halcyon days were probably when Paul and I were writing CM2 and the whole thing was a lot more personal. Although it’s been fun to work with such talented and enthusiastic people, being a smaller part of a bigger team just doesn’t give me the same creative satisfaction."


The above is a quote from, 'Open letter to the CM Community - by Oliver Collyer August 7th, 2001 @ 12:25'

In short, this was (part of) a post from one of the two founders of Sports Interactive explaining that he was leaving the company (coding the then Championship Manager series). Whilst on the whole it was pretty standard stuff upon reading it, there is one line from it which is very relevant to the game we currently play now, FML.

"being a smaller part of a bigger team just doesn’t give me the same creative satisfaction"

He now has the opposite of that statement in Football Manager Live, he is very much at the helm once again and surrounded with what it would appear a very sparse team. This team may be happy with the pacing of development (fast in their eyes due to the numbers), but that is not what the customer wants to see or hear.

Let's say it is four months of development per major update. What we would ideally like to see is four months of dedicated development towards new features with a sprinkle of nice little extras for the more hardcore of users.

What we actually get is (due to the small team), the following four months after a major update, two of those months are spent tweaking and fixing the last update and only two months development time from the whole team (or only 2 months code time from OV as the case may be) is dedicated to new features. This short time frame usually results in bare bones features and the inability to expand upon older features.

Take youth academies currently. They are very much a 'click and wait for the randomness' kind of feature and we have no evidence to point towards them changing anytime soon.

Stadiums came into the game around January 2009, and other than the nerfing of their effectiveness financially and a couple of graphics tweaks they appear to be an indicator for the fate of the youth academies.


Will this game follow the same path as the Championship Manager/Football Manager series? - starting small and allowed to expand into what could potentially be a huge game, or will it be constantly reigned in and essentially bottlenecked by a limited development team?

And will that mean this games ultimate demise?