The UK's loss of talented developers in the sports genre has been 'utterly huge' according to Miles Jacobson, the studio head of London-based Football Manager developer Sports Interactive. In an exclusive interview with Develop, Jacobson explained that Canada's exemplary tax break rates – which peak at 40% of dev costs – was the reason why a number of British-born developers now work in cities such as Vancouver and Toronto.
Call of Duty 4 has topped a Radio 1 poll to find its listener's favourite game. Football Manager 2009 came second, with Final Fantasy VII taking third. The vote was actually from a list compiled by a list of journos from the UK media, including Eurogamer's Johnny Minkley and CVG's Gavin Ogden.
SI Games are very pleased to announce the immediate availability of the 9.3.0 patch for both PC and Mac, complete with an updated database which includes the latest transfers from the January transfer window. Full change-log after the jump.
The man behind the hugely successful Football Manager series reckons game prices would be reduced if a cure for piracy were ever discovered.
Videogamer writes: The day of Football Manager 2009's release and the authentication problems players experienced led to Sports Interactive studio director Miles Jacobson's hardest and most disappointing day of his career. Players experienced a raft of issues when trying to authenticate Football Manager 2009 when it was released on November 14 last year. Not only was the font used for the authentication code displayed on the manual too small for some fans to make out, but SEGA-owned developer Sports Interactive suffered no less than three denial of service attacks on the day of release, one targeted directly at its phone lines.
The general manager of Beautiful Game Studios, the developer behind the Championship Manager series, has criticised rival Sports Interactive's online MMO-style version of Football Manager, FM Live, saying the game is too deep to be worth spending money on. Speaking to VideoGamer.com last week during a demonstration of Championship Manager 09, due out this April, general manager Roy Meredith said: I have played Football Manager Live and I don't really get why I'd spend money on it because it's too deep for me to want. I like Football Manager, I like playing it by myself. Football Manager Live is just a bit too time consuming for me, and I understand there will be a market for it but not me personally.
The latest Football Manager game may be taking the MMO route, but FM Live won't be following the standard MMO model when it comes to adding new features. In a recent interview with CVG, Sports Interactive studio director Miles Jacobson said that, despite five years of hard work developing the game, there'll be no rest for his staff following its retail release later this month.
Shacknews writes: Following in the unfortunate footsteps of World of Goo, developer Beautiful Game Studios' claims that its Championship Manager series of PC soccer simulators is the victim of a 90% piracy rate. That's not just a number in the air, we can measure it and we know that there are a huge amount of pirated copies, said Beautiful GM Roy Meredith. World of Goo co-creator Ron Carmel recently stated that his game was suffering from a 90% piracy rate--though Carmel later lowered the estimated figure to a still-staggering 82%.
According to the story, IGN posted a review that had nothing to do with the game reviewed, gave it an insanely low score and now, probably in order to fix the problem, they have completely removed the review!
Maxconsole reports: Talk about reviewer discrepancies. IGN US has posted up a review on Football Manager 2008 and awarded it a pathetically low score of 2/10, while IGN UK has awarded the same game a 9.1/10. Amusingly, the US reviewer seems to have no clue that Football Manager is a management simulation and concludes his review by stating I couldn't imagine why anybody would prefer Worldwide Soccer Manager to FIFA 09 or Pro Evolution Soccer 2009. Err, hello, you have to compare LIKE for LIKE, the reviewer seems to think that Football Manager is actually supposed to be a soccer simulation, blasting it for its lack of traditional gameplay to speak of.
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