“Business as unusual.” That is how the offices of Football Manager are calling their period during the coronavirus pandemic, according to PR manager Tom Davidson. “Although we’re not able to be around each other in the office, we’re still working productively and to the same schedule that we usually would.
“As a company, we’ve embraced flexible working for a number of years now and a significant number of the team are based permanently off-site. Our IT and office management teams have been brilliant during this lockdown period at sourcing and delivering equipment to people who didn’t have a home office set-up prior to this,” Davidson said.
The next edition of the game would usually come out in late October, following the start of the new European season in August and September. That is changing but the game has not had to stop.
“This time of year is traditionally the design phase of the development cycle where the various areas of the development team work through what the features for the game are going to look like and this process is still continuing as usual.”
“The majority of the different areas of the game don’t rely on real football taking place so, in turn, the majority of the development team aren’t focusing on how the current real-world situation will be implemented into future versions of the game and are working on feature ideas, as usual,” Davidson said.
While the game will have to account for whatever impacts there are to be on real world football, it is not the focus of Football Manager right now and even if competition start dates need to be adjusted for the veracity of the simulation it is still a game.
“We need to balance that out with the fact that we still want the game to be engaging and entertaining so don’t expect to start a game of Football Manager in the future and find yourself with nothing to do because the league you’re competing in is suspended,” Davidson said.
The current edition of the game, released by developers Sports Interactive last October 31, has been one of the big distractions during lockdown with the media turning to it in the absence of live football.
“Sky Sports over here in the UK even ran the final day of the English Championship season in Football Manager as a live blog on their website, giving it the same treatment as they would have done for the real thing. It’s great to see the game being used in this way. ”
“We’re very lucky in that the coronavirus pandemic has actually seen an increased amount of sales and playtime and we appreciate just how fortunate we are to be in that position. There have been no pay cuts or a reduction in hours for anyone in the team,” Davidson said.
“In fact, we’ve hired 16 people in the period since the lockdown began, which is a staggering amount when you consider the size of the team was just a touch over 140 in early March before the lockdown.”
There was also good news for fans of the game, with two weeks of free Football Manager available in March and April.
“We felt that this period of social distancing and isolation would have a detrimental impact on a lot of people’s mental health so we felt that by making the game free to play for two weeks on Steam would be able to ease some people into the lockdown a bit more easily,” he said.
“The response was overwhelming with more than 870,000 new players giving the game a go over that free fortnight and, to put that into context, across all of our Football Manager 2019 titles we sold just over two million copies worldwide. We’re proud that the game is able to keep people entertained during this incredibly difficult period.”
The mental health effort has also seen the in-game pitch side hoardings handed over to such charities.
“We have handed all of our advertising inventory over to mental health charities to raise awareness of the great work that they do and to give people access to some of the help that is out there if they are struggling.”
While the game famously included different versions of Brexit in the last three editions, there is no such plan for the pandemic.
“We always take a long-term view whenever we add anything into the game, as Football Manager doesn’t have an end date and most players will get at least a few years into the future.
“It’s hoped that this awful virus will only be around for the one to two years so it would be out of place if it was still occurring in a Football Manager save in the year 2035.
There are things that Davidson is willing to predict, though.
“If my own save game is anything to go by then Brentford are going to be in the top flight next season and surprise everyone with a seventh place finish!”
