Football Manager Is Cooked
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- Опубликовано: 9 фев 2025
- 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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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
You're completely right.
@@MrSamWilson1 I agree. This year went completely south and the trust is damaged but not gone. But there cannot be a disappointment for fm 26 or the game is done
And not to mention, the financial hit of missing a full year, coupled with bad word of mouth, yeah 26 is **the game** for them, and what might determine if they continue onwards as is or get gutted.
Miles is literally insane. This mismanagement should come as little shock
not that deep dude. theres no other game like FM so they only need to release FM26 and all good.
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
All of this for the unity engine. I never asked for that. I just want a great management game. Graphics just need to be acceptable. I never expected full F1 levels of graphics from my F1 Manager games, because it wasn't about that. As long as I can see what's going on, I'm not that bothered.
@@catrionacolville2192 it's not just the graphics. I am not coding expert but the engine they were running on was ancient and impeded them from making progress in ALL aspects of the game, not simply graphics. But the graphics were also awful and definitely needed an improvement. Also, obviously this whole thing has been catastrophic but even if it was only about graphics, I am still very thankful they are doing a 'remake' of the game. The progress the past I wanna say almost 10 years has been minimal. Like the "revamp' of the tutoring system or the training system have been extremely minor and they don't even work well, tutoring is broken now pretty much. So it was about damn time they decided to make a big change.
hahahah i knew it they wud cancel it
@alexdunatov3718 then don’t say you will be in the first place
@@catrionacolville2192 you didn’t ask for it but most people do ask for modern graphics. They didn’t want to sell the game to the same small-ish core fan base each year. They wanted to grow. I do care about graphics and I’ve been playing FM/CM since the 90s
the fm26 delay announcement is gonna hit different
they wil ljust release "fm25" with a rename and database update :p
@@dalaraz1 i mean the delay clearly means that this is what they will be doing, this is not any sort of gotcha comment? unless i'm missing something, plz let me know if i am :)
@ na just the expectation i have
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.
This is the most sensible comment I've seen on this whole thing. SI has a team of excellent Football Manager devs who know the code and it's intricacies inside and out - not necessarily a good team of Unity game devs.
There's a reason why there are still thousands of computers around the world running Windows XP - because converting legacy software (which the FM engine is) is not an easy task. They've been trying to do it since 2020. This looks like a case of C-Suite thinking that the dev teams are screwing around and making FM25 the deadline to set a fire under them - when there was no screwing around, it-s just a fucking difficult task.
This comment is spot on and I believe may have been something thats happened at SI in the past (I remember reading how they had coders try and make some of the graphic elements for the early 3D engine rather than hiring people experienced in that area).
The company has long been overdue a refresh as, like you say, they've essentially been tweaking 1 game system for many years whilst having almost ZERO competition driving them on to make the game the best it can be.
Yep software rewrites are always hard not only because of the amount of new code you have to write but also you basically lose all the expertise you had on the team with the old code. As a software engineer you get super comfortable and complacent working on the same codebase for years and then when you get on a new project it hits you pretty hard.
@@jafrazeryep and no need to hammer them for it imo. Give them a break
@@jafrazer Yeah they are just a UI update company for the same game. Now it hits them in the butt because now they have to really work to eat.
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.
You are making a great point here and I hope Zealand reads it, as I believe you are spot on.
Mate, every single thing you said is rubbish. You clearly aren't a lawyer. SI is UK based company wholly owned by the ultimate parent Sega in Japan. They have a parent-subsidiary relationship ot a contractual one. Therefore there would be no shenanigans like you also made up. Why is your life so sad you have to make up lies in youtube comments?
@darkjudge8786 there are financial legal ramifications in si revealing anything before the investors call I Japan. Sega own si and are beholden to their shareholders first above all else as anything ahead of that call that could impact the share price could have legal implications for Sega from their shareholders.
@@darkjudge8786 No one is implying a "contractual" rather than parent-subsidiary relationship. For these events to be plausible, all that is necessary is for SEGA to have the power to prevent SI from cancelling. As the parent/publisher they likely do have that power, and the earnings call is a plausible motivation to keep things hush.
@@darkjudge8786Like the following comments says, I never said a contractual obligation. I regularly referred to the parent-subsidiary relationship. Further, even if I were to mention contractual obligations, parent-subsidiary relationships are created by what most countries call a parent-subsidiary agreement, which is a contract between the two parties to create the relationship and defines the obligations of each party. On top of this parents and subsidiaries usually make more contracts as the years go on and things occur that weren’t covered in the original parent-subsidiary. I have drafted both parent-subsidiary agreements and contracts that are supplementary to the relationship. Please refrain from hate-trolling RUclips comments, especially when you lack understanding in the discussed subject matter.
I rather have a canceling than have a half baked trash game.
Ea would've released no matter what. Enough said. I trust SI
I said the same months ago... you should see how much negativity I got including from some creators. For me, this was always going to happen.
@@imRehnzy You trust a company that has released half arsed shit in the past (blaming covid one year for example). A company that still took pre-orders knowing the state the game was in. NEVER showed ANY information on the game?
This is why you really should have watched the video before commenting. Your comment is so cliche and dumb, it bears no relevance whatsoever to what Zealand is discussing.
@@Mr_jz_12compared to most video game companies SI has actually been very honest with people. I know the bar isn’t exactly high lol it’s more than most companies give us
Next week: Zealand interviews the sacked SI lead developer in a Hong Kong Hotel like Edward Snowden
I'm looking forward to it 😂
SI needs a fresh team that can actually code and design.
This feels like a zealand and zealandism collab
Have you ever seen them in the same room? I haven't. Wondering if this is a Clark Kent / Superman situation
@@estcoachgregstupid idea, zealandism actually has some interesting opinions
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.
Money can be returned no problem.
You get it back without hassle, its literally not the problem. So thats, by FAAAR, not the worst thing.
Preordering is a huge mistake, no matter what
Why does anyone pre-order a game?! 😂
@@LiftandCoa SI offer us game that doesn't exist, how's that not a problem ? they literally lying if not scamming.
I think you should go on a retro era where you look at the older FM games and decide which one is the best
fm11 arsenal still had fabregas and van persie
fm13 no contest
Cm 01/02 the best manager ever released
FM19
@@Kyriakos1206loved that game and played its from release till I finally decided to update and purchased FM15. I subsequently purchased FM16, and the FM23, but none have given me the enjoyment of CM01/02. Maybe it’s just nostalgia and the fact CM01/02 was the first computer football game I played.
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
absolutely
Which is hilarious because FM24 is still really good imo
Which is even more hilarious when they said they were switching to unity nearly 5 years ago!
It's a classic example of mismanagement
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"
That would have taken humility and self awareness which I think they have shown they did not have an overabundance of
Bit pointless though isn't it? You can update FM24 yourself for free in less than half an hour.
reduced price xD you are funny
@@PeteBaldwinyeah but most people don’t want to have to deal with that, plus people on console can’t do that and there is a large player base on console now.
@@PeteBaldwinbut the years are wrong, which is super annoying.
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.
That's a great shout. They toned down the FM24 hype saying that all efforts are going into FM25.
To the extent they didn't improve anything on 24 just because 25 was going to be big
The worrying thing slightly is that they don't actually mention FM26 by name. Just "creating a new era"
if there was FM26 it wud be copy/paste of FM24. THey cannot go any further! those are fact everything else is sugar coating
inb4 Sega takes trademark from SI and gives it to someone else 😆
And still no screenshots of the match engine. What the heck?
@ If we don't get anything in 2 weeks we can assume there is none anything worth showing. So the claims of delayed release were lies all along for months.
@@snake3837 SI's database is decades ahead of any alternatives. I would hate to see them lose the license even if they suck in terms of making games, I honestly couldn't care less
I work in software development (albeit not game development) and that line about having "clear validation for the new direction" is key. They would've spent 4-5 years working towards a specific vision and the consumer playtest will have been the moment that their initial vision was proved to be wrong so they have to pivot and scope out a different direction. Depending on what they decided to do that could include shuffling teams/hiring more staff/rebuilding their infrastructure (such as how they test the game, any automated tests that they have would likely need to be re-written) which are all things that can cause massive delays on top of the already existing delays.
The issue is that they are not leading a new indie project. They should've known.
@@lightravenn 100% agree, my comment was more to give a little insight into what kind of things can cause these delays. Even if SI didn’t fully know the scale of work ahead of them, they’re owned by SEGA who surely would’ve been able to help them scope out the work.
@@Keano243.1 Did you ever work in software development that had DEI hiring practices? As miles has clearly taking the company down that route. Womens football, changing his name to chairperson instead of chairman, a full dev team thats 70% non white and 50% female. That never happened in a vacuum. its like that because he wants it like that, now we have a total disaster of a game that can't be made in the timeframe of 6 years with the underqualified people he hired. Everything points right at miles and his political ideology that he put first at every opportunity. It's uncomfortable to talk about this stuff sometimes but it needs calling out, its the elephant in the room that most of the fm community are flat out ignoring,.
I also work in software development. It's very easy to be confident, 100% so, that your only a few months away to then realise in 2-3 months you were so badly off with that estimate and there was a mountain of things no one considered.
I get Zealand's annoyance but I don't feel he's qualified to be making some of the comments he's making. Kev's video was much better and way more understanding on this while still rightly critical.
I’m also a software developer with lots of experience. What happened probably is devs and dev managers underestimated the scope which happens all the time. But then the business people pressured them to promise to finish it in time. So it’s probably mostly on the higher-up managers.
There is nowhere in that release that mentions FM26 . It mentions the next release but not the year . We could be looking at FM27
We could probably not even have fm at all. Hopefully that’s not the case
@@Okddases Nah there's no way. I think both Sega and SI have invested WAY too much time/money to where they would just scrap it. Also, they have a monopoly on the genre so it's not like they're gonna get quickly replaced by some other game.
@ I would say it depends if they continue with the conversation towards Unity.
If they just recycle the old engine for fm26 instead they would be good. However Sega will not tolerate wasting any more money into a project which has resulted in a barely finished worked for from what I am told 6 years ago
@@Okddases This would be a sensible compromise if the new Unity engine is still not ready for what would've been FM26's release, if only to get a game released, but would surely spell the end for many of the higher up staff at SI. I can't imagine Sega accepting going a year without releasing a game to then follow it up by releasing a modded version of FM24.
They kinda do? By saying they wouldn’t want to release beyond March and have the expectation of people buying another game later the same year?
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.
Their silence always spoke volumes, they knew they couldn’t deliver but they kept faking it hoping they could make it
@@derelict06Yeah, it seems like they initially thought they could deliver the game they envisioned after a few extra months of crunch time, but ultimately they underestimated the timeline of the work still to be done.
BioWare was famous back in their heyday for running dangerously close to deadlines and working crazy overtime at the end of development periods to finish their games. It seems to be pretty common to think this way in the video game industry.
@@derelict06 you are all so brainwashed your are crying they arent giving you another £60 database update of players. its the only game in history that doesn't need a yearly release and your all begging for it. no wonder gaming companies scam everyone
@@CounterSpice do you need a hug?
@ coming from the guy who said "Their silence always spoke volume"
To everybody saying "I would rather have the game cancelled than have a buggy game. It was the right choice." You are missing the point! Yes, that statement is correct and all of us wish the same. The problem is not the result in cancelling but how we got there. This shit should've been said upfront. Us, players, should've been treated with a respect of a community that is loyal and buys the game each year, many of us for more than a decade now.
It seems like no one commenting actually watched the video lol.
With that said, obviously this has done damage to the relationship with their fans but personally I don't really care as long as FM26 turn out to be good, as well as the following games. They would really break the relationship if they became a DLC/live service game. FM is one of my favorite/main games but if you really were invested that much to where you now hate the company or whatever you really need to find something better to do.
I do get how this is tragic for content creators though.
@Patrik38cz Exactly, plus lets be real, it's not like the fm team have had a lot on their hands the past decade. Fm from 2015, to now, has literally been a copy and paste game with squad and player updates, with the odd tweak to the engine to make it feel fresh. A one man dev team could borderline achieve that. How he managed to mess this up is clear and obvious. DEI hiring, woke features no one asked for, and that idiot pandering to political nonsense like changing his name to "Chairperson" instead of chairman. He's ignored his fanbase at every single turn, and sat on his ass stroking his political virtual signaling ego while the company burns around him. Miles needs to go, his times up, step down and let someone else with a more sound mind take over
It’s just a game. Get over it.
Get over yourself. SI are answerable to Sega who are a much larger entity. Imagine if you publicly announced to the press behind your boss' back that a project won't be ready, or delayed, or whatever: they'd be spitting blood.
@@MrBannystar okay then do a meeting with sega before? is there a 3 month waiting queue to speak to the execcs of SEGA? Not a good argument mate. If they have to cancel this game then clearly they knew A WHILE ago they couldn't finish it. It's not a matter of a few weeks lol
Biggest question of all, What TF did they sold us on September ? the game literally non existent.
They are probably not adapting the game to the new engine properly
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.
@@Icagel0 like they had a choice lol
There is always a choice. Like giving a 1-2 sentence update as mentioned in the comment before would have been much better than total silence, without breaking any financial or legal commitments. It would have been possible.@@LanskeyBeatz
@ There is always a choice.
@@thargoff typically when someone says that there is no choice, they mean that there is no other option which isn’t reasonable and justifiable. The “choices” that you say they have lead to detrimental outcomes
@ the choice of doing a comms like the initial comment said ("we know we promised an update but we can't right now, but it will come soon") could still have been done without breaching anything, still better than silence, so a choice doesn't need to be detrimental
This is what happens when you pay a studio every year for an identical game without complaining
dayumnnnn, haven't seen Z this pissed since the US rehired Gregg Berhalter then completely failed in the Copa America
this is gonna make bros hairline worse from stress
Underrated comment
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.
Honestly, its better to cancel then release a broken game. Too many companies would have released a broken game just for the sake of release.
Then cancel it with your first announcement. Why do this weird roundabout of very rapid delays, release pre-orders, etc? They've been developing 25 for half a decade, they should have better insight to the release time
Fantastic move, else you end up with Ea25 glitches, mistakes, incorrect content etc etc etc bit disappointing but like others have said, they'd rather have a working game
The issue isn’t the fact they’ve cancelled it. It’s the fact it’s taken so long to come to the decision and without any communication. Not to mention how poorly they’ve done at getting the game ready
I disagree that that's better. Cancel and then release a broken game afterwards? Now I will agree that it's better to cancel *than* to release a broken game 😜
@@croissantpowerThese are complaints, not actual issues. Sorry you’re unhappy, I’m sure the dev team and their overlords are unhappy as well
As an indie game dev myself, I knew this woukd happen from the very first time they said they'd be using UNITY to make it.
UNITY has a pretty big issue with data management or to say it better, with cleaning up useless data as a game goes on.
Testament to this is the infamous loading time in Pillars of Eternity thst as the game goes on, grts so long you can be stuck on loading screen for literally 10 minutes.
Imagine using the one game engine that has this specific issue with data management and freeing up resources on a game such as Football Manager, which is HEAVILY data driven.
I mean I do not know if this was one of the issues that prevented this from releasing, but even if not, it was a MORONIC choice from the get go to make their own life harder.
Makes you wonder if concerns like this might have been raised before they made the decision, but were ignored by someone powerful
If they cancelled from the first push back ( where they moved it from early to late November ) then I would’ve been so on their ride but the fact they pushed it back and stripped it down and pushed until now and still cancelled it shows that they were no where near ready last year and are probably not ready now
Yea, like looking back at the roadmap makes it look insane. Was the roadmap fake? They knew they were gonna be lying/misinforming people when they were making it, they knew it wouldn't be ready. Crazy stuff
With the lack of communication, I legit think the only reason they're not releasing a broken game is because they don't even have a broken game to release.
On a larger scale, I honestly don't see why this game needs an annual release. Releasing the game for the sake of it every year just breeds complacently and pure monetisation.
It's basically been the same game since FM13, arguably further back: Bits have been bolted on here and there, systems have been modified, but it's still the same thing under the hood.
I suspect the truth is that it's much easier to sell a new title at retail - even if it is *remarkably* similar to the previous release - to the consumer than it is DLC. Similarly it's practically impossible to sell an "update", which lets be honest: Is exactly what each release of FM has been for the last 10+ years if you discount the database.
That said, I'm one of those folk who was actually sad that the FM:Live subscription model (and multiplayer fantasy football league) tested in 2008 failed, and I'd have happily funded the development of the project this way rather than in annual releases.
Feature wise it clearly doesn't, same as Fifa. The issue is player and club updates. All of their scouting work, updates rosters, licensing, etc. People aren't going to pay $60 for an updated database every year. Not when for 30 years they've set that precedent.
Instead people will just keep playing the same saves, or use community created databases/mods. Then they make no money
because people on SI eat everyday they need to make annual income every year, simple as that
Yep, this game never needed to be bought yearly
“Pure monetisation” is what corporations are made for. It’s not a hobby, it’s a job. EAFC is the same game released every year because they have shareholders who demand profits and employees who demand wages. If you’re not okay with choking every single dollar out of the market, then you’re against the market as it stands. And hey, I’m against the market as it stands, so you wouldn’t be alone.
Zealand figuring out which ideas to implement on this channel is going to be insane brain work lol
I think he's diversified his content enough with the Hidden grounds and other docuseries, he'll be alright
I have watched a lot of videos on this topic, and finally someone brought the right tone to the table. Thanks Zealand.
A major thing that does not get talked enough about is the release of FM 25 being used as a justification for the minor updates in FM 23 and FM 24. We all bought games with very little updates and it was justified with the new engine. Now it didn’t even get release in time and we still got two years of half updates at full price.
The worst thing is that most fans would still buy FM 25 on old engine but SI couldn’t figure this out before delaying the game. Bro, I know they have been wrong since the first delay, but I would still buy FM25 with old engine and few modifications and SI would have less financial disaster.
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.
Oh and the sad part in game outlets covering it: They mostly copy the press release and then go on championing SI for the great decision of not releasing a buggy game.
They are congratulating them for the barest of minimums and not even a hint of asking the questions of WTH went wrong, why they stopped communicating,...
They didn't promise you FM26 though
@@akunwanneprosper7016 That's just semantics. If you want it to be the 'next instalment' than read it as such in my comment.
Me, I treat it as the legalese word salad that it is. They don't know where they are heading and I don't know either.
SI are implying the cancellation was due to issues with the UI rather than the match engine, so why don't they show us the match engine then? This might be a way to regain some of the goodwill lost with fans of the game by not just cancelling the game in November when it was pretty obvious that it was never going to be ready.
It's too bad SI didn't just say they were going to put a very small team together to put DLC updates for FM24 out every six months until the Unity game was finished. Maybe it would be a year, maybe another two. If 24 was still getting some support, the hard core fans would have bobbed through, and the new fans wouldn't know the difference.
Unfortunately that was not possible because of license agreements.
@@tristanlwkns actually the license agreements was because of FM25, based on their statement if FM25 failed to launch they technically allowed to used those licenses on FM24, they simply didn't want to make the effort because FM24 no longer provides money.
@SongofIceandTea Gotcha. Then they definitely could've AT LEAST gave us an official updated player database.
@ they could but again, they didn't want to put more effort for a game that won't make any more sells
FM should be a community project, tbh. A solid engine with frequent data updates would be enough to keep most enthusiasts happy.
The lies from SI, the negligence (for years) by miles, and the contracts neglected will cost SI (and sega) mega bucks and could kill the game completely. Im laughing at the comments stating that "im glad they didn't' release a half arsed buggy game"............ THEY HAVE IN THE PAST! They just don't have an excuse this time.
That’s the thing lots of comments are missing here
Sports interactive and Football manager are not these massive revenue streams for Sega. If they cost too much money then they will be cut completely and the series would have been discontinued like their hockey ones
@Okddases and i wouldn't be suprised if 24 was the last game released. They failed to fulfill contracts which will have to be paid compensation for. No sales + compensation =......
People keep saying "the game will die" yer there's no competition so no it won't die. They can get away with absolute murder sad it'll never die until something else comes along.
@@Mr_jz_12 Miles is problem, has a golden goose and has no idea what to do with it. Spends more time worrying about whether to call himself chairman or chairperson, and introducing virtual signaling features not a single fm player asked for like womens football. Plus his dei dev team he hired isnt helping either, yet again that falls at his feet for hiring people based on identity politics over merit. Miles needs to go, simple as that
@@yogaflame7884 I never liked Miles, always seemed a holier than thou smarmy tosser.
The ‘at least they didn’t release a buggy game’ argument is annoying, as it sets such an incredibly low bar of acceptable behaviour. It’s ok to expect more. Because Company X would have released a buggy mess, doesn’t mean SI are doing something commendable by not joining those at the bottom of the barrel.
Delays happen but the pre-orders annoy me the most about this situation. Every dev in that studio would have known the state of the game wasn’t going to be ready for a November release. Yet they opened pre-orders anyway… pre orders for a game that they couldn’t get to a satisfactory standard with another 5 months of work. So what state was it in when pre-orders went live?
Right? What was the state when preorders went live? What was the state when it was supposed to be ready after a 2 week delay? hell WHAT IS IT LIKE NOW? We STILL have no detail on what it was ACTUALLY supposed to be like! But everyone wants to start kissing boots because?
1:00 spitting absolute nonsense Z. They would have lost more trust if they released a half assed game. Look at the backlash that Cyberpunk release got, or at No Man's Sky. That's how you lose trust. Releasing a game that is unplayable is worse for the reputation than Cancelling it. This shows they take their fans serious and don't want to feel like they doing a cash grab.
They have already lost a lot of trust with this clownfest.
This doesn't work now anymore. They promised transparency and open communication and did the opposite. The cancellation in itself is not the problem but the whole way they got there is and does erode a lot of trust. By still being apologetic you justify their course of action but they can't continue like this and need to learn the lessons.
Issue is, if theyve been working on this new engine "for years", what confidence is there that this can be sorted out in time for FM26?
FM26 is now in developmental limbo/hell. It's cooked, even if it comes out. SI bit off way more than they could chew and promised way more than they could deliver on, I would not be surprised if FM26 either never gets released or is the final entry in the series. Two delays in to a cancellation? What were they planning on releasing back in November? And they have enough that they can make not just a functioning game, but a massively improved game in 9 months? Remember, SI's own words- the game was supposed to be "super ready" next month. Things aren't looking good.
There is a potential alternative narrative: Licensing agreements.
I wouldn't be surprised if SI were expected to pay for licensing at full rate for just a few months, even though those licenses will require renewal in the summer. If that is true - we'll never know and it's just my speculation - then the decision to skip this year is a calculated financial one.
This is how I inferred the references to "stakeholder compliance".
FM26 wont be the last game lmao
I expect FM26 to be really bad then FM27 will be somewhere between solid and best in series
I disagree - they could’ve easily released a half baked product. Instead they’re holding it back. Builds trust if you ask me. But you need to put a video out on something I suppose.
The communication sucks really bad but Baldur's Gate 3 shows that delaying games can be the best thing to do. Fingers crossed its a Baldur's Gate
I'm hoping for a Baldur's Gate 3 or a Crusader Kings series where you only see a new game once in a great while.
Baldur's Gate doesn't ask you to buy Baldur's Gate 4 the next year, and Baldur's Gate 5 the next year, and Baldur's Gate 6...
@@ryanchiasson7211 Yea true I do not like the yearly cycle, does not feel enough time to make a big enough impact to development to warrant a new fully priced game
The first delay (last year) was just a couple of weeks. Can you imagine how far off completion it was then to have to scrub the game entirely and give themselves what will eventually be another YEAR to produce. We haven't had delays, we've had lies.
The Sega AGM was 2:30am; the statement was 2:34am. It had to have literally been the first thing mentioned to the shareholders.
Sega is only on the Tokyo exchange, not London or New York. The announcement was public at 11:30 local time.
Imagine the amount of fucked up choices you need to make in order to mess up something in which you don't have competition at all ☠️☠️☠️
Maybe having no competition is the problem.
To use a sega analogy, FM25 could have gotten away with A Sonic Frontiers. Now, FM26 has to be a Sonic X shadow Generations
Nobody over 5 years old plays sonic/nobody under 5 plays football manager. You missed the entire population of earth with that analogy.
@@permaskunkedNot true, there’s autistic people everywhere of all ages playing Sonic 😂
They absolutly knew last summer that November was impossible to make, you don't miss a second deadline tats 4 months later if you actually thought there was a chance , Miles just choose to bury his head in the sand, I suspect largely due to his championing of Womens football. By the time it got to feature lock and they would have realised even with the cuts making November was never happening the decision should have been "Lets write code to translate the db into the old engine format and release FM25 on the FM24 engine with updated data and some bug fixes (and ideally a discounted price, atleast for those who own fm24)" to tide us over but that would have meant dropping what they have been pushing as the headline feature and spent in their own words multi-millions or at the very least doing a basic version where its just a standard set of leagues with none of the details they have spent billions on. And dropping it would have been an admission that adding something that costs multi millions at the time of an engine change was a mistake, every penny they had spare should have been going into the engine switch and then when that's completed you could reassign those resources to the woman game, trying to do both was just ridiculously and its led to this situation where we don't have a game and as we don't have a game we don't have women football as it needs the game first and the engine switch should have always been where all the resources were going to
I would assume most people would have been fine if they would have skipped 25 to overhaul the game but canceling 25 after months of delays is incredibly worrying for the state of the dev team and loses a lot of credibility
I mean let's not forget that FM24 was announced with fewer new features because they were shifting all of their focus onto the unity project and they still had the audacity to charge full price for it.
well, at least they didn't do Ubisoft and release a broken game. I actually respect that
We now need a competitor so si can’t do this again.
In the game, when you break 2 promises consecutive, the footballer wants to leave the club as they don't and won't trust you. That's our situation right now. They promised us twice, and failed both. It's hard to trust again...
The Reason they went radio silence was they needed SEGA to have there Q4 Earnings Call because shareholders are privvy to information before gamers sadly.
Then they shouldn’t have promised to give us info when they wouldn’t be able to after they already fucked up and delayed the game twice
Never thought in my life I’d ever see Zealand this pissed off… But he’s right! Also, shoutout to my girlfriend which bought me this game for Christmas not even knowing am not playing it, cause she’d be more heartbroken than me.
There's no way they can't release some pictures or videos of the things that are actually good and working as intended. Surely there are new and exciting features in the game. Not showing anything , makes it seem like everything is cooked in the game.
Well I think it's not crazy to assume that everything is actually cooked in the game as of now.
I've worked for Sega. SI gets a lot of the criticism from the public, but people actually don't know or forget that Sega is behind most of the big decisions.
Civ VII my friend. It's destiny..
I'm going to be completely honest and say that everyone involved with this since 2020 should be embarrassed. It's not some podunk small content creators making a game to sell on itch, it's a major franchise that averages one of the highest daily users on the whole of the steam charts and consistently pulls great numbers in sales.
The fact that they scaled down development of FM24 to put more time into FM25 and FM24 ended up pretty decent in spite of it is a testament to how truly monumental of a disaster this is. This isn't Sega trying to rush anything out the door, they've had more than enough time and probably endless resources to get this done and they have fallen so insanely short of the mark that the community has done more for FM24 to pull it into the shape of FM25 than SI have.
I'd place this firmly on SI and talent management/acquisition because this has dragged on far longer than it had any right to.
They decided to switch to a new engine, integrate the entire women's game and have simultaneous console launches all in the same year - all that on top of the work they need to do for an annual release. This has been a complete botch of project management from SI. There's no excuse for that, especially with Sega's resources and experience to draw on. It was apparent the second they started stripping features out that there was a very serious problem, and when they changed the delay from 2 weeks to 5 months in the space of a few weeks it became apparent that their communication was also a problem, not just with their customer base but internally - whoever announced "it just needs a couple more weeks" when it eventually turned out to be impossible clearly didn't know how bad things were. All that reflects really badly on the competence of SI's senior management. If I was Sega round about now I'd be going over the top half of their org chart with a big red pen to make sure such an embarrassment never happens again.
The engine was the problem. They've had awful trouble getting it to work at all. Unity is a notoriously bad and fickle engine. Let's not try and put any blame on women's football.
@@catrionacolville2192 It would have doubled the size of their database, required a new set of newgen names, clubs, player models, everything. It would have been the biggest expansion to their database probably since the beginning and a huge amount of work, with all the scouting, integration, testing and bugfixing. It would have been a challenge on its own even without everything else. Don't get oversensitive about it being women's football, it would have been the same if they'd introduced an equal number of new players and teams about the men's game. They piled far too much work on themselves in too short a time and nobody managed to grasp the big picture.
@@catrionacolville2192 no one did... it was about the amount of work for a whole new section.... not women per se.... so chill "white knight".
"we've been validated in the new direction" Whats been validated???? Like what part is being well received? Show us that part! I almost can't believe they haven't shown anything outside of like 4 screenshots. In this update they're saying there are good things, why not show them or at least say what it is? Makes me feel like that part is all BS and there aren't good parts and 26 will be a total mess
The engineering mismanagement that led to the game being in a terrible state back in November had absolutely no chance of being fixed in time for March. In fact theres almost certainly not enough time to fix it for an FM 26 release at the normal time.
Get ready for literal years of disaster.
Just to add on to this. The only thing we've seen from this next generation of FM is a couple of quite terrible looking screenshots of a UI that looked like a trello board. I'm not even sure that it actually came from the game, but I always hated it either way.
@@drhay53 Agreed, looks like a console game. FM has always been a PC game and it looks like SI has thrown it's core fanbase under the bus. Why use Unity as a platform if not for console and mobile, there would be better options for PC.
Unity itself isn't the problem with the UI. The screenshots we've seen, I felt like was a thrown together Photoshop by a UX designer.
'years of disaster' and what makes you qualified to say this?
@@Fives179 being a software engineer and recognizing the signs of inept product ownership
Sports Interactive are a public company, operating and trading from the UK. Here in the UK, like most countries, it is illegal to make a knowingly false or misleading statement that will influence the companies share price. I agree with your suspicion that it just seems off that a game they claimed would be playable just a couple of months after their announcement, is in reality, so far from finished that they cancelled it completely. Pissing off customers loyal customers is one thing, but they’ll actually care if they have pissed off their investors.
its the right situation, dont want a game that's half finished and a lot of bugs
Every fm released is bugged
Thing is is the game even half finished? We haven’t gotten any fm25 gameplay showcase at all, despite already being in February and the game being in a development cycle for 5 years
The right decision was not tying to get the engine for FM25 when CLEARLY they aren’t capable or ready to implement it
the right situation was admitting since September that they had nothing to offer
For me, the fact that Miles Jacobson went silent, speaks volumes. He is the first one to be most excited about new FM and talks about features and whatnot, does in depth dives, etc. The fact that SI main guy is silent, is alarming.
Well, we all knew that switching from their archaic engine to Unity won't be a breeze. It's the biggest jump in year they have made. It reminds me of when they went from Championship Manager 0304 to Football Manager 05.
I know already that even porting small games (from Flash) to Unity can be a hassle, let alone project like Football Manager with it's huge statistics database and whatnot. On top of that, they need to write completely new match engine from scratch. I believe that's the main culprit of this whole situation. We haven't seen gameplay footage at all. Something tells me that Match Engine was either not done or it was very buggy and a mess.
11:26 THIS, Thank you Zealand! THEY picked the year to make this step up and with what grounds? Did it look near ready back in 2023? If so, what the fresh hell was supposedly going to be available in November?
The whole "Unity version" could have been delayed for years and we would have been none-the-wiser and not even upset about it as long as we were getting the regular yearly installments of what we're used to... but SOMEONE pulled the trigger to do this way earlier than they could manage
Sports Interactive is only interactive with their shareholders not with their community.
I work with Investment Funds and I do believe the decision to go radio silent and data change to March was financial ONLY .... Financial results are publin in March April but P&L most likely was closed on December 31st. Now I believe they should move the game release dates to October (the latest) going forward..... Otherwise You're always getting the game half way the season is in progress.... ridiculous!
Sega's financial year ends on March 31. This was discussed a lot when they delayed to March because it made it look like that March was the last possible date they could delay to.😢
@thargoff Still.... The reason was financial ONLY! Not based on game development, on how things were looking/ready or not ready at all.... And when a company starts making decisions based on money ONLY.... thats when things can start going wrong! Now they're lucky in my opinion because theres no competitor or true competitor. If there was, with decent deadlines, outing a database out in September/October, they would suffer more than they will. I dont buy the game every single year because sometimes I dont get how they spen a full year just doing a few tweaks and a database update and sell them as a full new game. A competitor here is really needed!
@ If it was financial only, they could have released a buggy game and made some cash. It was both financial and developmental. Otherwise I agree.
They saw the pregnancy announcement from Chelsea's first women keeper and they knew the game was just not ready... 😂😂😂
Honestly I had not purchased FM24 specifically because I knew FM25 was supposed to be such a massive shift. Yes, this is a massive disappointment. The communication part, (or lack there of,) is the most frustrating thing. Oh well, on to Zealand Live turning into a Civ VII channel.
lol, I was the opposite.
I normally only buy this game every other year, and 24 was going to be an off year for me, but I pretty much assumed 25 was going to be trash, and 24 would be the last good FM for a long time, so I decided to pick up 24 when it was on sale.
Same. I have been holding off the last couple of games because I have been hanging out for womens teams being added.
It went free on Epic a while ago and i dont doubt itll go free somewhere at some point soon. Keep your eyes open for that
Bullshit so you have trust in a game who sell an almost similar game every year to full price with something who only needed a dlc update every season. Thats a scam in my eyes. So this is good news.
7:17 - Zealand I think this is the main area of our disagreement. That works for me. I'm fine with that. They had trouble, they delayed the game trying to iron out the issues, then it became clear that they can't and they canceled it. Fair enough. I just hope that the devs get a lot more breathing room, because it is likely that a lot of crunch was involved since the mid summer 2024, maybe for longer. And personally, if just cancelling FM25 is possible, perhaps moving to a biennial release schedule is possible.
SI themselves stated in that release that this was only the first time they could talk about it. Blame shareholders, the parent company, whoever but that's completely different from "hey guys we're trying really hard". That's acting with ill content
They were taking preorders for a game they knew was no where near completed. It's cancelled because they probably don't have a sellable product.
@@Peacock__dirty little secret, every single game company does this. They just normally deliver on time. This time we saw what happens when that doesnt happen
@@TheDieseI then we should critisize every company :)
What is really worrying is there STILL no match engine examples , that basically says they are not confident it would get a good reaction .
Completely agree that the real issue here is the complete lack of communication. I was unaware they are tied in with Sega - this reeks of typical Japanese corporate overmanagement and radio silence in times of difficulty. "Stay silent, head down and hope it blows over" is the usual response to scandal. They should've been clear that the March deadline was hopeful at best - stringing us along just brews discontent. Everyone's still gonna buy FM26 but with this kind of delay I'm starting to worry it won't be basically bug-free by then.
September would be a great release date
The video we’ve all been waiting for.
10:00 To the best of my knowledge the reason they couldn't say anything is because Sony has to give the investors a report on how much money they expect to make in the coming fiscal quarter. If SI came out and said that FM25 wasn't coming out in march but Sony said to investors that it was that would be against SEC regulations and Sony would be in legal trouble because the investors would have expected them to have a big influx in cash from the new game that was never releasing. So SI had to wait for Sony to tell the investors first before they made a public anouncement.
So what ur telling me is their internal communication is even worse than their communication with us? They don’t know when their game is gonna be ready, sega doesn’t know, of course we don’t.
@oneunripemango1858 SI probably told them around the end of January cause that's when they were supposed to release gameplay. They just couldn't say anything because the earnings call was coming up.
@@oneunripemango1858SEGA is a publicly traded company, as such they have to make their shareholders aware of anything that may impact their share price first. Their latest quarterly investor call was their opportunity to do that and therefore SI will have been legally bound to silence until that point, hence the statement coming immediately after it had been covered on that call.
You’re doing such a great job! Love the vibes you bring.
Imagine Zealand is a Hollow knight fans and waiting Silksong to come out
Lmao
FM better step up their game, add cutscenes , add interactive media for the press conferences , add in-game face generation for new players , there is so much that needs to be done in the next FM since they canceled this one we clearly cannot have just another bump in the year and a new DB for the fm game.
It will be easily moddable because it's Unity. Many features could be added by mods and any bad graphics/UI can be fixed.
They need to go back to how it use to be. 1 year, full game, 2nd year update (which is £15, similar to what they use to do)
A new full game doesn't need to come out every year. They should one full year to refine and bring out need features, like they use to
This is the highlight of my day. Thanks for making it.
I AM emotionally invested in a game. It's called Football Manager 24.
They didn't drop the ball Zealand. They threw the ball into the neighbors yard and decided to walk away!
Started: Dramatic crime drama montage with flashing headlines!
Most of the video: really good deep analysis in a calm and relaxing voice
That's a bit over the top! I have been playing this game since the first championship manager. I'm not surprised it was cancelled after the delays and things that weren't going to be in FM25. I hope that means 26 will be better. I will just continue to playing 24 until the next one comes out.
I think all this hand wringing and screaming about it will still buy 26 and 27 whatever state they are in!!
For years and YEARS now, and I mean well over 15 years, on the Sports Interactive Forums people have been saying that they should "skip" a year so they had 2 years to work on a game and make it spectacular. They of course have never planned to do this as it just has to come out as an annual release. But now we get the chance to see what SI can do when they skip a year. I've already commented on the forums that FM26 better be absolutely bloody brilliant or there will be a riot...
It's your fault for not running
The game is so far away from being finished it's not even in a broken state yet. I wouldn't be surprised if we're still waiting on a release by Christmas.
Your hairline is cooked
The thing is, most of us called this back when it got "delayed".
My reasoning personally wasn't even anything to do with them needing more time, or not being able to get it ready, I just thought it made absolutely no sense to launch a game in March when you plan to go back to regular releases in October/November for the next iteration - outside of the really, really die hard FM fans, nobody was going to buy a game that had a 7-8 month lifespan.
Should've took a year off in the first place and just put out a mini update for FM24 considering the size of the rebuild and they must've known that they were never meeting the original release date if this is now where we are. Should've been more transparent with the fanbase and most importantly now, FM26 has to come out HOT, because a lot of "casual" players that were excited about the changes and new engine aren't going to hold onto that excitement for another full year only to have it come out a buggy mess.
FM is basically just a big excel spreadsheet with Fifa 97 playing during the games.
Embarrassing.
Yes, but upgrading those graphics has been what has led to the cancellation.
It's not the fact that they cancel the game that annoys me its the fact that they wait til 4 months after due release to go oh yeah lets just cancel it. Like just do it earlier
Ehh I think it's a matter of quality control. If anything, it's impressive that they wouldn't let an unfinished / unoptimized release fly by.
ADMIRABLE HAHAHAHA 😂😂😂😂
It literally isn't. They absolutely 100% knew they didn't have a game anywhere near finished when they first delayed it. They were taking PREORDERS when they KNEW they didn't have a game that was in anywhere near a sellable state. It's entirely a decision based on them being unable to move a product that would probably tank their company, not quality control.
@@Peacock__every company takes preorders on unfinished games
@@TheDieseI Then critisize all companies :)
Trying to massively overhaul your game engine and stick to your yearly release cycle is a bold move.
This was the expected outcome, but I'd imagine refunding all those pre-orderers is going to be a nightmare.
I can't fault SI/SEGA for trying, and maybe this is an impetus for SEGA to possibly bring back their other football management series *Saka Tsuku/Let's Make A Soccer Team!*
I'm glad they are actually canceling the game than forcing it. It is disappointing but I'd be more devastated if they delivered a broken buggy mess on march.
This is so common in the software world. Deadlines are arbitrarily set by people who have no idea about how long the work will take and don't listen to developer feedback.
lol let us please all stop ignoring the massive elephant in the room. spending thousands of hours and millions of dollars on developing womens football while trying to make the switch to unity at the same time doomed the game. it is that simple.
I agree that it the planned introduction of women's football 100% took some resources away from overall development of the game and was probably a mistake however....
There is no doubt the development issues are way bigger than that and woman's football wasn't the difference between the game being out on time or not.
the bigger worry for me is: Will this even work out? Did SI actually get their shit together? Does FM on Unity even make sense?
It only makes sense on unity for console and mobile!
They announced the unity switch years ago, how is it not ready? Stunning Incompetence...
If FM24 had an update to what all the major leagues are like now, I would be okay until the end of the year.