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There has been a feeling that the new reboot of the Football Manager franchise – FM25 – has been struggling for a while amongst fans, and that spidey-sense has today proved correct as Sports Interactive and Sega decided to pull the release from the end of November and hoik it all the way back until March next year, leaving this year as the first without a new Football Manager game for what seems like an eternity.
Pre-orders were pushed back a week earlier this month but the main rumblings out of Sports Interactive have all been around what FM25 wouldn’t have as much as what it would contain. International management, touchline shouts, and even player weights disappeared from the game that prides itself on being packed to the rafters with more stats than you could ever need.
Now, in a statement, the devs have said, “After careful consideration, Sports Interactive has made the tough decision to further delay the release of Football Manager 25.
Following discussions with SEGA, our licensors, and partners, we have agreed the best course of action is to delay the launch until March 2025. Specific platform release dates will follow once confirmed.”
Fans had already been suggesting that they may just carry on with Football Manager 24 until FM25 sorted itself out. Now it seems that they will have little choice.
The statement continues, “In our last Development Update in September, we explained that we needed to push FM25’s original release back to give ourselves more time to deliver the best possible experience for this first instalment in a new era of Football Manager.
“This additional time has not been sufficient to ensure the game quality and experience meets your expectations and our very high standards.
“Timelines were already tight and, as rightly pointed out by many of your recent comments, we were simply rushing too much and in danger of compromising our usual standards. This has put an enormous amount of pressure on everyone working across the studio, who are all passionately committed to delivering the best game possible.
“FM25 is the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation. We simply cannot compromise the delivery of this crucial juncture in Football Manager’s history by rushing to release it in November.
“Of course, this is not where any of us expected to be seven weeks out from our release but, in the spirit of our studio values, we always consider the bigger picture – and the bigger picture here is that we need this additional time to deliver a game that we can all be proud of.”
As with games that have been canceled this year such as Life By You it does feel strange that you can get this close to launch – the PC specs were released just days ago – before realizing that your product is nowhere near ready. Fans of the series will now be hoping that the long-awaited switch to a new game engine and the issues it seemingly has brought will it will ultimately mean they get the game they wanted, rather than no game at all.
