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Soccer management game Football Manager 26 released this week after two years of anticipation.
No installment was released last year following complications from the transition to Unity; the two releases before that (2023 and 2024) were announced as half-developed games because of parent studio Sports Interactive's purported all-in focus on this year's release (well, last year's, as it was then). FM26 was to be the ultimate Football Manager: enhanced match graphics, a tile-based UI no longer evocative of a spreadsheet, improved "newgen" (game-generated future player) faces, and... women's football.
Then came the leaks and reluctant announcements from the studio as the clock ticked down to what should have been the release date of FM25. Despite years of insistence that neither the engine transfer nor the addition of women's football would cause any complications, the game was in trouble. International management, a poorly developed (and therefore rarely touched) aspect of previous games, had been entirely removed rather than improved. In-game manager-player interactions (known as "shouts") had been entirely removed rather than improved. Most controversially, player weights had been removed for obtuse reasons pertaining to "women's body types" being "very different from men's" with their weight fluctuating "a lot more, often weekly." This, of course, somehow resulted in all players having their weight measurements removed, including male players.
Cue this week's release... a calamitous, bug-filled, poorly-optimized catastrophe. Sure, the bedrock is there in Unity for a game that will eventually surpass its predecessors, and patches over the last 48 hours have taken Steam reviews from "Overwhelmingly Negative" to "Mostly Negative", but it's simply unclear what the SI team was working on for the last five years of claimed development on this game. User mods slapped together in a week's time have outdone in-game graphics and processing times; the two most recent patches included hundreds of fundamental basic features and fixes that... somehow no one thought to include in the base game upon release? The whole saga has been a fascinating public showcase of mismanagement, procrastination, incompetence, and a bizarre hierarchy of priorities.
That last component is most interesting to me as an observer: who is benefitting from all these video games devoting time and money toward the implementation of women's sports? EA Sports, 2K Sports, and now Sports Interactive chose to limit development elsewhere so they could include slapdash, poorly-planned women's leagues. Are their marketing departments manufacturing idealistic projections of future female fanbases? Have they all been Pied-Piper'd (or Don-Corleone'd) by Sweet Baby Inc.?
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