Interviews// Miles Jacobson, Part 1

SPOnG: When you make a new Football Manager, what sort of things do you look at to refine? Are you still able to find things that can be added and changed on a base level?

Miles Jacobson: Well, we now have a system in place whereby I kind of know what's going in the game over the next three or four iterations. We have a features database – we spent a lot of time this year going through new feature ideas.

We went through 1,500 ideas over a period of three weeks, with everyone in the studio invited because we don't have designers. No-one at Sports Interactive has the job title of 'designer'. Everyone's involved with that process. And we went through all of these ideas which have come from everyone – from us, SEGA, QA, the community, people in the pub...

So we went through all of them, and I've scheduled them into the next few iterations, so that there's a good, wide range of features in the next few versions. And there are always new things that come up each year that we want to do but might take over priority, and then we'll slot that into the one game and then move some other things across. We have no shortage of ideas at all.


SPOnG: You have a release on the PSP and iPhone. The big release, you could say is on the PC. Now there's obviously a debate on the landscape of the PC industry. How is that working out for you guys?

Miles Jacobson: The nay-sayers are wrong. It's quite simple. There are certain genres that have moved off the PC. FPS is one of those - it's now console-friendly, because they have the control methodology right. We haven't worked out how to do that yet. Our sales were down slightly on the PC last year, but we are in the middle of a recession, so you kind of have to expect that a little bit. The iPhone sales made up for that - the iPhone game did really well.

But there's still a PC market out there, you've just got to look at Steam, and how they and other digital platforms are thriving. Most retailers are now trying to put the digital PC platform together as well, and we'll start seeing more of those within the next year or two. So, while the boxed market might be shrinking slightly - for a lot of people, it isn't for us, but it might be for a lot of people - the digital market is very buoyant.

If you make a great game on PC, you're going to do fine. Look at us, StarCraft, World of Warcraft, The Sims. It might sound arrogant for me to be bunching us in with those other AAA games, but I do think our games are of a very good quality, and customer satisfaction seems to show that as well.

But ultimately, you've got to make the right game for the right platform, and we went full-on into the console thing a few years ago and made the game on the 360, and it wasn't the right game on the right platform. We made the PC game with a worse user interface and worse control system, on a console.

That's not what you do. Civilization Revolution's Firaxis got it right, and obviously you've got Civ V which is going to do really well, as is Total War. There are still a lot of us who are doing fine on the PC platform, and I worry about the people who say the platform is dead. Because I don't know what market they're watching.


SPOnG: There's a lot of people who say the focus has moved from FPS and more high-end games to more casual products.

Miles Jacobson: Yeah, and in Germany the market for browser-based Freemium games is absolutely insane. There's a lot of people who have moved over to these sorts of games.


SPOnG: Have you dipped your toe into the browser space with Football Manager yet?

Miles Jacobson: Well, we don't have a freemium game quite like that. There's Football Manager Live, which is our MMO. It's a client-based server deal, which is still a low-key release. We've got around 11,000-12,000 subscribers, which is fine for the state that we're in.

We're also working with a South Korean company called KTH on something that is tentatively titled Football Manager Online. That's going to be a Football Manager MMO built for the Asian market.

How the tides turn! That SEGA signed us to be a Western developer, and now we're going off and doing games for Eastern consumers. It's quite a strange one! But we're working very closely with KTH – in fact, some of their engineers are moving over here to work with our development team. I'm really looking forward to that, we're going to learn so much from them.

So we're very open to new opportunities, but one thing that we've learnt over the years is that we would rather be best at something than first at something. The first time we actually tried that philosophy was on the iPhone. It would have been very easy for us to have released the iPhone version ages ago, and done something rubbish.

We wanted to get it right, and do it right. We were patient, released at the right time with the right game, and it's part of what you have to do. We're not going to rush things again.

Check back next week for Part II of our monster interview with Miles Jacobson.