The absence of supporters from the stadiums not only means a huge loss of revenue from ticket sales, but also from concessions and merchandising. It’s no secret that football clubs around the world are suffering financially. Let’s start with the money side of things. There’s also a request for your help in one area. If you’re at all interested in how it has affected development, you can find more information by finding out how COVID-19 impacted the making of Football Manager 2021 - it’s something I’m bound to be talking about a lot more in interviews in the coming weeks and months. So, for this blog, I’m going to deal with how we’ve chosen to reflect COVID-19 in FM21’s gameplay.
As we pride ourselves on FM’s realism, we knew that we had to reflect that, while still offering that escape.Īs a result, for FM21 we’ve tried to strike the best possible balance between realism and escapism. We knew that our stance would have to change for FM21 as COVID-19 and – possibly more significantly – its social and economic effects have had a serious impact on real world football. FM is meant to be an escape from reality, and having a squad ravaged with an illness has the opposite effect. Of course, we couldn’t stop people who ‘mod’ our games from including COVID-19 in FM20, but we really dislike what their work did to our game – and from what I’ve seen on social media, so did most of the people who downloaded and used those mods. People have always used FM to create their own fantasy world and we reasoned that now, more than ever, they needed something to take them away from reality… not to remind them of it. When developing Football Manager, and our games before that, we’ve always tried to make entertainment that provides the best value for money on the planet and also offers an escape from the real world.
#FOOTBALL MANAGER 2021 CRACKWATCH UPDATE#
When COVID-19 first brought the world to a virtual standstill a few months ago (although it seems like years at this point) people started to ask us via social media if we were going to update FM20 to include the virus and its effects.