by For the first time in his 20-year history, SIM Football Manager SIM football manager will skip a year. Football manager 25Twice delayed, shortly before the proposed release date of March 2025, it was canceled.
In a statement, developer Sports Interactive and publisher Sega said they had decided to shift their focus to the next game in the series after it became clear that that FM25 Would not be able to achieve its quality goals without further delays that were excluded.
Football manager 25 Was considered a major makeover for the series, where sport interactively promised the “largest technical and visual progress in the series for a generation and laid the building blocks for a new era.” The game was due to the introduction of better animations, improved user interface and a revised competition daily experience and to record women’s football for the first time.
But Sports Interactive seems to have struggled with the scope of the makeover; It had already taken the unprecedented step to postpone the game beyond its usual autumn release until March, which means that it would miss the lion’s share of the football season. The developer still had to publish a gameplay disclosure and had missed a promised development update in January.
“Because of various challenges we have been open so far, and much more unforeseen, we have not currently achieved what we wanted to do in sufficient parts of the game, despite the phenomenal efforts of our team,” Sport said interactively. “Every decision to postpone the release was made with the aim of getting the game closer to the desired level, but when we approached critical milestones during the beginning of the year, it became unmistakably clear that we would not reach the required standard, Even with the adjusted timeline. “
The studio said that releasing the game in its current state and repairing via patches was “not the right thing to do”, and it concluded the release date to push further “because it would be too late in the football season to be to To be expected to buy a game later in the year.
“Because of the cancellation, everything is aimed at ensuring that our next release reaches our goal and reaches the quality level that we all expect,” said Sports Interactive.
Sports Interactive apologized for not communicating the cancellation of the game earlier because of legal and financial regulations arising from the ownership of Sega, a listed company. It stated that players who had already reserved the game would automatically be reimbursed. It also ditched out at updating Football manager 2024 With data from the current sport season, because this would be a “substantial enterprise” that would detract from the development of the next release.
Football Manager has been published according to a strict annual schedule, never later than the end of November, since 2004s Football manager 2005. The history of Sports Interactive with football management games goes even further than that – all the way until 1992 Championship manager.
