Championship Manager 11 for iPhone out soon

Built for the platform, says Beautiful Game Studios.

Beautiful Game Studios, the Wimbledon-based developer behind the Championship Manager franchise, hopes to have Championship Manager 11 for iPhone available later this month or in October, studio boss Roy Meredith has told VideoGamer.com.

It's an all-new game that really takes advantage of what the iPhone and iPod touch offer, something Meredith admits wasn't always the case with the two previous entries in the franchise on the App Store.

"Before we had a situation where we ported it over from Java, we knew it wasn't a superb quality game, but it did test the market," said Meredith.

The earlier games did more than well enough to encourage the studio to work on a version of the game built from the ground up for the iDevices.

"It did very well, did CM09. CM10 was a half port, half made for iPhone, but this [CM11] we've started all over again," Meredith explained. "The difference in this is just being able to drag and drop. You can do player runs by dragging your finger over the player. The other nice thing is you can easily drag players around to make the formation you want to."

CM11 has been created around the idea of allowing players to dip in and out of the experience for short periods of time, something Meredith claims isn't offered anywhere else.

"The amount of time we get told there is no good management experience that allows people to dip into it for 5 minutes at the coffee machine, 20 minutes on the train in the morning, 5 minutes when I've put the kids to bed," said Meredith.

He added: "People have grown up with CM and we have this weird demographic which is 17-25 then they drop out completely and people come back into it in their 30s, but drop out again after a few years because they don't have the time to play it. One of the things that iPhone gives you is that dip in dip out... Iain Dowie would have called it din in dip outability. I want to get that dip in dip outability where you feel you are advancing through the game, but it's only taking you 10-15 minutes wherever you are: on a train, making coffee, in the bath, on the bog, wherever you want to play. If we can get people accessing it five times a day then I think we've got a really, really good product."

Beautiful Game Studios plans to submit the game into Apple's approval process at the end of September, with the actual release date in the hands of Apple.

"It could come out two days later, it could be two weeks later," said Meredith. "It just depends on how many people are submitting."

For more on the future of Beautiful Game Studios check out our full interview with Roy Meredith.