The changing face of Beautiful Game Studios

Expanding into China, the iPhone and an exciting future.

This morning Beautiful Game Studios, the people behind the Championship Manager franchise, announced a partnership with leading Chinese online game publisher Shanda Games. The specifics of the deal remain a little vague, but it's an exciting move for the Wimbledon-based studio which has gone through some dramatic changes over the past 18 months. I sat down with BGS general manager Roy Meredith and brand manager Tim Hodges to discuss the partnership, Championship Manager 2011 on iPhone and a more agile future.

Q: Tell me a bit more about your partnership with Shanda Games.

Roy Meredith: They are huge. At one stage I was told they are one of the biggest company's in China. They've got their fingers in lots of interactive and online stuff.

We've been talking to them for about 18 months about stuff we can do with them. We're not divulging what it is, but it's obviously got to fit within what we do and what they do - they are huge in the MMO space. They are huge in lighter games as well and our expertise is in football.

Q: Is is possible whatever comes from the partnership will make its way to Europe?

RM: Initially they are going to be more concerned with the Chinese market because that is where their stronghold is. We'll see how it goes and see if we can bring it the other way as well. Obviously there are games built predominantly with Far East culture. Horse racing games. I can't believe how big they are. And cartoony... kinda weird games.

It's the same with China, there's some strange, from my aspect, it's not strange full stop because it's culturally fantastic. What I've got to do is see what we build is right for them, because it is genuinely a partnership with them, see how it works then see where we can go with it. It's very early days. There is a certain ambiguity about the press release because it is early days with them. We've signed an agreement, it's taken us a fair old while to have discussions with them, to look at the Chinese market, to get the right people. And they are brilliant. What's really staggering is, from my perspective, is how knowledgeable everybody at Shanda is about football. Not just Premier League stuff, but last season there was a tackle by Shawcross at Stoke who broke Aaron Ramsey's leg. They were going into all the psychology of it. They weren't just saying 'did he do it deliberately?' which is what people would have discussed in pubs over here. They were talking about the psychology of teams when they approach and play Arsenal.

I thought this is the weirdest thing in the world. I'm talking to these two Chinese guys that I thought maybe wouldn't know so much about football. It's fantastic. They really know their football, so I'm really really excited to be working with them because it's a partnership, not just a licensing deal where we turn around to them with an idea and they go with it. They are offering as much to us as we are to them, which is great, absolutely great.

It's important for us. We went through that change at the end of last year with our studio here. We were completely focussed on one direction which was PC and trying to do the odd mobile game and trying the odd iPhone game. The people were completely focussed on the PC game. We know how fast our market changes - that's one of the disadvantages of working in computer games I guess, over night things change. So we had to have some deep thoughts and a lot of conversations about where we wanted to go because the market for boxed PC is declining. The market for PC is changing full stop, whether it's boxed, direct delivery, and also it wasn't enabling us to focus on other areas. We have a very strong brand, we've got a great game in a great genre - everybody who loves football loves football management games. We kind of needed to refresh a lot of what we were doing, so we took the decision to put the PC game on hold.