You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here
Football Manager 2025 is dead and buried, and the cancellation wasn’t that surprising. With the game delayed until late in the football season, it made sense that developer Sports Interactive would cut its losses and move onto the next game in the series.
But what happened? After decades of annual releases, what was so different that making Football Manager 2025 resulted in such a disaster? Well, with developer Sports Interactive moving from its own technology to Unity, developers believe the team “underestimated” the “mountain of work” needed to adapt such a bespoke series to new tools.
Football Manager 2025 devs may have underestimated their work
In a piece by The Athletic, former communications director on Football Manager, Ciaran Brennan explained that the series had been built on the same technology since 2004. With the goal of future-proofing the series, the team made a decision to change tact and adapt to the Unity game engine.
“They needed to make a change,” Brennan explained. “They evaluated a few different engines and decided to go with Unity.”
In the article, a developer “with experience working with Unity” explained that porting projects from a custom game engine into the tool is a huge challenge. The engine—the tool that runs the game—is very different from the 20-year-old foundations of Sports Interactive’s series, and that may have caused the team to underestimate how much work needed to be done.
“Changing technology and porting a product while trying to ship a new version is always going to be a challenge,” the developer said. “Porting from a custom engine to Unity will have its challenges. There is no magic button that converts all your code, libraries and art. There are different rules, file formats and ratios. Often, that mountain of work is underestimated.”
However, the developer explained that the shift to the engine “will provide many advantages” as Sports Interactive no longer needs to develop and update its own internal tools. Many developers have made this shift as of late with Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt moving to Unreal Engine as well as Halo Studios.
For many Football Manager fans, it’s a shame that there won’t be a new entry this year, but it’s also a good sign. FM26 should be more polished, and the future of the franchise is secured. This situation should also give players some insight: game development is hard, and it’s never as easy as just switching engines. Next time you see a Bethesda game, remember that.
About the Author
