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Sports Interactive studio director Miles Jacobson believes motion controllers Kinect for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Move would make bringing the Football Manager franchise to consoles a “hell of a lot easier”, but remains sceptical about the controllers’ potential installed bases.
Asked if motion controls could break down the barriers of entry for Football Manager on consoles, Jacobson said: “We’re sitting and watching all that stuff from the sidelines with huge interest. You know, if Move or Kinect end up with a huge penetration rate, then it makes our job – if we wanted to do a console version – a hell of a lot easier.”
He added: “But, the reality is that those are peripherals; they’re not going to have the same penetration as the consoles.”
Jacobson was also very open about the problems the studio had in the past in attempting to bring the hugely successful franchise to the consoles.
“We tried to go down the console route, we couldn’t get the control method right, we couldn’t get the GUI right, there’s very few people from the PC scene that’s managed to do that. The whole FPS genre managed to do it – lucky bastards! Civilisation Revolutions was a good example of how it should be done, it’ll be interesting to see what The Sims do as well, and it’ll be interesting to see if anything happens with the Command and Conquer franchise moving forward, because they were nearly there on the control method.
“We want to be able to entertain as many people as possible; we want to be on every platform, if possible. But we’ll only do it if we believe we’ll be delivering an 85% + rated experience. And that last Xbox 360 game wasn’t that, which is why we stopped doing it. It was making money, but SEGA still supported our decision to stop doing it, because it was taking valuable resources from other projects. We were big enough to hold up our hands and say ‘look, we don’t know how to do this, so we’re just going to stop’. You’ve got to know your limitations as a developer.”
For more from Jacobson, specifically on the topic of FM 2011, head over to the full interview.
