Championship Manager 2010 Interview

gamescom 2009 was coming to an end, the football season had just kicked off and Spurs were sitting pretty at the top of the English Premier League, so what better time to sit down for a chat with Roy Meredith, general manager at Beautiful Game Studios. Read on for details on what to expect from Championship Manger 2010, the success of the headline grabbing “pay what you want” pre-order promotion, and the importance of community.

VideoGamer.com: Where are you with the game right now?

Roy Meredith: We’re releasing on September 11. Traditionally that’s been impossible because you have to wrap the data by about September 4, you have to test it for a week and then you have to build and ship and manufacture the product, and get it out in the marketplace.

What we’re doing this year is getting it out for September 11 and the minute you install it you get a launcher which comes up. You can download the closed transfer window data so you can start the game with two start points. You can start with June data or start with the September data.

VideoGamer.com: Is the September data a free update?

RM: Oh yeah, absolutely, Absolutely without a shadow of a doubt. The reason behind that is that it gives people a lot of option, a lot of alternatives. I don’t particularly like the fact that we’ve signed Crouch so I’d start with the June data. I’m sure Liverpool fans would start with Aquilani in there, so would go with the September data. There’s another reason we’re doing this as well, which is Season live. This is six updates, five pounds for all six, and from October through to March it allows you to start with the results bang up to date, right the way across Europe, 49 competitions.

I’ll give you an example; Once Man United get beaten at Wigan on Sunday and go on to lose their opening two or three, In October you can go and see if you can get them to qualify for the Champions League. It’s that Newcastle situation from last year; in March Shearer had eight games to save Newcastle.

I think there’s a tendency with people with these games to build that core, you’re like me, you’d probably build a core Tottenham experience. And if you’re really like me you’d fail a few times until you do get to the core experience. Then you have that game which you see as the proper game, but then I always go in and start a couple of other games just to see what the transfer situation is like, what the money’s like at Preston or Nottingham Forest and play that for a while. Go and play Barcelona and see if I can build up a super squad. But I don’t treat that as my main game, I’ve this main game going all the time as well. And that gives people the opportunity to do it in short bursts and have specific challenges against it.

VideoGamer.com: Can you talk us through the major new additions?

RM: Let’s have a look at training. There’s individual drills and also team drills. This is the highpoint of it, the fact that you can control both sides. Invariably if I start as Tottenham I’ll get sacked in January and get offered a job as manager of Colchester United. I don’t know much about Colchester in real life, let alone in the game. Now you can browse around or go onto the training pitch and get an auto pick option, which will give you roughly best players, best positions. This now gives you an opportunity to try both teams on the training pitch. The advantage of this is that you can change formations, you can change tactics for each side, you can bring in trialists and not have to arrange friendlies. If you’re in January and you want to trial people, as in real life, it won’t let you, it won’t let you as clubs are too busy to arrange friendlies.

In takes you onto a training pitch and you see it play out. At the end of it you get a training report generated into email which will tell you how the players performed.

Scouting. The normal way is to look down the list and spend your money, or send scouts out to Paraguay and they come back three months later with a list of 24 attacking midfielders. What we’ve decided is we needed more a) of a gameplay challenge and b) reflect real life and enable people to build knowledge.

There’s two ways to scout. You send a scout out and depending on the skill of the scout the knowledge will build quickly. Send a crap scout out and you’d get up to say 56 per cent knowledge on a player. There’s another way to search players as well, which is to do with money. This is scouting networks. As your money is invested in regions you build an improved picture. You can send a scout to look at a specific player to build the knowledge much quicker.

We watched a match last night – Werder bremen vs Aktobe in the Europa Cup – and there was an Aktobe player who struck a free quick that was amazing. Now if we were on a scouting mission and watching him, we’d look at him. Now if you went scouting you’d know his work rate was very high, and his shooting ability and accuracy is really high. But how do we know about the versatility, how do you know about this leadership, more of his mental skills. Those are the ones that take the time to build. Maybe the free kick was just a hit and hope as well. You’d probably have to see him two or three times. And you need that to reflect the realism in the game.

Set pieces. This is where you go and create your own free kicks and corners. There’s five phases to a free kick, each phase is where the ball is passed or played. You can shoot, pass, cross, chip, whatever. You set the free kick up, obviously you don’t know where the defence is, you only know that there will be a wall of some sort.

[A free kick is spilled by the keeper]

Oh that wasn’t bad. Of course that would indicate that maybe you would need a player running in because the defence came out. You can refine it, you can add more steps. You then check it for use in the match.

You can also set up defending formations for corners and free kicks as well. The opposition AI within the game will learn about your free kicks. So you get a storming free kick that you’ve worked on; you play it once in the game, well other managers are scouting you and your next opposition will know and therefore the defence will try to close it down.

VideoGamer.com: If you’re scouting out a team, will you actually see their plays and then plan against that?

RM: Yeah. Absolutely. You won’t see their free kicks laid out in front of you, but you are able to view the next opposition’s games within the 3D match engine and recreate the set pieces in the training ground.

VideoGamer.com: What about the match engine in this year’s game?

RM: It has different weather effects: Rain, sleet, snow, sunshine. There’s an ambient sunshine for evening games in Italy in Spain. There’s evening floodlights as well. The weather does have an effect on matches. You get pitch degradation depending on where you’re playing. If you’re playing in Spain. If you’re playing in the second division then you’ll have a dust bowl car park by the end of the season. Obviously Barcelona won’t. The same for Aston Villa, same for ManU. They’ll have reasonable pitches, but pitches will degrade, if there’s heavy rain, they will degrade during the match and will have an effect on the match as well. The ball bounces less and it holds up as well. If you’re at Colchester than you’re going to have a mud bath by the end of the season, depending on the weather.

VideoGamer.com: Is the game going to be scalable for low end systems?

RM: The match resolver will be limited depending on the size of your processor. A low end PC will let you watch two or three of the games. If you’ve got a quad or something you’ll be able to watch all of them.

There’s loads of options within the match engine. You can view it in 2D if you want to. It’s basically called a camera angle, but it does take it back to an overhead blimp view.

VideoGamer.com: You made the announcement about the ‘pay what you want pricing’. Is that going well?

RM: Yeah, it is going well, really really well. I can’t give out numbers, but it’s going well from two perspectives. The amount of publicity we had exceeded what I was thinking we were going to get. It was amazing. And from a sales perspective as well it’s exceeded what we wanted to do, which is great.

VideoGamer.com: Is this a pre-order promo only?

RM: Yeah, it will be back to whatever retail choose to sell it at when it comes out. Digital download will also be back to normal price come the 11th.

VideoGamer.com: So it’s almost like a reward to those who come in early?

RM: Well there were a number of reasons to do it. One is we’ve been two years out with this game. We think it’s the strongest quality Champ Man in many years from the feedback we are getting, and it was kind of like a nice thing to do for the community, because they’ve stuck with us. When we announced that we were going to move it out from when they expected it last October, they were very patient with us. It’s designed to attract in lapsed players, because of course people grow out of football management games and we think there’s an opportunity to bring them back in. And also to bring new people to the genre, people who haven’t tried it before.

What we want to do is reinvigorate it and grow the market for football management games. That’s from a commercial point of view and also from a selfish point of view for me as well, because I love these games and I play FM and CM every year and I want to be able to grow that market so a lot more people do exactly that so that we can strengthen the genre, and by doing that we increase competition and therefore give out a better quality gaming experience to people.

VideoGamer.com: Can you say anything about the most anyone has paid for the game?

RM: I don’t know whether I should. I know what it is, but I don’t know whether I should.

VideoGamer.com: Has anyone paid more than the RRP?

RM: Yes. There you go, yes.

VideoGamer.com: And that’s not someone who’s working in the office?

RM: No, that’s not me. I can tell you why I know that is because it was in Euros. Somebody has paid and when we saw that on the first morning we emailed them to check that he hadn’t entered the wrong amount. And it was confirmed.

VideoGamer.com: That must be good to see that kind of support?

RM: It was absolutely lovely. Whilst I don’t give out figures, the nice thing is that people are paying what they feel is a fair price for the game. So I’m quite surprised that people are coming in and paying much more than the minimum. There’s nothing stopping everyone in the world from paying 1p plus the transaction fee. There’s nothing to stop that, paying £2.51, but I know the average is substantially more than that and that is really quite pleasing to see.

VideoGamer.com: Did you have much of a fight to get this pay what you want promo to happen?

RM: There wasn’t a fight, but there was a lot of debate. Nobody has ever said no to it. The Eidos board and the Square Enix board have been incredibly supportive of the idea. Now I know that sounds like I’m bound to say that, but they really, really have. When it was first discussed one of the biggest evangelists was the CFO, that’s a finance guy. But they’ve been very supportive. A lot of debate about how it works, how we take it to market, but no arguments.

VideoGamer.com: Do you think this will be something other publishers follow now?

RM: I can’t really comment, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised.

VideoGamer.com: Is there a danger that you’ll get a lot of early pre-orders below the retail price, then come release the sales won’t be there like you’d traditionally have?

RM: Well, we’ve had a lot of discussions with retail and they recognise the reasons to do it. One of those is to reinvigorate the genre, reinvigorate PC as well., They recognise it for that and we’ve have a really good response from them. I can’t comment on what the sales are going to be. We have other marketing activities around the retail product.

VideoGamer.com: There’s always the people that must have a boxed copy of the game anyway.

RM:Do you know what, when Radiohead did it. People have asked if us, ‘oh did you do it because Radiohead did it?’ No, but there was a president out there. When they did it their album went to No.1 and stayed there for weeks afterwards once the promo ended. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t enjoy great sales.

VideoGamer.com: You’ve got a month head start over FM this year, a month six weeks, is that a good position to be in. To get out there first?

RM: Yeah, I like being first to market. I like the fact that Season live allows us to do that database update. You want to be first to market. I recognise the problems that FIFA and Pro Evo have, because they have to go through the console manufacturing.

VideoGamer.com: Any thoughts about bringing a version to consoles?

RM: Not at the moment.

VideoGamer.com: There were early versions for Xbox 360.

RM: I played FM 06 on Xbox 360.

VideoGamer.com: I thought it was kind of there, and you could play it, but it was really…

RM: It wasn’t great. I can’t say no, but I don’t know how we make this work to appeal to console fans. That’s a really tough one and I’m pretty sure that SI feel the same way as well. Even with the match engines it doesn’t feel dynamic enough for a console game. Fundamentally it’s a strategy game and strategy games, in my mind, work best on PC.

I played Lord of the Rings, the EA one, three or four years ago on PC. I thought it was a terrific game. One of the big selling points was that it was going to work on console. I tried it on 360 and again it just didn’t work. A beautiful game on PC. Command & Conquer, great game on PC, it just doesn’t work on console.

VideoGamer.com: The publisher often feels in order to get strong sales you need your game on consoles. I suppose with something like a FM game it’s always been on PC so that’s where the genre belongs.

RM: There are platforms around where you can make a success of it, not necessarily on console. Obviously handhelds and the iPod as well, all those areas are great for this sort of game, but I’m just not convinced of the appeal of consoles. It’s not something I’d say no to, but it would take a lot of change to the concept I think.

VideoGamer.com: So you’ve got this game out very soon. Are you hoping to build on this for next year. Another release this time next year?

RM: I can’t comment on the next version of CM – we don’t have a date on it, although we are designing it at the moment.

VideoGamer.com: Have you got stuff already there that you wish you’d got into this version.

RM: I think you’ll always think that, particularly on something that is a regular, probably, annual situation. We do know what’s going in, but my focus at the moment is purely on 2010. Part of the reason we did the pay what you want was to bring in new people, so when we come to the next edition of CM we’ve got a fanbase there.

VideoGamer.com: What’s the fan feedback been like from the demo?

RM: Very good. It was a beta demo. We put it out slightly earlier than normal so it had a few bugs in. There’s been some really interesting comments. Overall very, very positive. There’s been a couple of things which came back, positive comments about changes. I really like the idea of putting out an early demo to really get that feedback back. One thing is the dynamic data window – it’s based on sky sports, but some people had said they wanted the option to turn it off and expand the navigation instead, so we did it. That was a real positive thing.

VideoGamer.com: Did you get fans and the community in to help even before the demo was out there?

RM: Yeah we did. Without sounding patronising, we do take a lot of feedback from forums and some of those were implemented within the game. Some were a little crazy, but most were really strong. We also got involved in early alpha and beta testing and that’s important. This is a game that the communities really care a lot about.

VideoGamer.com: That’s great. Thanks for your time.

Championship Manager 2010 is scheduled for release on September 11. The pay what you want pre-order promotion is available now via the Champ Man Store.