UK Goes Football Manager Mad
Series laughs in the face of those who scoffed at the idea of a game based on spreadsheets.
Football management game creators have worked hard over the past few years to jazz up their staid titles, to help them appeal to a wider audience. The reams of numbers are still there, of course, but there's a trend towards including dashes of visual sparkle. It seems to be working.
Sega announced this week that its latest entry in the increasingly crowded genre, Football Manager 2006, sold more than 100,000 copies in just its first week on sale. This gave it, by analyst body Chart Track's reckoning, the 2nd best opening week for a PC game ever.
Developer Sports Interactive, which is no stranger to the genre thanks to its previous work on the Championship Manager series for Eidos, made a wealth of changes to its already-successful formula that helped the game get to twice as many people as last year's update.
With EA's FIFA and the Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer both spinning off management games recently, it'll be interesting to see whether Sports Interactive's obvious talents will continue to hold it over its better-known rivals.
Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games
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