Football Manager vs the pirates

FM 2013 is Sports Interactive’s most ambitious game yet. And if it can stay piracy-free for a few weeks, next year’s title will be even greater.
MCV discusses the game’s future with studio boss Miles Jacobson.
You’ve introduced a cut-down ‘classic mode’ to this year’s Football Manager. Why do that?
A few years ago in one of our post mortem meetings, I sat there and asked who in the studio had been playing the game. Most put their hands up but I was surprised at some of the people who didn’t because they’d been with us for a long time. I asked them why and they said: ‘Well, I’ve got kids now and don’t have time anymore.’
We’d been looking to do something console-wise again anyway. We went off and did a load of research; we did a poll with a few thousand people and presented the the idea of FM Classic as a console game. Everyone loved the idea but people were coming back saying “we don’t want it on console, we’ve got partners watching TV, we can play games on our laptop.” FM takes too long for that quick hour session and so that’s when we decided to do Classic in the same box as the PC title.
Our other new mode, Challenge mode, came about because it had done so well on the handheld and we thought it was worth adding.
FM 2013 has over 900 new features. Is that more than usual?
Yes. Last year, we celebrated over 800. This year over 900. There are more people in the studio now than we’ve had previously. We’ve taken on 17 or 18 people this year. We’re up to 90 now, which still makes us quite small. We’ve been somewhat ambitious this year, what with the fact that some of these new features were completely new game modes.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/footb...irates/0106876