championship-manager posts

One of the few pro sports that still gets a PC game release is soccer (or football if you are European). Not only are there lots of pro soccer/football games available for the PC, there are also quite a few football management sim games. However one the longest running football sim games series is taking an indefinate hiatus.

The Championship Manager series, which started in 1992 at developer Beautiful Game Studios, is going "on hold" according to a new Eurogamer article. According to the developer's head Roy Meredith, the issue is with the declining PC game market in retail stores. He stated, "So we took the decision to put the PC game on hold and build up our business in other areas." So when will the PC version return? Meredith says, "I really, really couldn't say." So we guess PC gamers will have to deal with only Sega's Football Manager or EA's FIFA Manager series. Too bad.

It's one of the most popular PC games in Europe year the development team behind the soccer management game Championship Manager claims that the game has a 90 percent piracy rate. In a story over at Computer and Video Games Roy Meredith, the general manager over at the game's development company Beautiful Game Studios, states, "That's not just a number in the air, we can measure it and we know that there are a huge amount of pirated copies."

So how can the team fight off the pirates? Meredith doesn't seem keen on putting DRM set-us in their games, owing to an experience with a rival game, Football Manager. "I spent about three hours trying to go through this registration process and I really want to play it but I've got other things to do with my life." He believes price competition might be a better way to combat pirates in the long run. In the meantime their next game in the series, Championship Manager 09, is due for release later this year.