Football Manager 2011

No. We still haven't found a decent control system for a joypad. We have people who are constantly looking at it. We will carry on looking at it. If we do have that breakthrough of working out how to do it then that's when it will happen.

The only people who've managed to take a typically PC-heavy game and turn it into a console game and make it work were Firaxis with Civilization Revolution. We tried to do the same thing they did and it still didn't work for us.

We'll continue looking at it but I'm not prepared to give people substandard games. I believe we did do that on the 360 version because we couldn't get the right control method.

Despite the fact that was making decent money, there are more important things than that, such as satisfaction of not only the customers but of us as well.

Hopefully we will have a breakthrough because we want to be able to entertain as many people as possible with our games.

We sold more copies of Football Manager in the last 12 months than we've ever sold before in a similar period of time.

It's still growing. Last year piracy did hit the PC game. It was cracked earlier than normal. We do track these stats. So sales were down slightly on the PC version.

But the iPhone game did really well. That made up for it.

The difference was in those times there were more football management games selling fewer copies, whereas now there are fewer football management games selling more copies.

Our sales have never been stronger. We certainly do much better on FM than we did with our previous brand. You guys interviewed the guys from FIFA Manager not so long ago and they told you how well they were still doing in Germany.

The market is definitely still there. The PC is not dead. I get frustrated with people who say that it is. Tell that to Blizzard. Tell that to us. Tell that to BioWare. Tell that to Kongregate. Tell that to Steam. We're alive and well and there's a thriving indie scene as well on the PC, which is fantastic to see.

We concentrate on what we do. It's our job to raise the bar. That's what we'll continue doing.

If they come along and sell five million copies in the UK, and we're still doing the numbers we're doing now, I'm quite happy with that.

The two games are different stylistically and appeal to different people.

I respect those guys a lot. They've been making these games for as long as we have. Before FIFA Manager they were working with another brand.

But no, I'm not concerned. We're making a simulation. They're making a game. There are big differences.

Probably this weekend. I'm recording a podcast tomorrow [today] and I will ask people on my personal Twitter to pick a number between one and five hundred just before I go in an do it, and I'll choose 10 of those.

I will then look up on the database what the feature is based on that number and that will come out, whether it's been announced or not, whether it's big or small. We call it Feature Roulette. We have to pad it out a bit, so some of them will be blank.

The other major things we want to make a splash about, there will be blogs about those probably in about two to three weeks. One of them will be as soon as legal sign it off. We'll be announcing that as a separate thing because it's a deal we're doing with someone that isn't signed yet.

There will be some things that won't get revealed at all that you guys will find when you start playing preview code.

It's actually really exciting this year. There's so much stuff in there. We're in that position because last year we had a polish year and naively we didn't realise the knock on would be lots more time to be able to do more stuff.

If you've got fewer bugs to fix you've got more time to put new features in. We had a database that had 1500 ideas in. It's now got over 2000. A good few hundred of those have been done this year in a controlled way so we make sure they all fit together.

It's a very exciting year.