New Football Manager games are coming but they'll be "a little later than originally planned"
"It has taken a monumental effort to make this possible."
Football Manager developer Sports Interactive has confirmed that "despite all the problems going on in the world", Football Manager 2021 will release later this year, albeit "a little later than originally planned".
"...[W]e have continued to work on our games throughout this troubled period - and we've managed to do this despite not being together in our office since early March," studio director Mile Jacobson wrote in a "State of FM" update on the official website (thanks, VGC). "Having a 'distributed' workforce isn't new to us, as some of the team have worked remotely for decades, but moving the entire team to work from home was a huge challenge. Everyone's personal situation is different, and our main priority as a studio was to ensure that the whole team and their families remained safe, healthy and happy.
"After that, our priority was to ensure that every team member was able to continue to work effectively (while taking their home situation into account) so that we could continue to create and deliver great games," Jacobson continued. "We're now in a position where we're set up to continue to work in this fashion for as long as it takes. None of us know when things will return to 'normal', but I would be very surprised if we're all back in the studio working together until well into next year."
As for new Football Manager games, such as Football Manager 2021?
"Despite all the problems going on in the world, there will be new Football Manager games released later this year. They will be delivered a little later than we'd originally planned, but they'll have exceptionally strong feature sets... albeit different to those we thought we'd settled on back in January when I completed my 'dream feature set'.
"It has taken a monumental effort to make this possible. The flexibility the team have shown through this period has been incredible; we've been changing scope, both upwards and downwards, on an almost weekly basis (and often as a result of changes in people's personal circumstances). I firmly believe you'll all appreciate the improvements and new features this year - and for us to have created the games that we're going to deliver later this year during a global pandemic is something else I'm very proud of."
In other footie news, EA Sports has outlined a raft of new features coming to career mode in FIFA 21 after the disastrous FIFA 20 career mode went viral last year. When FIFA 20 came out in September 2019, players discovered a raft of bugs and embarrassing issues with career mode and immediately took to social media to highlight them. Players were so disgruntled they organised a social media campaign that resulted in #FixCareerMode trending on Twitter.