SI: There's a new Football Manager Handheld coming before Christmas
And on Andriod, despite piracy rising to 11:1.
Football Manager Handheld: "There is a new version coming, and again, it should be out before Christmas."
Those are the words of Sports Interactive boss Miles Jacobson, who I spoke to this afternoon.
A new FMH is a no-brainer in iOS land, where FMH tops sales charts. But in Android land, FMH is pirated to high heaven. Jacobson told me the piracy rate of FMH Android had actually risen from 9:1 to 11:1. And if the sales aren't happening, then what's the point of continuing?
"There is definitely a new Android version coming because, thankfully, we have hit the sales target that we needed to, despite all the huge piracy," he said.
"It actually got worse than nine-to-one - we got up to 11-to-one at one point. But we still managed to hit the target that we'd pre-defined before hand."
An announcement for Football Manager Handheld will likely happen in around a month, Jacobson predicted. It depends on a couple of things. First, SI wants the dust to settle on today's Football Manager 2013 announcement (I've got a bit more to write on that today, as well).
Second, SI has to wait and see if Apple announces and releases a new iPhone this year.
"We kind of need to wait whether Apple do announce a new iPhone or not before we can actually finalise the feature set," said Jacobson. "That's one of the things with the iPhone and Android world: it's so fast moving that we have to move really quickly as well. That's why I don't really want to announce anything on that until we're ready.
So, what happens if Apple does announce iPhone 5 and it's got a new, super fast chipset in it - does this year's FMH have to change?
"At this stage of development, [a new engine in iPhone 5] would not be much use for this year, but would be for next year," Jacobson answered.
"At the moment, the rumours that we all seem to see online revolve around screen sizes and stuff like that, and that's probably more of a key thing for us. Because if they've got the same screen size, that means that we can spend more time doing new features. If they've got a new screen size, that means we've got to redesign the user interface.
"I know that a lot of people don't believe this," he added, "but seriously, we do not know what's in the new iPhone, despite the fact that Football Manager Handheld does incredibly well on the platform. We don't know what's going in there; I'm as much in the dark as anyone else. We're just going to wait and see."
Football Manager Handheld is great. It monopolises your life and keeps you awake at bedtime far later than you'd planned. Our Kristan Reed reviewed Football Manager 2012 and Football Manager Handheld on PSP and iOS all in one super-mega-whopper piece.
