The PC version has a skin similar to the one used in Football Manager 2008. The game is set to feature more players than ever before, with over 350,000 in the database at the time of the game's announcement. There will also be press conferences, where you can build up a rapport with the journalists, and the finance and transfer systems have been completely reworked. The player rating will have a decimal point, e.g. Other features include being able to play as a female or male manager, improvements to the interaction between the manager and his assistant manager, improved mid-match team talks and tactics, training players to have preferred moves and transfer rumours. This can now be watched fullscreen, with a widescreen option available. The main new feature to the game is the 3D match engine.
It is the first game in the series to be released on DVD-ROM rather than on CD-ROM. Coding game logic to take advantage of massively parallel computing power on a cloud scale also isn't as simple as just turning up the texture detail or graphical effects on an in-game model.Some of the new features and box art for the game were announced via a series of videos on 3 September 2008, other new features have been released via a series of podcasts and online blogs. Since those simulations are largely independent from the need to render characters or visuals at a set frame rate, Football Manager is well positioned to take advantage of Stadia's massively parallel computing resources.įor other multi-platform games, though, the underlying game physics logic often has to be designed to run well even on a lowest-common-denominator console or PC spec, and quick enough not to slow the game down. It also might be something of a unique case, since Football Manager's behind-the-scenes simulations are already designed to run as fast as the underlying hardware will let them. With cloud gaming, particularly the idea of compute being sharable across multiple CPUs in a data center, now this transition to gaming being data-centric is going to be a really fundamental shift."įootball Manager is one of the first concrete examples of a developer claiming that kind of cloud-distributed multi-CPU system offers a better gameplay experience than locally run versions of the same game, though. Back in April, Google's Phil Harrison told a GamesBeat audience that the company's cloud data centers could enable things like "distributed physics" and "complex multiplayer going from hundreds to tens of thousands in a very sophisticated world. This means you can have more leagues loaded into your save, or just go for a faster experience by keeping the amount of leagues the same, but having the matches process quicker than you can on any other platform." Advertisementįurther Reading Google Stadia will support “a variety of business models”Google has tried to stress this kind of Stadia advantage a bit in the past. It's not hard to find complaints about that simulation speed online, often alongside configuration tips for speeding things up even on a low-end laptop ("Go on holiday" seems like a favorite piece of not-that-helpful advice for enduring the wait).Įnter Stadia, which a press release from publisher Sega says "will be the fastest way to experience Football Manager." Sports Interactive Studio Director Miles Jacobson goes on in that release to say, " Football Manager on Stadia includes technology that is only available on that platform, utilizing the power of the cloud and Google's data centres to ensure that more matches can be processed in parallel utilizing spare bandwidth across the whole system. These simulations have only gotten more complex as the series has evolved over the years, to the point where even running a single team through an entire simulated season can take hours or days (depending on your level of micromanaging). While Football Manager is something of a niche franchise in the US, it's consistently a best-seller across Europe, where millions use it to simulate how their favorite teams might do under all sorts of counterfactual conditions, from team makeup to training regimens. That developer is Sports Interactive, and the game is Football Manager 2020. Now, the makers of at least one Stadia launch game are claiming that the Stadia version will actually play better than versions running on local hardware as well. Since Stadia's public unveiling, one of Google's main selling points for the platform is that the power of its cloud infrastructure can provide high-definition, high-frame-rate visuals even on low-end client hardware (though Internet latency is still a worry, of course).