Would you say?

I was thinking how far the game has come over the years. Would you say SI have a long list of improvements they can make to the game now but hold out and just drip them into the game slowly instead of all at once or do you think each year they sit down and brainstorm and add what the most popular features are?

Not really sure what your thread is trying to achieve here, yes I'm sure there is a huge list of things to be added that gets changed all the time. Do you really think that it would be feasable to add absolutely everything straight away and have a perfectly stable FM game? Let me answer that one for you, NO.

Pointless thread.

They have a list of big jobs that require years of development, and a list of features that can be worked on more easily. They have meeting to prioritise those and decide which will go into the next year's game and which will go on the back-burner. They will also pick up new suggestions from testers, this forum and other sources.

In the past they've tried to bring in too many new features at once and the result has been loads of bugs and criticisms.

This year has been much better because we have fewer new features but improvements and polish in older areas.

New features have been in development for 2 to 3 years, hence they are looking good. SI are working on more new features but are taking their time to get those right.

Maybe they've learned from the past; more likely, they are under less pressure with the demise of their opposition.

Football Manager Live showed that they've certainly considered other features and gave an impression of the way in which those features could fit with FM- things such as Stadium Development, Training Academies etc. Whether they'll end up finding their way into FM sooner, later, with the same form or completely different, I don't know. The point is, I don't think anyone can suggest they're not considering the game's development and direction.

FML suffered from going too far in the other direction- new features were added so regularly that they often felt unfinished, unbalanced or untested, regardless of whether this was actually the case or not. They were literally game-changers, affecting things like finance and player development, and in a competitive, ongoing game, that upset a lot of players who had been encouraged to adopt longer-term gameplans (e.g. developing youth) based on the nature of the game and the mechanics existing at the start. In FM, it'd be catastrophic- I've seen the odd post about the new things (tones, for example) unbalancing FM12, but by and large people seem to be relatively happy with them. That's a sign that they've been tested and incorporated well.

And the issues with FML was certainly not wholly SI's fault- the players deserve a fair share of the blame for that. There were all-too-often threads stating that people were bored, that they had nothing to do, that they needed some new feature to distract them, and if they didn't, they were going to walk. The pressure on the development team to keep people subscribed to the game was immense- once people started unsubscribing, it was only going to have a domino effect, because those who hadn't now found themselves in half-full GWs.

But I'm going off-topic- I miss FML, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who does, but this isn't supposed to be about that.

I am quite happy with the rate at which the FM series is developing, and would rather SI made sure things were right and had the effect on the game they wanted, rather than rushing them out just to announce that they had this big new thing. It means that some years there aren't going to be brand new things for them to shout about from the hills. It also means that FM game as a whole is a lot more solid, a lot more balanced and a lot more together. It's a question of evolution, rather than revolution (I may have borrowed that phrase from one of the reviews of FM12), and that is undoubtedly a positive thing for the future of the game.

That said, on the flip side, I honestly don't think the "x amount of changes"-style of promotion they put out in the buildup to FM every year helps their cause, because "change" is all too easily interpreted as "new" by a customer, which is generally inaccurate. So, whilst there may be a lot of improvement under the bonnet of the game, as well as things like improvements to the 3D, they're ultimately not new features and are creating a setup for disappointment. It has just never struck me as a particularly good way of promoting the game, simply because it invites criticism of the importance of the changes. But that's probably just me.

Yh they have a long list and its not that they choose to hold off on them to get more money for future version but either the development will take a few years to implement (for example miles said on a podcast not too long ago they had a feature for fm13 which they wanted on fm12 but wasn't ready) or they simply don't have enough time between versions to add the features

they cant put every new feature into the next release, that would possibly create farm too many bugs, therefore only put in 1 or 2 new features in each years edition to minimise the aount of bugs

I think they are maximizing profits developing iOS ports. Groundbreaking and time consuming new features (or reworks/fixes) can wait, because FIFA Manager is too far behind. I hope next year we get at least 3 new camera angles.