Sean Kaye

I'm one of those old folks who has pretty much played every version of this game going back to the original CM series when Ov & Paul were working out of their houses, so will I buy? Yeah, for sure. Actually, caveat to that, I got it on Game Pass this year because it was just there. If it's on Game Pass again this year, which I assume it will be, I'll get it there again. I buy Call of Duty every year too, literally going back to the original 19 years ago - FM and COD are like staples, I get them every single year. I play FM a fair bit so the value for money and enjoyment per hour is pretty good. I will say though, the lack of proper multi-core and multi-thread support in a game like this is irritating. I'm a nerd, I have good disposable income, and I like toys, so my PC is beefy - I don't think it's unreasonable in a game that's doing simulations of data a lot of the time in the background that the developers should optimize it for modern hardware to the maximum value possible. Does it take a significant investment of time and effort? Yes. But the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now. If they don't make the investment now, when will they? Zen 4 is coming in September, the core counts will stay the same, but clock speeds will go up, so simulations will happen faster because of single thread performance gains. Intel will be the same with Raptor Lake, but Zen 5 is likely going to double core counts, so in 2024, people like myself will be sporting 32 core, 64 thread desktops capable of running at close to 6Ghz across all threads, but FM25 will still be lightly threaded? That's kind of ridiculous. That's not even mentioning using something like the GPU for parallel processing if you really wanted to turbo boost background simulation performance - papers have been written extensively about that for 6 years. I suppose the other one for me relates to the issue of quality on release - I like playing lower league saves and creating my own fictional teams in those lower leagues. The last few years, the editor has been an absolute mess on release and in FM21 it didn't even work properly on release for English leagues. That's poor. You can forgive companies for not making large scale re-architecture investments because it's a business and those decisions need to be weighed up accordingly, but the quality stuff like the editor, that's not good enough. That's just testing effort and care factor. And you see it coming up time and time again in these comments - quality needs to be better. But will I buy it or play it on Game Pass? Sure, because that's what I've done for over 25+ years.