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Football Manager 2011 demo information


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  • SI Staff

Over the weekend, Football Manager 2011 on PC & Mac went “gold” on 5 of the 8 versions of the disc that are due to be manufactured, with the other 3 discs turning up later today.

That means that work has now started on the demo, and I can now reveal when it will be released.

We are releasing the demo this year in 2 phases, with strawberry on Thursday (Steam only) and vanilla and strawberry torrent & direct download on Friday.

There are many reasons that we’ve decided to release the demo in this way this year. We basically don’t have enough time to get all the different versions built and tested by Wednesday night, so had to decide whether to release them all on Friday, or split them.

So last week, SEGA’s global marketing teams started talking to various possible partners to release the demo that would mean that everyone who wanted to get the strawberry demo on Thursday could do completely for free without breaking SIgames.com & FM.com (as happens every year), and those that were more patient, or didn’t want to use Steam for whatever reason, could still get the demo on what was the originally planned date of 2 weeks before release.

As mentioned above, the only other option was to delay all of the releases.

Our partners for the demo will be MirrorFootball in the UK, Marca in Spain, Veikkaaja in Finland and L’Equipe in France, but that does not mean that customers in other countries will be unable to get the demo. We will of course provide information at SIgames.com and footballmanager.com as soon as the demo is available so that any customer in the world is able to download the demo via Steam as soon as it goes live.

The demo will have 12 playable leagues – England, Scotland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and is available in all languages.

At some point on Friday 22nd, we’ll make the demo available for direct download and torrent, and a vanilla version of the demo, which will feature just the English and Scottish leagues.

I know one of the first question I’ll be asked it “why choose to go with Steam first, rather than one of the others?”.

Now that it’s a PC and Mac distribution platform, everyone can get it via the system, it provides great download speeds, it will once again be one of the two options for installation for the boxed game (with lots of benefits, which I’ll be blogging about in the next couple of weeks) and is a system most of us here use without issue.

I’ve seen some posts on the forums that unfairly castigate Steam, such as blaming it for the activation issues regarding FM2009, which were nothing to do with Steam, but were caused by a denial of service attack on Uniloc’s servers, or blaming a bug in the game on Steam – a bug in the game is a bug in the game, and nothing to do with Steam at all.

Hopefully that answers that question.

As mentioned above, the links to the demo should be available here from Thursday morning – I would advise that if you’re looking to grab it quickly, that you download the Steam client in advance, which is available at www.steampowered.com, and then you’ll be just a couple of button clicks away from being able to grab it.

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nice, thursday it is! shame the dutch league is as unpresent as always in the demo, but im glad the uncertainty of when its coming out is over! probably need to pay the family and friends some visits before my life will be, and trust me it will be, totally about FM2011!! lovin it!

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Nice...looking forward to Thursday.

If I download Steam just to get the Strawberry demo a day early, then delete Steam a few days later (I won't be using Steam for anything else), I assume I'll have to download the demo again via direct download?

Which is all good, I'm just checking.

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Nice...looking forward to Thursday.

If I download Steam just to get the Strawberry demo a day early, then delete Steam a few days later (I won't be using Steam for anything else), I assume I'll have to download the demo again via direct download?

Which is all good, I'm just checking.

Yes you would.

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Really REALLY annoyed. I like many others have had issues with Steam and will never use them for anything again so now ive got to wait an extra day. Thanks a lot. At least a date is confirmed now though, shame im at a funeral that day so I wont be able to play it on the Friday either :(

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Really REALLY annoyed. I like many others have had issues with Steam and will never use them for anything again so now ive got to wait an extra day. Thanks a lot. At least a date is confirmed now though, shame im at a funeral that day so I wont be able to play it on the Friday either :(

For something FREE surely its worth downloading? you lose nothing!

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Miles, just one question that i've been meaning to ask since FM2008. why is the dutch league never represented in the Demo's? its a lot bigger than like.. the chile, sweden, denmark or norwegian leagues.. not that i really care becauze i can at least play 2011 from thursday and i love it, but maybe there's a simple explanation that im missing haha? thanks.

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For something FREE surely its worth downloading? you lose nothing!

Like I said, ive had issues in the past with Steam and im never using them again. Im glad we have got a date. I wouldnt have been able to play it on the Friday regardless but the fact its coming out on the Thursday when I can play it, but only via Steam feels like a bit of a kick in the gonads to me. I'll be sure to be up first thing on Saturday to download the direct version :)

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Like I said, ive had issues in the past with Steam and im never using them again. Im glad we have got a date. I wouldnt have been able to play it on the Friday regardless but the fact its coming out on the Thursday when I can play it, but only via Steam feels like a bit of a kick in the gonads to me. I'll be sure to be up first thing on Saturday to download the direct version :)

Mate, I once had a problem with the co-op. Basically short changed and then the person who did that called me a liar and I was marched out of the shop, after they checked the till and CCTV they apologised to me, but I didn't shop there for months and months, but one day I was out with my niece and she cut her leg, we needed some plasters and some water to clean it so I made a decision to go to the Co-op, whilst there I bought a scratch-card and won £200! If I hadn't have backed down over my stubborness I would not have won that money. So, considering this is something for free (and a lot of companies ONLY do demos on steam and nowhere else nowadays) surely, you can give this a go - then if it messes up you can say "well i was right" but why not just give it a chance? Its not having to murder somebody.

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Mate, I once had a problem with the co-op. Basically short changed and then the person who did that called me a liar and I was marched out of the shop, after they checked the till and CCTV they apologised to me, but I didn't shop there for months and months, but one day I was out with my niece and she cut her leg, we needed some plasters and some water to clean it so I made a decision to go to the Co-op, whilst there I bought a scratch-card and won £200! If I hadn't have backed down over my stubborness I would not have won that money. So, considering this is something for free (and a lot of companies ONLY do demos on steam and nowhere else nowadays) surely, you can give this a go - then if it messes up you can say "well i was right" but why not just give it a chance? Its not having to murder somebody.

I understand exactly what your saying and your right. It just feels like SI is trying to force Steam onto people though. I know its only 1 day difference and if it was say a week difference it would be a different story but....

Im sure im not alone here with the issues with Steam and it seems unfair that SI are releasing it in this way. It should be released at the same time for everybody then everybody is happy. This is just the start of it, wait till tomorrow when all the other 'Steam Haters' find out what is going on :p

Anyway, I suppose I'll have to wait till Saturday. As ive got a funeral to go to in Bournmouth, I'll be taking my quite old laptop and having Steam running on it as well as FM would probably make it blow up so im screwed. A direct download on Thursday would have been ideal because I could have played it on the train. Oh well :(

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Yay, great news. Looking forward to giving this a spin!! I'll probably just download on Steam and then get rid of it again when Ive finished with the demo.

Also I have wednesday and thursday off (Im in Canada so I guess the demo will be released late wednesday night my time!) so plenty of time to get stuck in!!

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  • SI Staff

Miles explained in the opening post. It was either release it all at the same time on Friday or get the strawberry version out a day earlier via Steam. It would be a lot easier for us just to make it available through Steam and be done with it but a lot of extra effort goes in to making the various different versions and having as many places to get it from as possible.

If you don't like Steam for whatever reason then there will be other places to get it from on Friday. It will still be there on Saturday and Sunday as well.

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I understand exactly what your saying and your right. It just feels like SI is trying to force Steam onto people though. I know its only 1 day difference and if it was say a week difference it would be a different story but....

Im sure im not alone here with the issues with Steam and it seems unfair that SI are releasing it in this way. It should be released at the same time for everybody then everybody is happy. This is just the start of it, wait till tomorrow when all the other 'Steam Haters' find out what is going on :p

Anyway, I suppose I'll have to wait till Saturday. As ive got a funeral to go to in Bournmouth, I'll be taking my quite old laptop and having Steam running on it as well as FM would probably make it blow up so im screwed. A direct download on Thursday would have been ideal because I could have played it on the train. Oh well :(

Si are being sensible because Steam does do a better job of sharing out, meaning you don't get the days like 2005 where the forum and site would crash thanks to the amount of people. Give it a go, you say it would blow but I have played on worse, believe me. My laptop was an old steaming crapfest last year and I ran the full game fine on steam on a train to Devon!!! Give it a go, take your mind off the funeral and have fun, you might just find faith in steam again and see SI are just saving the stress of "oh damn the forum is crashing, I want this download so much"!!!

(And strangely, I have a funeral same day, so will be thinking of you because of that!)

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Guest roberto922

Gotta love people being so ignorant of steam that they refuse to use one of the greatest innovations in recent PC gaming history because they've had a couple of problems.

One quick question, I've only ever played top flight in the demo so never thought to check, is the BSP included in the English quickstart?

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Guest roberto922

Well Steam demos are released as soon as it hits a date, so midnight Wednesday. Well, technically midnight Thursday but you'll know what I mean.

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