Pete1234

Indeed - I think the only way it would "work' is one-season challenges with limited transfers. But that takes the team-building fun out of the game.

Interesting. Have you ever considered a monthly financial approach like in the old CM2 or CM97/98? i.e. Include income from season tickets, regular tickets, TV money and so on as well as outgoings and bonuses etc? This isn't a criticism, just curious. The current system is effective but it seems an area where you could quite quickly add some realism? Or does it just get too complex or too easy to game?

I thought the same until I built one. It was fun, but it's far too easy when you have advanced knowledge of how good all the young players will be. Now, limited historic challenges would be be great - but really hard to build!

It may be no harm to get feedback from players though? I mean, it's a much-loved game that is very good and yet is losing players according to SI. So why not involve players to help figure it out? For example, based on this tiny sample size, I would see an argument for redoing Touch and Mobile into two much more different games. Keep one of them (let's call it FMM Numbers) like the current Mobile - as close to the PC version as possible, with lots of sliders and fine-tuning. Then make the second one (let's call it FMM Narrative) the same game but with a reworked interface. So with the current game, if you're a newly-promoted Premier League team and you want a centre-forward like Haaland but only have £10m to spend, you go to the player search and enter minimum attributes and maximum price and then you have to remember to see if they are determined or injury prone or go through their past. Then you will end up choosing between a 35 year-old grizzled pro who might have one season in him, a 27 year-old with dodgy knees, or to take a punt on a 19 year-old. So the fun is that decision. In FMM Narrative, you would just tell your scouting team to find you a player like Haaland for less than £10m and they would present you the three options above. So you have the same fun decision to make, you just get there much quicker and in a manner that feels more like how an actual football manager would do it. Another example might be if you are playing a team who use wing-backs and you want to get in behind them, in the current game you look for the guy whose green positional button is further up on the left, whose numbers for pace, dribbling, and strength are higher, rather than the guy who plays deeper and is more about passing and technique. In FMM Narrative you would just pick the guy described (in a bit more length, but basically) as a pacy winger over the guy described as a playmaker. Or in reality you would pick Doku over Grealish because every player of the game knows most of the footballers. So again you are making the same fun decision, with the same mechanics under the hood, just different presentation. So the decisions would be just as hard, the depth just as deep, and the mechanics just as intricate. From a development perspective, both FMM Numbers and FMM Narrative would look the same under the hood. But one would be really easy to pick up and play, and the other would appeal to the more in-depth player who wants the underlying numbers. They would also not necessarily compete, particularly if one were free on Netflix with DLCs and the other on the traditional FMM pricing model.

Appreciate the lengthy response! I suppose I'm not talking so much about levels or difficulty, but rather accessibility, speed of play, and moving from a spreadsheet "look" to a more narrative look. I think the basic game would play the same, but you wouldn't see all the numbers. So rather than, for example, Dominic Calvert-Lewin having a visible heading attribute of 17, you would have a coach or scout tell you he's good in the air. Similarly to how his injury-prone attribute is currently not visible but your physio can tell you he has trouble with fitness. So you would rely way more on the other "characters" in the game for the info, and you would make more decisions on personalities and player types (as in real life) than on columns of numbers. This would create more of a narrative approach than a stats approach as you would have to work out which coaches and scouts are best and which need to be moved on. Overall, I think anyone who has played the game for years would get a lighter, quicker, more character-based and fun version of what they already have without losing what we all like about the game. You would still get "dropped in" as you rightly put it and have to figure it out - only the mechanism would be words and characters rather than numbers and attributes.

It's a really great game First off, deep respect for how good a game the FM Mobile series is. Given the range of devices and range of user experience with the brand, plus the need to balance depth of database with playability and realism, all while keeping up with the PC game, it's a fine achievement. I thought FM23 brought a good balance of difficulty as well, always a concern for the longer-term player, and the game continues to support modding, which is always welcome. Which is why I'm really surprised that the sales haven't been sufficient and the Netflix deal was required. It is, after all, a good product with no "pay to play" or other annoying mobile game issues, offered at a boom time for football. The PC and Console versions seem to be doing well and there's no branding issues. From what I can tell there's no problem appealing to young people as well, and international gamers should be a good fit with a mobile game. I wonder if part of it is the decline in mobile versions of PC or console games in general. "Kids these days" play their complex, high-spec games at home but know there's no way to replicate that on a mobile, so instead they watch streams of the games or videos of other people playing on social media, or talk about it on reddit and so on. I'm an old fart, so correct me if I'm wrong on this! As far as I can see, FM has good social media engagement etc. So is it possible the problem with the mobile version is that it is too good? As in it replicates the PC game too well? This is both a gameplay issue and a visual issue, and I'll start with the latter as it's the easier one. Visuals FMM24 is the first version I'm not going to play (since CM2) because it's simply too dark. Now, I'm an old man (see my comment about CM2) and my eyesight isn't perfect, but what I mean by too dark is the palette choice. It's dark, intricate, and makes it hard for key information to jump out. Compare with FMM2017 - to my mind, the best edition, screenshot above. Broadly the same information, but bright and appealing. Now, I get that graphic designers have carefully considered the colour choices in FM and that the mobile game matches the PC one, but should it? Or should it have a separate, lighter, easier identity? Gameplay This goes for gameplay as well. By replicating the PC game, the mobile version is daunting for the new player and frustrating for the old player. It can and will never match the PC version for options and depth, but a smaller version would have very limited re-playability. As I understand it, most people play as a big team in a big league and bash out a few seasons. Longer-term players tend to work their way up from the bottom or try to set challenges like a thousand-goal career. But for all mobile players the fun basically ends when the game stops being "realistic" due to too many regens. This seems to be less of an issue for the PC game, where regens are a big part of the fun. But the essential fun of the mobile game is building a team of real players. This isn't a criticism of the youth system in FMM by the way, but again it's probably simply too good for what the mobile user needs The match engine is brilliant and even better this year than last year. The tactical options and "send your keeper forward" narrative stuff is great. It makes the match the focus. It's a real technical achievement on such a range of mobile devices. I wonder then if the best idea is to simplify everything else - but to be clear, simplify it from a user experience perspective only, centring the gameplay on the match day and hiding everything else under the hood to make a lighter, brighter, more user-friendly game. Training I can see the appeal of this as it works well on PC, but does anyone really use it on mobile? Personally I just hire a "general, natural" coach and stick it all on him. Individual training schedules may be more for a game called Football Coach than Football Manager these days anyway. By contrast, hiring and firing coaches is fun, as is improving the training ground, and most of all giving scouting, physio, and coaching roles to retiring legends from your team. So why not leave it there? You hire good coaches, build up your training ground, and the better you do those things the more your players improve. Remove the somewhat daunting training screen altogether. Scouting/Player attributes Does anyone use scouting in FM? Not a criticism at all, but rather the reality of a game where you have full info on all the world's players. By contrast, in real life scouting is even more vital than ever. So here's my radical suggestion - hide the player stats and rely on the scouts instead. Literally no-one who picks up FM Mobile is not already a fan of football and familiar with all the top players. They don't really need to know whether Mo Salah has shooting 17 or shooting 19 to decide if they are going to try to buy him for PSG. Similarly, while long-term fans like the attributes, they tend to dig out tools and databases and find the CA and PA of the players and base decisions off that. Meanwhile, SI has introduced an excellent personality system for players which works well but is obscured by all the numbers and stats. Am I really going to pick a player who is determined over one who is rash if the latter has technique 18 and pace 15? Whereas in reality it is the blending of personalities that is the primary job of the modern manager - so hide the mechanics and bring the personalities forward. The player screen could then be as simple as the club General Info screen. Just the picture, the personality description, position, and season stats. Player history in another tab. That's it. For the new gamer this would be perfect and less daunting. Then you would use a strong Fog of War approach - i.e. you know literally nothing about minor players except their name, position, and stats. You have to scout them to find out about their style of play, their potential, and their personality. Major players would have most of that info in place already. Suddenly, scouting is vital. With the current game if I want to know if there are any pacy wingers in Sweden I just use Player Search. With the new approach I would have to send a scout to Sweden, like in real life. (Just by the way, the opposition analysis part of scouting is perfect as it is). Transfers / finances The transfer systems are pretty much perfect for the mobile game. If going from a scouting approach you might use shortlisting and more long-term transfer approaches but that's a player choice. Finances could do with being slightly more complex - it would be nice if ticket sales or TV appearences affected your bottom line or even to return to a monthly approach like in early CM. But as it stands the finances are appealing to a new player, and fine for the experienced one. Tactics Here I must admit I'm finding the game becoming quite complicated for minimal extra value. The player roles approach is perfect, and perhaps it just needs to be player roles plus positions? So if you want to play tiki-taka, pick lots of playmakers, if you want to go Route One, pick a big centre-forward and play him as a target man. No need to decide if you are more a gegenpress person or a fluid counter player, or to decide if you want to play short, long, wide, narrow, etc. Basically, make it deterministic based on the players you chose. So if your scout tells you a defender can play it out from the back, he will automatically do that if picked. If your scout says he's a big lump, then he will get rid rather than try to play. If you pick two wingers and two wing backs you will be "wide" while picking all central midfielders will make you "narrow". Training could be used well here to make a player generally better, but for the casual player we want the power to be with us in the team selection and the transfer market, not through finding some gamey downloadable tactic that works regardless of players. Once again you would keep the mechanics the same as they are, but reduce the user experience down to words and descriptions, and the classic placing of Xs and Os on a chalkboard. Hide the workings. Expansion I doubt anyone will read all that, so here's the TLDR - make the game bright and visually appealing, hide all the numbers, and make it a narrative/description based game rather than a spreadsheet based game (we have the PC version for that!). They key thing is that all you are really changing is the appearance/user experience. The stats, database, and so on are already there. So theoretically you could still open that all up as a paid extra, including easier access for modders. Finally, the one thing FM doesn't seem to ever exploit is its historic databases. There may be a licence/IP issue for this but a retro version would hold a lot of value as a paid extra, or the chance to play narratives like the Arsenal Invincibles. I know this is an essay but this is the first time I simply don't want to play the new version and will stick to the old. But I wanted to make it clear that isn't a criticism of the game itself, which continues to be excellent, but rather the user experience for an old fart like me. Too dark, too many numbers!

Thanks, will let you know if it works. Edit to add, no - doesn't seem to work regardless of placement.

Thanks. I have full file access - I just need the exact location and what to name the folder. "database" doesn't work, nor does the formula from last year, which was "db_archive_2330". I have tried playing around with the numbers but no success so far.

It seems like on-loan players don't stay in the saved selection (i.e. when you load the selection they are not picked).

Hi Mike - do you know where we can place modded database folders? Last year it was android/ documents/ sigames/ fmm2023 but this year that isn't working. Any help would be really appreciated.

Just as we are talking about technical stuff, and I understand you would never endorse edited databases, super leagues, and so on for solid licensing reasons. I'm a big fan of file management strategies, and really into stuff like game designer choices on where to store certain files and what effect they have. For example, in some games released last year, one might be able to see fun effects by placing a database folder in the android/ documents/ companyname/ gamename folder. However in some games more recently released, that is no longer effective. If you were giving advice to a young game designer about file management, who was designing a game where they wanted players to be able to add database folders, where would you suggest they place such possibilities? Also, very happy with how quick the new version is, it feels very smooth despite having a larger database. Good job!