Stuff meets Miles Jacobson
The Football Manager manager
“LOCKDOWN MADE ME REALISE WHAT A RESPONSIBILITY WE HAVE FOR
OUR CONSUMERS’ MENTAL HEALTH”
Making games during a pandemic is strange.
You’ve got loads of jigsaw puzzle pieces with
Football Manager and you’re trying to appease lots of audiences: the tactics wizards, the transfer gurus, the people who want all the interaction. My job is to make it all tie in together and feel like it’s whole. The thing I’m proudest of this year is how FM21 feels like a complete game, because we’ve worked very differently this year to normal.
With FM we try to create a universe you escape into.
Our average play times have gone up from 240 hours to just shy of 500 hours. Humans aren’t used to being locked up at home and it’s made me realise what a responsibility we have for the mental health of our consumers. We’ve served over 100 million free adverts for mental health charities through the FM20 cycle and we’ll be doing the same with FM21.
I worry about people’s fitness.
I’ve done more exercise in this period than in the last 10 years combined and I’ve lost two stone. If Stuff hasn’t done a feature on under-desk cycling machines yet, please do
[noted!]. I’ve got three under my desk and I do 15 to 20 miles a day. I found it was really helping me so we gave everybody in the studio a budget of £250 to buy home exercise equipment.
Previous games had loads of possible Brexit scenarios.
This year there’s only one and it’s the one we believe is going to happen in real life. Players from inside the EU are now treated the same way as someone from Brazil would be. Post-brexit you’ll no longer be able to sign 16-year-old Spaniards to come over and play in your youth team.
I love the PS5 control pad.
I think it’s a thing of absolute beauty. I have both new consoles; they were released at a time when we were trying to ship a game so I haven’t had a lot of time on either of them, but I’ve been playing a lot of Yakuza – I’m a big fan of Japanese RPGS so the fact they’ve turned the series into an RPG is fantastic. I didn’t get to play Watch Dogs on PS4 so as far as I’m concerned that’s a PS5 exclusive.
I don’t think this will be the last console generation.
There will be things you can do hardware-wise that you just couldn’t do with a streaming platform because you need the power of the technology. I think streaming will become more important and it’ll be better for certain kinds of game, including FM, but the internet isn’t good enough across the world to take over entirely. We will have boxes in our homes for many years.
FM was never going to be a game for Snapchatters.
We’ve always been a niche game; we just happen to be a pretty big niche. If we wanted to make something for other groups of people it would be something new – we are experimenting with something a bit more bitesize, but I think it’s wrong to just say attention spans have dropped, because it’s not true.
My number one tip for Football Manager players?
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t come into it thinking you’re going to take AFC Wimbledon into the Premier League in two seasons. It’s not going to happen.
My favourite gadget is my barbecue.
I love cooking – it’s the thing that makes me stop thinking about work, because if I think about work when I’m cooking the food is s***. I have a Weber gas barbecue with nine grill sections. It has a pizza stone, it does incredible fry-ups, and you can even have rotisserie chicken. It’s a kitchen in its own right and it’s the only reason I bought a place with a garden.
Football Manager 2021 is out now for PC, Mac, IOS, Android, XSX, XSS, XB1 and Switch.