Football Manager 2017‘s release is right around the corner, but the development studio behind the game is facing no small amount of adversity in trying to successfully launch the new management sim.
Only four days ahead of its global November 4 launch, the game has garnered mostly negative user reviews on Steam, with many users bombarding its reviews page with complaints regarding the lack of a Chinese translation for fans of the series in the East. While the Football Manager series has never received a Chinese translation in the past, players believed that if enough copies of Football Manager were purchased in the region, developer Sports Interactive would change their minds. This belief was a result of a tweet posted five years ago by SI’s studio director Miles Jacobson, who bemoaned the amount of people pirating the company’s games:
@Talentconan to do a Chinese translation, we’d need 20k of the people currently pirating to buy the game. And that’s not going to happen.
— Miles Jacobson (@milesSI) October 25, 2011
However, with the series having now become more popular in China, players were anticipating a Chinese translation to be provided for Football Manager 2017. While that will eventually be the case, with publisher SEGA revealing that a “traditional Chinese” translation will be on its way to FM17 post-launch, many have either missed the memo or are disappointed that the translation won’t be in simplified Chinese instead. This has led to Sports Interactive receiving no small amount of abuse online, with Jacobson claiming that he has even received death threats targeted towards himself and his family as a result:
@owenzou1 yet we are still doing a translation. And still I get abuse – including a death threat for me and my family this morning.
— Miles Jacobson (@milesSI) October 29, 2016
Despite translations requiring serious time and effort on behalf of developers, the lack of a Chinese translation at launch has still rubbed many up the wrong way. The early access of the beta of FM17, which launched two weeks ahead of its official release, has seen players take to Steam ahead of schedule in order to fill its user reviews page with negative comment. The game currently has over 1,100 reviews, with 788 of these being negative.
Considering that Football Manager usually attracts widespread praise among critics and consumers alike, those who are unaware of this latest controversy may be put off by the overwhelming backlash against the game. Hopefully this won’t affect FM17‘s success too much, as it would be unfair for Sports Interactive to be punished for not including a feature that will be making its way into the game at a later date.
