The general manager of Beautiful Game Studios, the developer behind the Championship Manager series, has criticised rival Sports Interactive's online MMO-style version of Football Manager, FM Live, saying the game is too deep to be worth spending money on.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com last week during a demonstration of Championship Manager 09, due out this April, general manager Roy Meredith said: "I have played Football Manager Live and I don't really get why I'd spend money on it because it's too deep for me to want. I like Football Manager, I like playing it by myself. Football Manager Live is just a bit too time consuming for me, and I understand there will be a market for it but not me personally."
The closing of multiplayer services can happen for a number of reasons. Sometimes there just aren’t enough people using a product to justify keeping it running while in others it could be down to complicated legal wrangling, like expiring licensing agreements, or even a desire to bring out a new installment.
One thing is clear though – many of these discontinued games simply don’t deserve to die, to be cut down in their prime leaving players without a viable alternative and waste all that time the audience invested in them. With that in mind, this article will count down the 12 games least deserving of being shut down, the ones that players the world over wished had kept going.
An overview of legendary football management sim, Championship manager and how it effected the author's outlook on life and games.
Eurogamer: "It's a shame when relationships end but it's often for the best. Football Manager and me had it all – long intimate evenings, weekends away, the occasional holiday. I'd thought we never split up. But eventually cracks began to appear, the physical side deteriorated, and we became strangers.
As an early adopter of pretending to manage a football team on a computer (i.e. a semi-autistic weirdo), a chronic addiction to Football Manager seemed my inevitable destiny. My first taste was the original Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum, whose bearded creator, Kevin Toms, appeared beaming on the cassette case cover."
Championship Manager is a pile of crap nowadays anyway since SI moved on to make Football Manager.