Pay What You Want Promo a huge success for CM2010


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Last month, Eidos and Beautiful Game Studios shocked the industry with the announcement that it would allow fans to pre-order its upcoming football management title, Championship Manager 2010, by paying only what they felt the game was worth.

The Pay What You Want promotion means that until the close of play on September 10, you can legitimately pre-order a digital download version of the game for only 1p plus a ?2.50 transaction fee.

At gamescom last month we caught up with Beautiful Game Studios general manager Roy Meredith, who revealed that the promotion has been a huge success.

"? it is going well, really really well. I can't give out numbers, but it's going well from two perspectives. The amount of publicity we had exceeded what I was thinking we were going to get. It was amazing. And from a sales perspective as well it's exceeded what we wanted to do, which is great," said Meredith.

Meredith also explained that there were a number of reasons for running such an unusual pre-order promotion.

"One is we've been two years out with this game. We think it's the strongest quality Champ Man in many years from the feedback we are getting, and it was kind of like a nice thing to do for the community, because they've stuck with us," said Meredith. "When we announced that we were going to move it out from when they expected it last October, they were very patient with us. It's designed to attract in lapsed players, because of course people grow out of football management games and we think there's an opportunity to bring them back in. And also to bring new people to the genre, people who haven't tried it before.

"What we want to do is reinvigorate it and grow the market for football management games. That's from a commercial point of view and also from a selfish point of view for me as well, because I love these games and I play FM and CM every year and I want to be able to grow that market so a lot more people do exactly that so that we can strengthen the genre, and by doing that we increase competition and therefore give out a better quality gaming experience to people."

While Meredith wasn't willing to divulge the figures for the promotion, he did reveal that the average price paid is "substantially more" than the minimum, and one customer paid so much that the purchase had to be verified as legitimate.

Despite the fact that there is nothing stopping gamers from pre-ordering the game for 1p, Meredith said that both Eidos and Square Enix have been very supportive of the idea.

"There wasn't a fight, but there was a lot of debate," he explained. "Nobody has ever said no to it. The Eidos board and the Square Enix board have been incredibly supportive of the idea. Now I know that sounds like I'm bound to say that, but they really, really have. When it was first discussed one of the biggest evangelists was the CFO, that's a finance guy. But they've been very supportive. A lot of debate about how it works, how we take it to market, but no arguments."

And now, after the success of the CM 2010 Pay What You Want promotion, Meredith says he "wouldn't be surprised" to see other publishers follow suit.

For more from Roy Meredith check out our interview in full.

CM 2010 is scheduled for release on September 11. You can pre-order now using the Pay What You Want promotion over at the Champ Man Store.

Source: http://www.videogamer.com/news/pay_what_yo...for_cm2010.html

I remember when CM was the king, then Football Manager took over, but this proposal is very interesting in the hope that CM2010 can actually offer a decent challenge to FM2010....

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Well, something is only worth what people are willing to pay for it and its nice to see that filter down to retail purchases. Unfortunately, it's a gimmick and a totally unsound way to do any real business (a step in the right direction though).

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Well, something is only worth what people are willing to pay for it and its nice to see that filter down to retail purchases. Unfortunately, it's a gimmick and a totally unsound way to do any real business (a step in the right direction though).

Not really, a lot of the "thousands" people who see this online and only pay ?2.51 are probably people who were only going to get FM, or people who were going to pirate.

You would never see someone like Activision do a "pay what you want for Call of Duty", but Eidos/Square Enix know Football Manager is the king and just saying to people that CM2010 is a huge improvement to the series is hardly going to convince many people to jump camp.

If the games good it will instil confidence back into any people who bought it for ?2.51 and make it more likely they'll be happy to hand over ?20 next time around for CM2011, and also hopefully prevent the game being pirated as viciously as the pirates take the route of getting it legally to enjoy not having to wait on cd-cracks and everything else.

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You actually feel quite bad buying the game this cheap :p To be fair though I'm one of the people who abandoned CM a long time ago in favour of FM which I buy every year. I dislike demos for these Football sims as the demo code is always quite out of date and full of bugs, so I've always just bought FM based on it's upstanding quality. Lets see if Eidos can interest me again in CM.

cm2010.jpg

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The demo/beta was buggy as hell. With very few changes made for the final release. At least they did a patch for the first day.

The online store bit was also buggy for everyone and there were problems starting downloads.

As for the game, it's no so bad.

The match engine (after the update) seems better and very few bugs (I only watch the goal highlights).

But team selection just seems a pain, I miss the old drag and drop as you could view any of the attributes where as with the team selection you don't get that choice. I tend to just use the normal squad screen and right click.

Tree menu can get messy again I just use right click to avoid this.

The player knowledge bit is anoying, the first thing I want to do is improve my squad and since I've got no money I have to take tons of players on trial just to see their stats. I wished this stayed as an option like in the other game. And the scouting network wastes your time as you can't tell it what players you want, for me this is an utter disaster. Man Utd don't want information on some 32 year old in the lower leagues of spain, they'd rather have a youth player. In the old game you could tell a scout to look for certain players or just do a youth search. This has gone. So this aspect of the game has changed but not for the good of it.

In the match day tatics, player targeting again is an utter annoyance, in the old game you just right clicked, now you've got to keep dragging and dropping.

I've not used the set pieces yet as I'm just trying to get the hang of training. Although you can select free kicks/corners/penalty takers, you can't select throw ins....

Oh yeah the GUI is utter trash, I'll wait for one of the first community skins to be updated. The blue just hurts my eyes. I can see they've still got pretty poor GUI makers.

I have no doubt they've improved aspects of the game, but some of that basics from the last version have changed when there was nothing wrong with them (e.g team selection and player targeting). But the time it has taken to do this is just odd, it's been a very long time to implement these changes and even then in the demo they were buggy, either they're slow at making changes or have a reduced/small dev team.

The recording feature is useless, the time it takes compared to the quality of the video is laughable. But I suppose they didn't want to spend money on video technology licenses.

I've no idea yet if I will play this version as long as I did with CM08 (601 hours on just one game save). We'll just have to wait and see, it might just rub off on me.

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I've had a bit of fun with this, but yeah, the GUI is absolutely terrible.

It's smooth in the sense it has nice transitions/effects, but dear god the colour choices are evil. As soon as someone finds a good community skin please link me!

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I've had a bit of fun with this, but yeah, the GUI is absolutely terrible.

It's smooth in the sense it has nice transitions/effects, but dear god the colour choices are evil. As soon as someone finds a good community skin please link me!

http://forums.championshipmanager.co.uk/fo...ead.php?t=60119

I love the skin, I've not tried it on the final release version as you can now disable the bottom left hand information box.

So the skin may not work work due to this change.

**snip**

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Well I'm pretty bored with the game now. It screwed up my game save, It was my 4th season and I started in the Southern Premier and was in the Conference Premier. I couldn't play a match or even add a manager, the game would just crash. Sadly I forgot to backup my game when reinstalling the game. I started a new game but I'm bored with it, all because of the knowledge system, I cannot play a game for fun. A times I just want it to be for fun and use my time up, with this knowledge system being in full place the game is just boring and pointless to pass time.

I'm pretty sure I won't play this game as much as CM08. And still no news on a pre-game editor or even any other updates (quite a few bugs are still in the game). They better release a bug fix update.

I'm still pretty f'd off that the scouting system is utter tripe. I end up just spending money on the network and ignore all the reports and sort through it myself.

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  • 2 months later...

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/36657/Cuts-hit-Champ-Man-dev

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/beau...be-restructured

http://www.develop-online.net/news/33368/C...hamp-Man-studio

Low down is it looks like %80 of BGS (CM Devs) to be cut and the work shipped out to China.

They've not showered themselve in glory, I've been rather peeved off by the knoweldge and scouting system. Despite being realistic you've got no choice for making the game fun once you're bored with it (Which I am now) They've still got bugs in the game from the last version (Can't do contracts when you are in charge of a national side!!!!) They've screwed up parts of the game which were fine - they removed the history sections and replaced it with a buggy thing (which has since been fixed). They've made a lot about this 3D Engine, while it does look better than FM, the AI at times is utter mad and can make you loose a match because it fails to respond.

They also introduce a media back page, something I don't see the point in. It seems this version they cared more about the match engine and this media thing.

The scouting system is so restrictive you're better off getting a load of scouts and do it yourself. I want a young striker, not some fat 35 year old defender! The system is also a pain, the costing of each region is so useless you can't fully use your money as you only have set presets. GUI's have also been pee poor.

Sad to say but they deserve it because some of their decisions for the game has been poor. I can only hope the game improves, but then again I wouldn't be suprised. BGS in the past have basicly released games and done nothing with them, its not been till this version that they've really supported it and when they do they go and release the game at stupid prices. A few of us are interested in making a save game editor for the game but BGS have not really given anything away.

I can only hope this outsourcing means bugs are fixed before released or the game gets 1 or two patches for the bugs. I'm not too fussed about the live system but I can see it can create money, recently I've been tempted to buy it.

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