This sounds like a disaster.
For those who don’t know, Football Manager has a yearly release schedule, and the highlight of the release is that it has a database of nearly every professional player in the world, the club they play for, and an attempt to “scout” them, giving all their various attributes from passing ability, to height and weight, to their determination.
By releasing in March 2025, they’re going to release the game essentially at the end of the 2024/2025 season right before players start moving to new clubs and the database becomes obsolete. Typically, around March is when they’re giving deep discounts on the yearly release because they know there won’t be much remaining interest in playing a game that’s almost out of date.
They really shot themselves in the foot. They could have released a Football Manager 25 that was 100% FM 24 but with an updated database, they’ve done it before. They could have called “Football Manager 25” something like “Football Manager Next Gen” and not tied themselves to a certain season. And, if they do manage to get Football Manager 25 out in March, are they really going to be able to do FM 26 half a year later? Will anybody buy FM 25 if they know there’s a FM 26 coming out so soon?
I agree, this will really be a shit show. It’s especially scummy that just last week they announced a road map and opened pre orders only to now suddenly delay the whole game by 5 months(!). There’s no way they didn’t know about this last week, why open pre orders then? I know it says you can get a refund but it’s not a good look to do it this way. Sports Interactive is so bad at marketing and timing things it’s insane.
I think this delay will cause problems for both this game and the next one because they’ll either have to focus on FM26 and undercook this one or they’ll focus on this one and release a minor upgrade in FM26. There’s no real solution anymore, all because of how they’ve done things.