Sports Interactive and SEGA have announced their latest of headline features to be included in Football Manager 2011. With the ability to setup Football Manager to tweet out your achievements within the game and upload match highlights to YouTube from inside Football Manager 2011. Although this will not directly make an impact to the game itself, but could hugely impact the interaction between fans and the Football Manager community.
Twitter has grown massively in the past year. Miles, SEGA and Football Manager use it extensively to interact and promote their products, SEGA know the power of Twitter and how powerful a marketing tool it can be in spreading the word. If everyone is talking about Football Manager 2011 on Twitter, manually or automatically as they play, this can only help spread the word and the FM brand offering huge marketing potential for the game.
But as the STEAM achievements allowed you to do since this year, was give fans bragging rights against the rest of the lads at school or down the pub. But STEAM hasn’t really taken off in the community as a social media platform. Instead you will find more interaction on the community forums and Twitter were there is constant activity and interaction amongst some of the most prominent characters within the community and at SI/SEGA. Automatically giving access to influential Twitter accounts that will interact with the fansites on a proactive basis.
PlayFootballManager have already shown on a small scale how you can integrate social media with achievements with their facebook application. I love seeing PlayFM updating my facebook when I have won my latest league title, to show off to all of those other FM players on my friends list. Just as much as I love talking about my achievements when I am in the pub.
PlayFM as of today, in 9 months have approved 3,907 CV results and 1,200 challenges. Growing naturally, an achievement for the site when you consider it relies on someone to physically taken a screenshot and uploading it to the site in order to part-take. It shows that there definitely is a want from people to show off their results. SI and STEAM though have given mention to a Managers Office another place to show your results, I hope this won’t be stepping on the toes of the community sites that has done this very well so far. I would rather see SI work with the likes of PlayFM to promote, improve and integrate these features with what already exists.
style="overflow:hidden" >
Play Football Manager allows you to show off you CV on your very own webpages
Not knowing how the whole system will work its difficult to speculate, but one thing I do fear is that Football Manager tweets will litter our feeds with twitter spam, automated messages “@fmplayer has just won the league” – “@fmplayer has just beat United 2-0″ -”@fmplayer has just got the achievement iron curtain”. Which lack personality and personal touch to provoke discussion and a likely way for alot of people to hit the unfollow button.
YouTube
Where I think the real explosion in the Football Manager community and gamers will be in the integration of YouTube. The ability to post your goals onto YouTube allowing you to enter ‘goal of the month’ competitions all of which you could only do before by buying screencapture software. But now you will be able to easily show off your FM games to the world using one the most popular video-sharing sites in the world.
The exciting thing about making YouTube now being accessible to FM gamers is that it will begin to give us an opportunity to capture those goals which we can use in the ‘Goal of The Month’ competitions that sites have struggled to setup in the past. Adding to the discussions on forums with working examples and hopefully creating stories and tactical discussions much less of a heavy text based experience and adding depth to the discussion.
Videos can now be uploaded straignt from Football Manager 2011
I am excited most of all that it will allow me to demonstrate my points clearer and easier, adding more entertainment for those reading in trying to help get my points across.
Social Media interaction within the gaming industry has certainly exploded and its good to see Football Manager, a game with huge social interaction surrounding it, now making itself accessible to the social media generation and although won’t improve the experience of the game will improve the experience of the fans.
The only issue I can see here is YouTube being beseiged with thousands of goal videos that will all end up looking the same!! Certainly a good addition but not sure how it will work in practise. 1000 entries into goal of the month competitions would be a nightmare!
Well with YouTube itself, there are many things on the site besieged. But it is good because it easy to filter the clutter.
But your right, I think those people who might run competitions like that should basically have something in place to sort through it all. But many of the sites won’t see excessive amount of entries I wouldn’t have thought.
Many could say 1 entry per person per month. Many of the community forums attract a few hundred during really busy times, usually alot less once everything has settled. Only SUSIE and the official forums can I imagine will have massive numbers entering.
This stuff is for people who are into bragging rights. I wonder if the player demographics were taken into account in deciding to implement these.
From a marketing point of view, twitter is a brilliant feature. It’s like Facebook when everyone started playing that farm game and then all their friends saw the game updates and wondered what it was and before you know it everyone is breeding pigs and growing corn.
Bragging rights have never been my thing on any game so I’m more interested in improved gameplay and on that front, it’s disappointing that resources have been spent on these features.
I could well be the minority but it’s safe to say the forums over the years have asked more about gameplay improvements rather than social networking features.
Well not everyone wants the bragging rights. Its a small part of it but every little helps as they say.
But you are right, SEGA will want FM to grow and grow working harder to market and with free marketing on twitter using these features it is fantastic for them. I think we’d have to be nieve to think that the reasoning about doing this isn’t a marketing one.
But the bottom line is always the game, without a good game why would we want to brag about it in the first place, it is the foundation for everything else that follows and I am sure the SI know this already.
I don’t think it is a case of putting social networking features in instead of gameplay improvements, I think it is something bolted on. But in terms of YouTube I think that will be a major edition not to the game but in how we interact with other gamers.
The baton was a bib on a stretchy belt. We were ceafrul not to drop it, of course, tee hee, but the clip was broken and I had to knot it as I ran, then start my watches and commence the climb. The trail switch-backed its way up the side of the valley, and for a while I could catch glimpses of other runners, above and below, as we worked our way up. But this would not last, since the top of the ridge was hidden in cloud. I was winging the pace, running at about 88% Max HR, threshold pace, with the Garmin showing speeds ranging from 10:30 to 11:20 or so. Not bad for the gradient. At the top, the fog closed in, and I started up the ridge, the so-called Ocean View Trail, heh. 400 vertical feet done, only 900 to go, yay! I picked up the pace a little. Begone, you elevens, only tens and nines from here to the top! Diana, my opponent on this leg, started with a hefty lead, and is no slouch, so my chances of catching her looked dim, unless she blew up on this hill. I looked ahead hopefully. The fog was getting thicker, my spooky little world had a radius of about 30 yards of trail, low scrub and an occasional big rock.Hey, I was catching someone! Oh, not a runner, but a mountain biker in low gear. Passing on your right! Not often I get to say that to a cyclist. Later another figure came into view. A runner, but not Diana. Oh well, picked up a place, anyway. I slowed a little, since it was getting really thick and there was a turn coming up. Heres a group of hikers looking intently at a map and Theres the Dipsea Trail marker!The Dipsea rolled for a while, then started downhill. Check the Garmin: 6:20 pace. Yup, Im fast downhill, but not the fastest. One guy actually passed me here, so I lost that place Id gained.Most of it was not that fast though. There were some sharp turns and steep parts. The fog thinned, and took on color. That blue tint to the left must be the ocean, but what the heck was that diagonal white slash in front? Was I about to be kidnapped by aliens? Clear air revealed it to be the surf at my destination, Stinson Beach. Still more than a mile away, and a long way down, but a welcome sight.Then into the trees, and it got really steep, with switchbacks and stairs. A short uphill came as (almost) a relief after all that quad-workout. Three hikers stood aside and applauded as I stormed up the slope.Another fast bit, then a road, and a turn to the finish.I ran my leg in 55 minutes at an average pace of 8:12. We were 13th out of 25. The B&Bs were 11th, beating us by 5:55. But we were the 2nd all-masters team! I could have done it better, I think. Hmm, could get a taste for this trail racing game