Jacobson wants to score on consoles

Sports Interactive’s Miles Jacobson wants to see a console version of Football Manager.

The studio director – who oversees Sega’s popular football sim franchise – just received an OBE in the New Year’s Honours list for services to the games industry.

Now he’d like to bring Football Manager back to consoles following an Xbox 360 release in 2008, but says more research is required.

A new console version is something we’d like to do, but currently don’t have solutions to a lot of the questions that the console market and consumers bring up,” Jacobson told MCV.

We will continue to investigate the possibilities alongside Sega.”

Sports Interactive has already brought the Football Manager franchise to the PSP, iPhone and PC digitally, but Jacobson says more sales come from retail.

PC market share at retail dropped 0.5 per cent last year, but shelf space for PC dropped more than that.
So I think it’s actually performing pretty well.”

The SI director is also pleased with how well the best-selling franchise has fared on the App Store.

He said: We targeted the iPhone because as a platform it’s powerful enough to handle the Football Manager Handheld project, with a mature marketplace, few barriers to entry and a captive audience.”

Football Manager 2010 and 2011 were the top two best-selling PC games of last year.

Despite our position in the PC market, we won’t be complacent,” Jacobson added.

We’ll keep working as hard as we can to improve each new iteration of the game and give people the best football management series possible.”