Id be mad to ignore retail says Jacobson

Sports Interactive studio head Miles Jacobson has insisted he is fully committed to retail partnerships – after announcing that the Steam edition of FM10 will come with exclusive bonus content.

In an exclusive deal with Valve, the upcoming Steam version of Football Manager 10 will be bundled with Sega’s acclaimed racer, OutRun 2006: Coast to Coast.

But this isn’t about digital distribution versus retail,” said Jacobson in an exclusive interview with Develop.

It’s just that Steam gives us free bandwidth to use, and these types of partnerships allow many great opportunities for developers,” he said.

The Steam deal is thought to be a direct reply to Eidos’ recent ‘pay-what-you-want’ offer for Championship Manager 10, where customers can pay as little as 2.51 for the rival game via digital download.

I’m not looking to drive people away from standard retail,” insisted Jacobson, because I’d be mad to do so.

"Steam is a retailer, much like Play.com and HMV and GAME and the rest.”

Despite declaring his faith in brick and mortar retailers, Jacobson holds high praise for Valve’s Steam service.

I’d never even thought about putting the game up on Steam, to be honest with you, but the Valve guys came over to show us more about the platform and it’s amazing,” he said.

We get fantastic feedback from Steam users and can implement patches seamlessly.”

Jacobson also revealed that the Steam edition of FM10 would include something … that non-Steam games can’t have”, though was not at liberty to confirm what that is.

Develop’s full interview with Jacobson can be found here.