Sports Interactive has confirmed this year’s Football Manager 25 instalment won’t arrive until well into the second half of the current real-life football season.
The developer has made the surprising decision to delay the game into next March, despite recently promising a delay would only last until November.
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The company said following discussions with publisher SEGA, the “best course of action” was to delay the release well into the new year.
SI says this development cycle has been particularly difficult and the extra time has not been sufficient to get the game into shape for a release last month. To cut a long story short, progress has been slow, despite fast work, and standards won’t be compromised.
“Timelines were already tight and, as rightly pointed out by many of your recent comments, we were simply rushing too much and in danger of compromising our usual standards. This has put an enormous amount of pressure on everyone working across the studio, who are all passionately committed to delivering the best game possible,” the developer said in a statement.
“FM25 is the biggest technical and visual advancement in the series for a generation. We simply cannot compromise the delivery of this crucial juncture in Football Manager’s history by rushing to release it in November.”
“We are intensely aware that this will be massively disappointing for you. We share that disappointment and are extremely sorry.”
There will be an update to reveal new gameplay footage in January. The main question is, wily Eric Ten Hag make it that long?