As you may have heard on the Football Manager podcast on Friday, or seen in the News of the World on Sunday, the demo of Football Manager 2009 will be released next Sunday, November 2nd, just after midnight, giving you a whole Sunday to try out the latest incarnation of the game.
The demo will, as normal, come in different "flavours".
The "vanilla" demo will be the smaller version of the demo file size wise, in that it will have very limited graphical content (no logo's, player pictures, stadiums), English language only, and only English and Scottish leagues available to play, for half a season of ingame time. This saved game will be compatible with the full release of the game, out on November 14th.
The "strawberry" demo will have all graphical content, multiple languages, and 10 leagues to play with (the list of which will be made available later in the week), also for half a season of ingame time, and saved games will also be compatible with the full release of the game, out on November 14th.
The "vanilla" demo will be available exclusively from the News of the World's website as a download file. We will be linking to the News of the World's page directly from the front page at www.sigames.com, and from the forums, as soon as the file is live.
There will be 3 ways to get the "strawberry" demo.
The first of these will be via STEAM. For those that are unaware of STEAM, it's a digital platform made by Valve Software (the developers beind the Half Life series, the Counter Strike series, Portal, and many more). They have super fast bandwidth, and it is by far and away our recommended way to get the "strawberry" version of the Football Manager 2009 demo.
STEAM will also be one of the ways to be able to authenticate your retail version of Football Manager 2009 on it's release, and our preferred route of patching, as patching through STEAM is automatic. You can download the STEAM client from
http://store.steampowered.com/ and can also pre-order Football Manager 2009 from the site to be able to play it at 9am UK time on the day of release.
The "strawberry" demo will also be available as a torrent download for those who are aware of this techonology, and as a download with bandwidth provided by GameShadow, although these are likely to appear shortly after the demo becomes available on STEAM, as we will be uploading to STEAM first.
I am also now able to confirm the specs required to play Football Manager 2009.
Please note that these specs are for the machines that we are offering technical support on - the game will work with other graphics cards, and on other spec machines, but as we are not offering technical support, we cannot list these on the system spec.
If your spec is lower than the minimum spec below, it is best to download the demo and try it on your machine, as the spec for the demo is the same as the full game.
Please note that if your PC graphics card is not capable of playing the game with the 3d match engine, it will default to the 2d view from previous FM releases, but the game will still run.
As was mentioned earlier in the year, I can confirm that the game will be released as a DVD Rom this year, rather than a CD. If you do not have a DVD drive, you are still able to purchase the game, but will have to do so via STEAM.
Mac System requirements
The game is currently only being supported on Intel Mac's only, and the minimum requirements are - OSX 10.5.5, Nvidia Geforce 7300 / ATI X1600 Radeon. 1GB RAM.
PC System Requirements
OS - Windows Vista or XP
Processor Speed - Vista - 2.0GHz, XP - 1.4GHz Memory - Vista - 1GB, XP - 512MB Videocard - 128MB Nvidia FX 5900 Ultra, ATI Radeon 9800, Intel 82915G/82910GL or greater.
Personally, I would recommend more RAM than the minimum listed above.
Now, there's also been a lot of talk on the forums about copy protection, and how we are planning to handle it this year, particularly in light of recent press with certain other titles and Securom, which we have used in the past.
We have followed those stories closely, but already had our plan in place for this year, and are happy with the choices that we have made.
I am therefore happy to be able to announce today that, for the first time in the Football Manager series since we started making the game, you will not require the disc to be in the drive each time you start the game if you are playing on the PC! Instead, you will need to authenticate your game.
This can be done in 3 different ways.
The first is via STEAM, as mentioned above. By authenticating through STEAM, you will automatically receive patches as soon as they become available. The second is a simple online transaction, which will take less than 30 seconds. The third, for people who are not online, is via telephone registration, with local call numbers in each country where we release the game, and this will take about 5 minutes to complete from our experience in testing.
We highly recommend the online authentication processes, as they are quick and easy.
Despite the license agreement that comes with the game stating that you can only install on one machine, we are well aware that many people like to play the game on personal laptops, as well as desktops, and our licenses for Football Manager 2009 will work in a very similar way to ITunes.
This means that you will get 5 licenses for personal use, so you can play the game on up to 5 computers as long as you own them, and the owner of the game is the person playing on said machines. If you uninstall the game on one of the PC's you have the game installed on, you get that "seat" back.
As an example, say you have installed the machine on your work laptop, your work PC, your home PC and your home laptop. You would then have used up 4 out of your 5 uses of the game. Your home desktop has some problems, so you decide to re-install windows on it. As long as you uninstall the game from that machine first, you will get that license back, and when you re-install, will still only be using 4 of your 5 installs.
Please note that the license when you purchase the game is explicit that you are only allowed to use the game for your own personal use.
Also please note that on uninstallation of the game, everything is removed from your machine, including all remnants of the copy protection system which we are using, which was a bugbear of many of the other systems available on the market.
MAC users will still have the same protection system as with other years, although we are hopeful that this will change in the coming years when someone comes up with a similar system for MAC's.
So, what we've aimed for, and have hopefully succeeded on, is a system whereby the legitmate purchaser of the game will notice the copy protection even less than in previous years.
