The top-down view remains, but has been augmented with a fully-3D pitch side camera. And hey, they’ve won both the Premiership as well as the FA Cup in recent years! Sociable Soccer as it looked in 2015. It’s like the fact that Leicester City is everyone’s second favourite team. So, our aim is to build upon our own userbase and appeal to the others’ userbase too. I really can’t see any reason why devotees of “the big two” can’t enjoy this just as much, and maybe more.
I love the focus on the social element and, whilst you can put in the hours and build a career path, it’s just as much fun to pick it up and have a five-minute kickabout with your mate on the tube. But with 11 players on the pitch over 90 minutes, we might sneak a cup win now and again.īut seriously, I firmly believe there is a gap that the immediacy of this product fills. However, over the last few years there has been a growing appetite for a good quality alternative to the rather staid and po-faced style of FIFA something a bit more fast, fun and light hearted, but with more to it than the plethora of lightweight, pixelated retro-reverential soccer games at the bottom end of the market.ĭo you see an opportunity to take points, so to speak, from “the big two”, or do you look to the more modest successes of games like New Star Manager and Football, Tactics & Glory?ĭS: To use an analogy, I like to think that as a QPR fan myself, and Jon being a Norwich fan, neither of us have any great illusions of beating Liverpool or Man City regularly. Even before the change to eFootball, it was outselling PES 19 to 1, such has been its dominance. FIFA has been so dominant for so long now that you see many people reference it as if it were the ONLY football game in town. JH: We see the current situation as an opportunity for us to establish our place within the current football action games hierarchy. It’s an interesting period in football games, with eFootball being received rather negatively and EA seen to be wrangling with FIFA over licensing. Whilst there is no such thing as a no-brainer in business, this is probably as close as we’ve come to it. So, when we embarked on a separate (and so far unannounced) project that required some football input, I reached out to Jon and it soon became apparent that what he was looking for in a publisher for Sociable Soccer, and what we were looking for in the type of product we wanted to publish, had us going down a directly parallel path.
How did you come to partner with Jon on this title? Darryl Still, Kiss Publishingĭarryl Still: I’ve known Jon for too many years to mention – going back to when Sensible Soccer was head-to-head with Kick Off, in the same way that the Atari ST brand I was managing was head-to-head with Commodore’s Amiga! Oddly, as time passed, we’ve never managed to work together but have always bumped into each other at events and had a good chat about football. We are absolutely delighted to have finally tied the knot with Kiss after six years of searching for the right partner on the flagship versions of Sociable Soccer
#FIFA MOBILE SOCCER PC CONTROLLER ANDROID#
In the background, I have spoken to around 200 publishers and platform holders over the course of six years and turned down many potential deals to end up with the three that we have currently signed – firstly via Rogue, our US publishing partner on Apple Arcade (a subscription model for iOS, MacOS & TVOS) secondly via our Chinese mobile publishing partner Crazysports (a free to play model for iOS and Android in China only) and now finally via Kiss, our UK publishing partner on PC/Console (a premium model for PC, Playstation 4/5, Xbox One/X as well as the Nintendo Switch). So this has enabled us to transition our focus between platforms and varying publisher requirements quite easily.
The game was deliberately constructed from the outset to work with controller and touchscreen and to monetise via premium, subscription and free to play models. Given my heritage of taking Sensible Soccer to all of the platforms available at the time – and the more recent ability to develop easily for all platforms with Unity, Unreal and the like – this has always been our target.ĭuring the six years that we have been making the game we have allowed the more attractive commercial opportunities available to us to shape our more immediate priorities as to which parts of the cross-platform development to do next. Jon Hare: From the outset of the development of this game, we have been aiming totally cross platform at the widest possible audience. You always intended to bring Sociable Soccer to a wider audience. Masterminding the challenge behind the scenes here are legendary designer Jon Hare and the equally veteran Darryl Still.