Soccer Manager Worlds was the very first game this company ever made and in 2025 it will be 20 years old. That means it will be 20 years since four of us (all still with the company) started up a games studio in our Dad’s garage without much of an idea where we were going, other than we thought we had a great concept – an authentic, fun, social football game that you play with your friends. In the end it proved more popular than we could have ever believed.  

We still really believe in that simple concept and many of us at the studio still play Worlds and compete against each other. We still attend Worlds ‘meet-ups’ with fans of the game and we’re really proud of the fact that people still love to play the game after all these years. Its legacy is important to us and so is its future. 

The current situation with Worlds is that whilst it remains a popular game it does not make money, indeed it has been loss-making for many years. This has meant that we have not been able to deploy the required resources to develop and maintain the game as we have wanted to. Whilst we have sustained this for a period of years, with the recent increase of costs in all sorts of areas, it makes the game’s future increasingly uncertain and so we have been putting some thought into how we address that and protect the game’s future. Our ultimate goal is to re-develop the game and ensure its future for another 20 years. 

There is clearly an amount of work required to bring Worlds up to modern standards. We have our own ideas of what this work is, mainly based on the conversations we have with users, but we also want to ensure that we retain a strong sense of community in the game and consequently we will ensure that the redevelopment is led by votes from our Gold Managers.

We’ll post a list of potential fixes and development areas and you will be able to up or down vote them accordingly. We’ll fix and resolve the highest priority issues first as voted by Gold Managers. We’re in a good position to do this as the majority of the original development team still work for the company. A big change we will also make is to let the Gold Managers drive the direction of the game, Gold Management will mean that you will have a say and vote on any changes to the game and decide on what we developers work on next to improve your game.

Our approach to redeveloping Worlds does of course need to have commercial considerations too. We believe the best way to do this is to create a subscription model to the game – essentially preserving full access to the game for Gold Managers only and adding in extra benefits now and over time. Free to play users would still be welcome to play but their access to certain features would be limited. Our intention is for the price for Worlds to be similar to the current 1 year Gold Management. 

Once we have consulted on these proposals with the community we would set a date to enact the changes. Below is a diagram of our outline plan for the sequencing of the project we are proposing.

We believe this will put the game onto a firmer footing and ensure its viability and enable us to deploy dedicated resources to start to redevelop the game, fixing current issues and building new features that the Gold Managers want to see.

The alternative to not proceeding with this plan could lead to us ultimately having to call time on SM Worlds, something we as a Studio desperately do not want to do!

We think this plan would give existing players a far superior experience than they currently have, secure the game’s future and also grow it for new users and fill up Game Worlds. We anticipate that a subscription model would also assist in maintaining user activity and reduce multiple account issues such as player cheating/trading loopholes. 

In the first instance, we’re really testing the water with this idea. We’re ready to make it happen, if you the community want it to.

Please join the discussion or give feedback below.