So today is the day that Football Manager 2012 was released, and what a shambles it has become. The whole gaming experience has been spoiled by Sports Interactive, Steam and SEGA; The three of them combined to bring us, the consumer, the ones who pay for the game, the worst experience possible.
It has all started since SEGA/SI Announced that the game MUST be installed with Steam; What is Steam? It is basically a place to legally pay, download and play games, similar to iTunes. That means if you are not a big gamer, you don’t buy games online or very often then you may not have even heard of Steam, let alone have it installed. So Sports Interactive/SEGA are forcing us to install 3rd party software to play their game. I don’t have anything bad to say about Steam (yet), other than I don’t want it, I won’t use it (for anything other than FM) and it should not be required to play a game I have just went out and spent my hard earned money on. There is also the argument that what if people don’t have the Internet, and so on, I could go on and on…
Why do we need to install steam, create an account with steam (yet more accounts we need to set up online), and “ask” steam if we are ok to play the game? You cannot uninstall steam once it is activated, you must have it running on your computer in order to play the game.
Got the game, was a (reasonably) happy customer, tried to play it and…..This happened. No longer happy! 
Downloading games, yeah, “It’s the future” nooooooottt!
Your game is assigned to your steam account. Which means you cannot use it on 2 machines at the same time, you cannot let a mate borrow it, and you cannot sell it as second hand. You can play it offline, however you must get the permission from steam to do that, physically using steam to select “play offline”, it’s like asking your mam if you can go out and play football which is fine if you are 7 years old, but at 27 it’s not 
After buying the game
OK So I go out and buy it, then go home and install steam and whatever, then create an account; (BTW – I still need to input the activation code which is in the box) Even though I have bought the disk it still tries to download the whole game! Over 2GB of it!! There is nothing which pops up which says “you have the game on the disk, you can follow these instructions to stop the download since you dont need to do it”. Fortunately for me I had only downloaded around 400mb of it when I found out you could stop that and install it through the disk. THEY ARE MAKING THINGS TOO DIFFICULT! Why can’t I just play the game I bought!!! I do not use steam, I am not familiar with it, so don’t fully know how it works. I imagine there are many others who don’t, but it seems Sports Interactive/SEGA don’t care.
OK, so WHY?!?!?!
And why do we have all of this? Because some people pirate the game. Why don’t they wake up and see that the only thing they are doing is spoiling the experience for the consumer, the fans, the people who pay for and play the game. People who steal the game will STILL steal the game, you will not stop them. If they invent some un-hackable protection what will the pirates do? They will just not bother. They will not go out and buy the game, because they never did in the first place. All you will of done is spend money and time on something which will never work, and upset lots and lots of loyal and genuine customers.
What will happen in next years game? Will we need to be pre-approved to buy it? Will SEGA/SI need to come and visit us all and make sure we are playing the game right? I may not want to find out, because I may not bother just like many others. The fact that Sports Interactive have to post massive FAQ’s about Steam, how it works, how to do things, etc. just shows how painful the entire experience actually is. What ever happened of putting in a disc and playing a game?
It seems a big shame to not buy a game for this reason, because in this whole thing I have not even mentioned the actual game itself; But this is the way some companies are going these days. Sports Interactive tries to market itself as the “grass roots” proper football fans kind of game and company, and they once were. They have now forgotten the fans, the people that buy the game, and their paranoid ideas of copy protection are only harming the consumers. And yeah, I do know that many will read this with the “Well just don’t buy the game, nobody is forcing you, blah blah blah”, but I like the games, the problem is the hoops you now have to jump through; It seems to be getting worse and worse, and I am sure at some point I will say enough is enough, as will others if they haven’t already.
The latest Football Manager games, I have the rest somewhere. I remember CM 93 and the copy protection of “tell us the score for…”, those were the days! 
