How to treat paying customers 101

The latest version of Sports Interactive’s yearly Football Manager franchise was released on Friday, and in a bid to combat piracy, have taken the route of forcing you to activate the product.

The first thing that they did wrong was not taking care with the product code on the back of the manual.  You know the ones, when you install Windows and have to type out a 20 or so character string: “FCKGW….”.  These were printed in a font that made 0 and O look the same, and 1 and I.  Minor frustration, but one that’s easily avoidable.

Secondly, came the activation.  If you’re online, you can hit a button to connect to the SI servers and activate.  Except you couldn’t, because the servers promptly crashed.  For those unable to do it that way, there was telephone activation, which required you to enter four 16 digit numbers and type out 8 different response codes – taking up to 10 minutes to do.  Of course, the phones were overloaded, so you couldn’t actually do that, either.

Sure, these were just teething problems – there’s going to be a massive rush on launch day, and that’s the time where most people will be trying to activate.  There’s little point in using a huge cluster of servers that will fall out of use after a weekend, but the people they are alienating are their core audience.

The people who buy on release day will be the most hardcore fans, those who take time off work or make plans around being able to play the game they just bought.  I’d imagine the demographics of Football Manager players are generally male and in their 20s and 30s, exactly the sort of people who will download pirate games.  There’s no chance the validation will be in the cracked pirate version, so SI are making mugs of people:  £25 (£35 on Steam!!) for extra inconvenience before being able to play.  Great effort.

I resent SI assuming that I’ve stolen the game in my hand, and me having to prove otherwise to them.  Especially when they make it so difficult to do so.