Stuff Meets: Miles Jacobson

Making games during a pandemic is strange

You’ve got loads of jigsaw puzzle pieces with Football Manager and you’re trying to appease lots of audiences: the tactics wizards, the transfer gurus, the people who want all of the interaction. My job is to make it all tie in together and make it feel like it’s whole. The thing I’m proudest of this year is how FM21 feels like a complete game, because we’ve worked very differently this year to normal.

People have been asking us to add xG for years

My answer has always been: which version of it? There are lots of disciples of xG (Expected Goals) and cults of xG based around different versions of it. We haven’t wanted to do it before because there hasn’t been an xG system that we believed was good enough, so we worked with a company called SciSports in the Netherlands and came up with our own. This is our first version and we will add more stuff to it in the future, but we’re very happy with where it’s ended up.

In previous games we’ve had loads of possible Brexit scenarios

This year there’s only one and it’s the one that we believe is going to happen in real life. Players from inside the EU are now treated the same way as someone from Brazil would be, so it’s going to be harder to sign players from abroad. Post-Brexit you will no longer be able to sign 16-year-old Spaniards to come over to the UK and play in your youth team.

One of the things we try to do with FM is create a universe that you escape into

Our average play times have gone up from 240 hours to just shy of 500 hours. Humans aren’t used to being locked up at home and it’s actually made me realise what a responsibility we have as game developers for the mental health of our consumers. We’ve served over 100 million adverts for mental health charities through the FM20 cycle completely for free and we’ll be doing the same with FM21.

I worry about people’s fitness too

I’ve done more exercise in this period than in the last 10 years combined and I’ve lost two stone. If Stuff hasn’t done a feature on under-desk cycling machines yet, please do. I’ve got three under my desk and I do 15 to 20 miles a day. I found that it was really helping me so we gave everybody in the studio a budget of £250 to buy home exercise equipment.

I love the PS5 control pad I think it’s a thing of absolute beauty.

I have both new consoles but they were released at a time when we were trying to ship a game, so I haven’t had a lot of time on either of them, but I’ve been playing a lot of Yakuza – I’m a big fan of JRPGs so the fact that they’ve turned the series into an RPG is fantastic for me. I didn’t get to play Watch Dogs on PS4 so as far as I’m concerned that’s a PS5 exclusive.

I don’t think this will be the last console generation

There will be things that you can do hardware-wise that you just couldn’t do with a streaming platform because you need the power of the technology. I think streaming will become more important and it’ll be better for certain kinds of games, including FM, but the internet isn’t good enough in the whole world to take over entirely. We will have boxes in our homes for many years to come.

My barbecue is my favourite gadget

I love cooking – it’s the thing that makes me stop thinking about work, because if I think about work when I’m cooking the food’s shit. I have a Weber gas barbecue with nine different grill sections. It has a pizza stone, it does incredible fry-ups, and you can even have rotisserie chicken on it. It’s like a kitchen in its own right and it’s the only reason I bought a place with a garden. It doesn’t matter if it’s raining or snowing because I’ve got another oft-used gadget: a hands-free umbrella.

I bought an outdoor telly at the start of lockdown

It’s 4K, waterproof and it’s made by a company called Proofvision. With the different restrictions that were coming in it meant I could still have friends come round and sit in the garden to watch the football, but because I’m a good neighbour I also bought a Bluetooth transmitter and a couple of pairs of headphones.

We’re never going to be a mainstream game for the Snapchatters

We’ve always been a niche game, we just happen to be a pretty big niche. If we wanted to make something for other groups of people it would be something new rather than changing the core game. We experiment with other styles of game regularly, we just don’t tend to release them. We’ve got one at the moment we’re experimenting with that is more for the bitesize consumer, but I think it’s wrong to do broad brushstrokes of the human race to say attention spans have dropped, because it’s not true.

Football is weird at the moment

It’s like every game is a pre-season friendly; it just doesn’t feel as competitive as normal. I hope Watford go up this season because if we don’t we’re going to lose a bunch of players who’ve agreed to stay with us for this season, and financially we kind of need to go back up, but there are lots of good teams in the division and it’s going to be tough. We’re playing badly but still picking up points, so hopefully at some point we’re going to start playing well.

My number one tip for Football Manager players?

It’s a marathon not a sprint. Don’t come into our game thinking you’re going to take AFC Wimbledon into the Premier League in two seasons. It’s not going to happen. Plan for the long term.

Football Manager 2021 is out now for PC, Mac, iOS, Android, XSX, XSS, XB1, and Switch.

About

Stuff's second Tom has been writing for the magazine and website since 2006, when smartphones were only for massive nerds and you could say “Alexa” out loud without a robot answering. Over the years he’s written about everything from MP3s to NFTs, played FIFA with Trent Alexander-Arnold, and amassed a really quite impressive collection of USB sticks.