Football Manager 2017’s Miles Jacobson receives death threat over localisation

The Steam page for Football Manager 2017 is littered with negative reviews but it’s not because the game is terrible.

Chinese players have been asking for a localised Chinese version of the popular football manager sim for years but it’s not been forthcoming. Back in 2011, Miles Jacobson explained that piracy of the game by Chinese gamers was preventing them localising the game due to the costs involved.

@Talentconan to do a Chinese translation, we'd need 20k of the people currently pirating to buy the game. And that's not going to happen.

— Miles Jacobson (@milesSI) October 25, 2011

With the new Football Manager releasing soon, Chinese players have been leaving negative reviews for the game on Steam and things have got a little more serious prompting Jacobson to leave numerous messages on his Twitter in the past 24 hours.

A polite reminder – abuse to me or anyone else at my studio leads to an instant block from our accounts. Play nicely.

— Miles Jacobson (@milesSI) October 27, 2016

With so much pressure being applied with the negative reviews, SEGA has now announced that there will be a localised version created for the Chinese market which prompted a further tweet today.

but as Sega announced last night, they are going to do a Chinese translation now, despite not reaching the sales thresholds.

— Miles Jacobson (@milesSI) October 29, 2016

This is good news but according to Jacobson he and his family received a death threat this morning.

yet we are still doing a translation. And still I get abuse – including a death threat for me and my family this morning.

— Miles Jacobson (@milesSI) October 29, 2016

SteamSpy numbers indicate the Chinese market is the second largest behind the UK for ownership of Football Manager 2017. Looking back at Football Manager 2015, the Chinese market came in twentieth in ownership of the game which shows more Chinese players could be buying it now.

While SteamSpy numbers are not 100% accurate, there is an indication that more players in China are actually buying the game. Jacobson maintains they have still not reached that 20K threshold which would indicate that the SteamSpy number are very inaccurate.

Whatever the facts are with the numbers, it’s disheartening to see a community rally against a developer and individual.