Football Manager 2009

Did You Know?

• The Microsoft Windows version received a Platinum sales award from ELSPA, indicating at least 300,000 copies sold in the United Kingdom.
• Studio director Miles Jacobson stated that for every one person who bought Football Manager 2009, four pirated it.

Gameplay

The handheld version of Football Manager 2009 introduced a 2D match engine for the first time, and shipped with two skins: a light and a dark alternative. The core gameplay follows the series tradition of managing a professional, semi-professional, amateur, or international football team, including signing players, handling club finances, and delivering team talks. New features for the overall game included a 3D match engine viewable fullscreen with a widescreen option, the ability to play as a female or male manager, improved assistant manager interaction, enhanced mid-match team talks and tactics, training players for preferred moves, transfer rumours, and press conferences that allow building rapport with journalists. The finance and transfer systems were completely reworked, and the database contained over 350,000 players at announcement. The game was the first in the series released on DVD-ROM rather than CD-ROM, with new features revealed through videos, podcasts, and online blogs. Launch day setbacks included many users unable to activate the game due to distributed denial of service attacks on the DRM activation servers.

Controversy

Upon release, many buyers encountered problems with the game's copy protection. A printing error on the manuals made the keys difficult to read, and distributed denial of service attacks on the Uniloc activation servers prevented purchasers from activating their games, also disabling the telephone activation lines that relied on the same servers. SEGA issued a press release apologizing for the issues. As of May 2011, the game could no longer be activated because the product activation website was shut down.