Encouraging News
 

I just wanted to thank Andreas for posting the following:

"You're wrong.
Unfortunately, Jim has to work all alone on this at the moment, because we released PT two months ago and will release OOTP 20 next month and that is just a huge work load for the rest of the team.
Jim is posting new screens every week in our internal forum tool, but we cannot post them in the public, because the graphics designer did not work on them yet. If we post them now, we just get a lot of unnecessary discussions, because they are not final (graphics wise). We'll post details when the beta starts.
No news here means that the situation did not change. All is said, I'll close the thread, and I'll watch the posts on this forum attentively. No trolling please Thank you for understanding."

I was probably one of those "trolling" before when I vented far more than I should've, but I think this is some nice clarity that work is ongoing. Just a quick "thank you" for providing a little clarity on the process, and some evidence of forward progress (pun intended?).

I also recently got back into my 10-year (in real years) OOTP dynasty on OOTP19, and that's a nice way to tide me over, selfishly :)

I'm not sure how encouraging it is to think that only Jim is working on this project when the other guys are tied up with OOTP. I had hoped that coming on board with this group would provide more dedicated guys to this project. No wonder it's taking so long.

I believe it means FOF will be released late summer just in time for the new football season. They are working on the baseball game now because opening day is right around the corner. After that they’ll focus on the football game. That’s how I understand it.

Why do you think that, graphics are not done, Jim working on it on his own and they are not near Beta as yet? But yes we did get an update so thank you Andreas for that.

with respect ... OOTP is the centerpiece of this organization. I have serious doubts they would do anything to tarnish that aspect. They have hockey too but OOTP still takes precedence. American football will come when it does. Point is to be patient if you want the level of the game you desire as we customers so often demand so much from them on OOTP and they do their best to meet and surpass our expectations of their products they produce for us. Yes I want football as well but I am quite patient as as we know Markus & Co. expect the best of their own product. I have the utmost confidence in this team to do what they can on each game they have of which includes football.

Of course. Nothing in our statements suggests that they take any of the staff that have traditionally been used for OOTP (which I play religiously) to focus on developing FOF.

My personal “Aha” moment was in seeing that they didn’t hire additional staff dedicated solely to FOF to support Jim. I guess I just assumed that he had his own staff for that project.

I'm not entirely sure why some in this thread are acting surprised that Jim is largely working on FOF alone.

That's how he's done every single release previous, and this is how it is with other games in OOTPD's lineup too.

When FHM came to fruition, Markus didn't start coding hockey games - there are other developers who handle that project, while Markus and crew assist with various tasks related to development that come up or require their knowledge of the OOTP framework.

Similarly, when the FOF/Solecismic partnership was announced I didn't think Markus was going to start coding a football game with Jim. Rather, the OOTPD team assists Jim however they can (and in this capacity I assume the help required would be greater since he's transferring FOF stuff over to the OOTP world).. But ultimately Jim is the head developer and that doesn't change. So I don't think it should necessarily come as a shock or some huge delay on development that Jim is largely working alone at the moment. I'm sure progress is still being made, even if it's slower than if Markus/Andreas et al were all helping. But, I don't really think it's outside of what anyone should have expected from this partnership. Especially, as noted, baseball season starts soon and we are now in offseason of football, thus FOF is lower priority.

Well what I took from it was that they stopped assisting Jim as much as I did before when PT was released.

Why anyone would think it would be a good idea to release a football sim on the dawn of a new MLB season is beyond me. Why the hell would they release it anytime before August/September?

Wolverine Studios has a very strange release timeline for their football games. I think they went into early access for their college football sim in January, and I also think they went live earlier this month with the full release. I'm not saying that to say it's anything to replicate, but actually using it as an example of a company that seems to be trying to do it all with very little rhyme or reason (they seem to be churning out as many sims as possible, but with little focus on a core game to build off of).

I was really hoping for DDS:College Football to be good, but it just always lacked immersion for me.

I’ll assume your thinly-veiled comment is directed at me.

As a consumer who is not in-the-know for how OOTP runs their shop, I made reasonable guesses that included the notion that Jim would be getting something in return for bringing his product to them. Of course he ran everything himself before. He was a one-man-operation. That’s well known over at FOF Central.

I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable for us to have assumed he was going to get a team dedicated to his game. Otherwise, why make the move? Also, with respect to hockey and FHM, I dare think the market for a possible football sim from OOTP Developments is large enough to warrant its own team. This would keep some upstart from being able to enter the market with a better product before this gets launched.

Finally, I am not expecting a game to roll out now. Nor have I said anything to suggest that. I can still hold the position that I am less-than-encouraged by the news that this game really isn’t any further along. In programming terms, August/September is right around the corner—especially with only the lead developer working on things.

It wasn't directed at any one person. There were other comments in the other thread that expressed the same sentiment I was speaking about.

He is getting something. His games have always lacked good UI, immersion and customization. OOTPD games have always excelled in those facets and this is something they can help bring to FOF.

They also bring the fact that they are essentially the largest sports sim game company outside of SI and thus there's a lot more potential market. Additionally, FOF has always been fairly poor with marketing of their products, also something OOTPD is normally strong in.

I suppose for those not closely familiar with OOTPD it might be assumed that is the case. However, despite being a success in the sim game community it's still not a very large company staff wise and don't presumably have the resources to hire a bunch of new developers to work on FOF.

You still make the move for all the reasons I listed above and the fact that if the solid gameplay and engine of FOF can be matched with the UI , customization and fanbase of OOTPD, the game will sell infinitely more copies than Jim ever could alone.

This is a joke right, I am English so I don't play basketball and baseball so I can't comment on the other games but so far the marketing for OOTP Football has been non existent. In fact Markus's customer facing skills are beyond terrible and I don't mean that to be rude it's just fact. Andreas on the other hand does seem to be pretty decent at speaking to the customer base.

The marketing for FOF is so little right now because there isn't much to market as the game isn't released yet.

I agree they could have said/done more, but I would be confident once development is further along or the game is released there will be much better marketing and publicity behind the game than past FOF titles.

And you are WAY off base with your comments about Markus. If you played OOTP you would know he spends a ton of time on the forums chatting with players and answering questions and taking their feedback for improvements.

You would think after a year the game would be well along the way and would exist! Saying the game does not exist yet probably makes people think, oh wow it's a year or more off release and does nothing towards marketing the game.Many people are pessimistic about the game and the very poor marketing or lack of updates is not helping that situation. Obviously we all do though appreciate Jim and the recent update he did and others in past years!

I apoligize to Markus if that is the case but all i have seen on these forums so far is him closing threads and being a bit brash!

Holy jumping... for goodness sakes do not take me saying the game doesn't exist as anything other than the simple fact that the game is not yet released.


I have no sweet clue when the game will be released, just the same as anyone else on this forum until we hear something official from the developers.

Well, this truly wasn't my intent in creating this thread. We'll get there with this game! In the meantime, I can't wait until OOTP 20 comes out (both for an awesome 20th iteration, as well as because then maybe we'll be getting closer to FOF)!

Thank you Zep and Andreas!

I just looked at the screens of OOTP 19 and I must say, anticipation for the football game is growing. Well, actually, I'm so excited, it's getting harder and harder to wait. Can't wait to play the game.

I came across this post today so I thought since we were mentioned I might as well answer the question regarding release schedules.

Our football development team are part-time guys - they do a fantastic job but they are developing the game after hours. We are nowhere near the size of OOTP Dev - if we were even a tenth as big the football games would be on full time so if and until that point ever comes they're getting the games done as quickly as possible but it means doing the work on one game first and then the other - the same holds true for the basketball games. I can't develop them at the same time so work gets done on the pro game first and that gets released at the start of the NBA season and then work on the college game gets done and it gets released in February right before we get into March Madness.

The football releases weren't when we had hoped and our goal is to be more timely with them this year but as always we're just going to do the best we can. It was better to release them with the updates and new features we wanted to include and release them after we would have preferred as opposed to just releasing something to release it whether it was the game we wanted it to be or not just to hit a particular date.

I think the fact that between myself and two guys on the football team we put out 5 releases for our 2019 schedule is an amazing feat and they're all solid games - the football games aren't to the depth level of the basketball games yet because they're only a few years old. Compare OOTP 20 to OOTP 4 - nobody starts off being SI Games or OOTP or anything like that :)

We are focused on our customers and trying to deliver them new experiences year after year so that they know they can depend on us. Maybe people skip a year between releases because they want two years of new stuff before they buy - that's ok - they at least know that there's going to be a new release every year and hopefully people will continue to support us so that we can grow the studio like Markus has done here and eventually have teams of full time people working on the games so they could all come out at the perfect point in the year like OOTP does. We need people to stick by us like they did here and work with us over the years to make each product better, do more sales and grow the company larger so that we can operate like OOTP does. This is the model for us to follow and we hope some day we get even close to being the company OOTP Dev is.