Sports Interactive And Eidos To Part Company

tHE vAGGABOND

SPORTS INTERACTIVE AND EIDOS TO PART COMPANY

Publisher and developer of the best-selling Championship Manager series
of football management games agree to work together once more before
going their separate ways.

04/09/03: Sports Interactive and Eidos today announce that they have
mutually decided to end their longstanding relationship in relation to
the development of the Championship Manager series of computer games.
The two companies will work together on Championship Manager: Season
03/04, which will be the last game in the series to be developed by
Sports Interactive. The game will be released by Eidos in the fourth
quarter of this calendar year.

Both parties will retain their respective intellectual properties, with
Eidos retaining the name ‘Championship Manager’ and Sports Interactive
keeping ownership of the player database and source code.

Eidos will develop Championship Manager internally, with an update
release planned for the 2004/2005 football season, while Sports
Interactive will announce its plans for future football projects in the
first quarter of 2004.

"If this were the music industry, we would be talking about a classic
case of 'musical differences'," says Miles Jacobson, Managing Director
of Sports Interactive. "We've enjoyed an excellent relationship with
Eidos for many years now and will work closely with them to make sure
that our final collaboration is the best version of CM ever. After that,
I expect that we will become the friendliest of rivals."

“We would like to thank everyone involved with Sports Interactive for
their hard work in helping establish Championship Manager as one of the
industry’s most successful franchises,” says Jonathan Kemp, Eidos’
European Managing Director. “Moving the development of Championship
Manager to our newly-created internal studio will enable us to build
upon the phenomenal success of the game and develop the brand further.”

Championship Manager was created by brothers Paul and Ov Collyer in the
late 1980s and first published by Domark in 1992. The brothers formed
the development company Sports Interactive in 1994 and Eidos took over
the publishing reins in 1995 when it acquired Domark. To date, the game
has sold more than 4,000,000 copies, while the latest edition
(Championship Manager 4) became the UK's fastest-selling PC game upon
its launch on March 28th 2003.

About Sports Interactive

Sports Interactive is the development team behind the award-winning and
market-leading Championship Manager football games (published by Eidos).
Sports Interactive employs a full-time team of 22 at its headquarters in
Islington, North London, and is supported by a network of 2,500
researchers around the world. Further information on the company and its
products are available from www.sigames.com.

About Eidos

Eidos plc is one of the world’s leading publishers and developers of
entertainment software with a diverse mix of titles for the PC,
PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system, Nintendo GameCube™ and the
XboxÔ video game system from Microsoft. For more information on Eidos
and its products visit www.eidos.com.

ENDS

irishgeo

Sorry to hear about this. So it is just a name change required. Or do eidos own any of the code.

tHE vAGGABOND

Both parties will retain their respective intellectual properties, with Eidos retaining the name ‘Championship Manager’ and Sports Interactive keeping ownership of the player database and source code.

As it says there...

Nothing to be sorry about, these things happen in the world

DapperGent

This kinda blows.

It'll be hateful if the Eidos game outsells Sigames's next one simply because they have the rights to the CM "brand" ("cunts"), but if they don't have the source code or the database or the researchers they won't make anythign up to scratch in all probability.

I reckon they'll get one big pay day out of this before people realise they've been swindled by a brand name change.

Any idea what you're going to call CM5?

Is there going to be a name competition?

My proposal is "Football Management Flavoured Digital Crack".

tHE vAGGABOND

that sure has a nice ring to it