jordanc79 could you please send it me . would that be possible please

---------- Post added at 01:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:15 PM ----------

thank you very much .
 
Just receieved this email from FM Britain......

FM-Britain will no longer be producing regular content. Sports Interactive have objected to our content model of charging for annual strategy guides, and have threatened to remove all FM-Britain staff members from the beta testing process if we continued. They also threatened to put us under legal review despite our absolute conviction that nothing that we have done violates copyright law.

The absolute priority of FM-Britain has been to improve the quality of the Football Manager community. We felt it most important that Richard Claydon (wwfan) was able to continue to beta test the game and develop the tactics creator into which he and Oliver Collyer have put so much work. The only solution left open to us by Sports Interactive (SI) was for Richard to resign from making premium content – and without his input we no longer physically have the time or the manpower to continue.

Therefore, we have proposed that Richard continue to test the game as an independent fan of Football Manager, while the rest of the FM-Britain staff will remain separate from SI and from the newly proposed Sports Interactive Affiliate Scheme.

The biggest casualty of all this is that there will be no Tactical Theorems and Frameworks 11 as originally planned.

The site, however, would like to clear up some myths and misunderstandings that our activities over the past twelve months have and are likely to generate.

*The Business Model*

First, we will explain our business model. In the 2008/2009 Football Manager (FM) season, FM-Britain (FMB) produced one piece of content: Tactical Theorems and Frameworks 2009 (TT&F09). For the rest of the year, we wrote and produced nothing. The only reason we were able to continue was down to the business model we put in place for the twelve months running from October 2009.

This should be stated again, to be clear. The site would literally have gone off line, and all of our content would have been inaccessible without this business plan. That is not an exaggeration. The site’s domain name came up for renewal, and we seriously considered letting this lapse.

In order to allow us to produce regular, quality content over the lifespan of FM2010, we planned to release Communication and Psychological Warfare (CPW) as a premium guide. This would provide some small financial remuneration at the end of the 2009/2010 FM season, and allow us to build a platform from which we could launch even more content for 2010/2011. The work leading up to CPW was, in effect, “paid for” by its release as a premium guide.

We are no longer teenagers or undergraduate students. As much as we love the game and as much as we have enjoyed putting in our own time for free, there comes a point where schedules become too crowded. Staff members move on and are unable to do what they once did. Under the system we had in place, Jordan Cooper was able to divert some of his business time towards the marketing and administration of FMB’s servers. Richard Claydon was able to continue to work directly with Sports Interactive on match engine feedback. Gareth Millward (Millie) was able to produce regular content for the main site and act as the editor of our content. Matt vom Brocke (The next Diaby) was able to spend small pockets of time working on guides, while we were able to offer compensation to Jon Pearson (JP) and Keith Matthews who run our excellent LLaMa section and administrate the forums. We were also able to enlist the help of Thomas Levin from FM-Pundit in producing content and editing the main site. He has been similarly frustrated with the company’s attitude, apparently excluded from the SIAS without a single word of correspondence from SI or SEGA.

Without the business plan, this was simply not possible. Perhaps this is something that people don’t like to admit, but when you know that your work is building towards a particular goal it is much easier to dedicate time to finishing tasks. This is the basic advantage to a more entrepreneurial model. It fosters a more professional attitude to content production which ensures its quantity and quality.

It is absolutely clear that this could not be an entirely selfish enterprise for many reasons. That is not the community spirit. The community should be about helping people with FM, discussing the game and having open discussions with people. Above all, it should be about having fun.

However, we did not feel that it would be helping the community in any way were we to simply shut down the site. We found a way to help the community without any input from Sports Interactive while at the same time allowing the site’s staff team to continue their work.

FM-Britain has directly helped a number of fan sites through our affiliate sales program. As of 26 August 2010, the community has earned £749.49 in sales commission. This goes a long way to helping sites, large and small, cover their hosting costs. The potential amount to be gained from this form of content production is far in excess of proposals we have seen from Sports Interactive’s bursary scheme. Importantly, it directly rewards the community for the work they put into their sites rather than making them dependent on the grace and favour of the parent company. It is also, historically, a much more appropriate income source than selling copies of the latest FM – because most people who visit fan sites have already purchased the game.

FM-Britain has also given away almost £200 worth of prizes through competitions. That is not copies of our own products. That is copies of Sports Interactive’s games’ series such as Football Manager, Football Manager Live and Football Manager Handheld for the iPhone. We purchased all of these products ourselves. Therefore we not only helped the company sell more copies of its games, we also directly gave a proportion of our income straight back into the community. We have also donated money to charitable causes such as UNICEF, Sheffield Children’s Hospital and Clic Sargent.

Much of the money was re-invested back into our site (for things such as hosting, software, marketing, etc.) or went directly to the authors of the guides and the administrators of the site. This worked not only as compensation for our time but was also an incentive to make sure that we took enough pride in our work to make sure we could justify its costs.

ONE guide a year was designated as premium. This means that per-iteration of Football Manager, the site would, at maximum, ask for around £10-£15 per year. This was designed as a thank-you – so that our members, if they enjoyed what we did, could help support the community, the site and its authors. If you never wanted to pay for a guide, then nobody was forcing you to. If you fundamentally disagreed with the concept of premium guides, nobody was expecting you to change your mind.

The premium model forced us to produce regular and quality content. Without it, we would be cheating you, the community, out of your money. Without it, new members would not join the site and become potential customers. Without it, people would not discover us via Google, see us as trustworthy and part with their cash. Our entire operation had to be concerned with promoting Football Manager, promoting the community and producing the highest possible quality of content that we could.

This is why the FMB- Twitter and Facebook feeds have been so committed to making everyone aware of the fantastic amount of effort and quality work that the entire community creates. So many sites produce some quite extraordinary work that FMB simply doesn’t have the expertise to offer. For example, many sites produce better graphics and downloadables than we do. We will show you precisely where they are and how you can get more. We were, are, and had to be, committed to the entire community and the maintenance of the community. And this is why we set up our affiliate sales links so that everyone could benefit in the premium content we were producing.

*Why we are stopping*

One thing should be made abundantly clear. We are not stopping because we did not sell enough guides. As we have already shown, we have paid out over £900 worth to the community through affiliate sales and through competition giveaways. We actually sold more than we expected. We do not wish, for obvious reasons, to give out our full financial statements, but we sold over 1,000 copies of CPW.

Many of these sales were to people who would never visit forums, never comment on posts and never e-mail us. Yet we have, to date, not had a single request for a refund due to the quality of our work. We stand by this. We produce professional quality work, and we have helped many people who are new to the game get to grips with it.

We should also make it absolutely clear that nothing that FM-Britain did was illegal. There were no violations of copyright or of trademarks. We used no screenshots and made very clear that our guides were unofficial. We are adamant that any legal challenge from SI or SEGA would have failed as has happened in similar disputes in the communities of other video games.

There is a more valid moral argument, which was debated rather maturely and fairly by the community – for this we are grateful. Many of the established community argue, as do SI, that everything in the community should be “free”. This, however, is a romantic notion of the community past. It is becoming more and more evident that high-quality writing in the FM community comes in fits and spurts. So far, no site (including our own) has found a way to produce quality content over a long, sustained period of time. The premium model solved this issue and gave the opportunity for people to continue to use our site 100% free of charge if they did not want to buy our guides.

We are stopping because we physically no longer have the manpower to continue this premium model. We are also stopping because it is clear that Sports Interactive will not offer its community the support that it needs to survive in the modern arena. By refusing to sanction a self-financing and mutually beneficial entrepreneurial approach to content production, SI are effectively taking the stance that they would rather have control over a weaker community than allow a stronger, more prosperous community to grow organically.

We were put in an impossible situation. Continue to produce guides and be accused of putting ourselves before the community. Or stop producing guides and be forced to effectively shut down large parts of what we do. We have chosen the latter, despite the fact that we will be sacrificing a good income stream and we believe this will harm the community in the long term.

*The future*

The only way that content in the community can continue to improve in quality and quantity is if we all take a more professional approach. The people who write quality guides, the people who write applications to view and edit data, the people who create graphics and do research for data updates – you all have skills that any business should jump at the chance to utilise.

SI would have you believe that they have given you the privilege of being able to use these skills. This is not the case. They should be privileged that you take so much of your time to make their product better. When you consider how many of SI’s current staff started out in the community, it becomes even more frustrating that they feel like they have a monopoly of expertise on their product. The game has historically always benefited by the resourcefulness and invention of its community. SI, this year, have taken active steps to quash that spirit.

We made an attempt to equalise the terms of this relationship. With absolutely no financial input, SI could have fostered a self-financing community which produced regular, quality content from experts all over the community – all for the purposes of advertising their brand and their product. Both sides could have profited. Most importantly, the content consumers – the community – would benefit most by being able to access an incredible amount of high-quality content. The vast, vast majority of which would have been for free.

Our proposals did not rip off the community – they allowed the community to invest in itself. We feel that at no point did Sports Interactive take us seriously. Our e-mails appear to show that very little, if any of it, was actually read, and even less of that was seriously digested. The initial aversion to any form of charging in the community has blinkered them from seeing the larger picture.

There is nothing inherently wrong with them wanting more control over the community. However, it is not a rational business decision. It is a romantic decision based on the way the community used to be. Many will agree with this stance, and we’re not here to try and change your mind. But look at the past few years of the community and you will see that SI’s “hands-off” approach has actually produced a much more innovative community. The sites which could innovate, have survived. Those who have not been able to properly organise have fallen by the wayside. Now, even the bigger sites are having issues with finance and with finding the time and energy to keep their momentum going. We will watch with interest and see if the SIAS does indeed reinvigorate the community.

FM-Britain will not join the SIAS while SI continues to oppose premium content. We believe it is the best way to ensure the community’s long term survival and to provide even MORE free content available to all. It also ensures the community’s independence from SI, who have clearly shown that they are willing to crush any site which does not adhere to their ideal of respectability. As this decision means that Richard Claydon must stop work on premium content, the site can no longer continue with its business model, and therefore cannot continue to produce regular content.

*A massive thank you to all our readers*

The only reason we were able to succeed this year was due to our readers valuing our work so much so that they were happy to support it. By paying for the small 1% that we offered for sale we were able to justify the work we had put in for the past 12 months. TT10 was downloaded over 60,000 times this year and our past guides have reached a total of nearly 800,000 downloads in over 12 different languages. Every week for the past year we receive e-mails thanking us for committing the time and energy to produce quality content for the benefit of the entire FM playing world. We sincerely and very humbly appreciate it.

Our biggest regret in ceasing production of TT&F ‘11 is letting you, the readers, down. We expected backlash from the general, traditional community, and were it possible for us to continue then SI’s opposition would not have been an issue either. However, we are eternally grateful that our core readership not only gave their blessing but actively supported us so well. Given the stance of SI and given our own personal commitments we are very sorry that we cannot continue in the way that we have managed over the past year.

The site will not be completely dead. We will update from time to time, and we will keep our discussion forums open. Using what is left of the community’s investment in us we will upgrade our forum software and main site. In the future, when our schedules allow, we will be able to return and prove to the community how beneficial our proposals could have been.

With the greatest respect to our readers,

The FM-Britain staff

Which will mean no tactical theorems next year......
 
Oh sorry about that, should have noticed that. :$
 
has anyone actually read TT10 fully?

and if so, was it helpful?
 
has anyone actually read TT10 fully?

and if so, was it helpful?

Read most of it, and yes i found it helpful. Also have CPW too now, despite SI and FMB arguing over it.
 
yeah it was pretty good. CPW however was fairly gash, not worth the money
 
Is there one for 2011? Haven't found one as of yet.
 
An erro occuer while try to download tactical teoremes.An error massage appear on screen it's like"Your submission could not be processed because a security token was invalid."hoe can i fix this problem.will u send me correct link of this.
 
Thank you Shiraz, I need all the help I can get. Might just be Argyles saviour.
 
Top