Soccer Manager Ltd’s Soccer Manager 2017 has recently launched on Steam as a free-to-play game. It features all the stats and managerial aspects one would expect from a management simulator, complete with leagues, coaching, facility and user interface options.
Soccer Manager 2017 features various upgrades over last year’s counterpart, including the latest league and team rotations for the 2016 and 2017 season. The game allows you to control the destiny of players in both domestic and international competitions, as well as elevate their skills and abilities through upgrading the team’s facilities.
YouTuber Oliver Eaton has up an eight minute video featuring some of the pre-season content and a look at the Liverpool career mode, which you can check out below.
While the game is free-to-play, it’s already garnered some mixed reviews on Steam from gamers the world around. Some like it because it’s free and it gives you a lot of options in how you manage your teams, recruit players based on real-life stats and salaries, as well as deal with all the challenges of making it through the league.
Others, however, are not so thrilled with the fact that the game is – in their opinion – a pay-to-win cash grab. Now, pay-to-win is a little overblown here given that Soccer Manager 2017 is free-to-play. There’s no one to out-pay against since it’s just you and the AI competing against one another.
However, there are pay-to-access features, such as signing new players requiring cash shop tokens, or player transfers requiring premium access, or trying to extend your budgets for certain top-tier players requiring real money as well.
Some gamers were okay with this given that Soccer Manager 2017 is free-to-play. But others aren’t so fond of having to fork over cash just to do simple things within the game. The developers are probably thinking that this is a long-term revenue solution, but if gamers consistently stay displeased with the results, there won’t be much revenue there beyond the initial release.
If the game has caught your fancy, you can check out Soccer Manager 2017 over on the Steam store.
