Eidos confirms Championship Manager Online shutdown
Season's end
Publisher Eidos has confirmed that it has ordered the closure of Championship Manager Online, the web-based version of the long-running popular fantasy football franchise.
“We can confirm that CM Online, a joint initiative with Jadestone in Sweden, will be closing from 30 April 2010," the company said in a statement today.
News of the closure was broken to CMO players last week, but until today, Eidos, which owns the property, has not spoken out about its decision.
CMO has been running for almost five years, maintained by its developer, Jadestone.
However, the game never managed to attract a sufficient number of punters to make the site a financial success.
In a post on the CMO forum, Jadestone staff admitted that "we’ve tried hard, for a number of years, to attract the sort of interest and user numbers that was needed to make a real dent in the books. Ultimately... we failed".
They said the total number of players ran to a "couple of thousand" people.
For its part, Eidos said: "We are re-focusing our vision for the Championship Manager franchise and hope to share more news soon." ®
COMMENTS
Championship Manager has been ChampMan in name only.
Eidos retained the name but the team behind it moved on.
Football Manager is the /real/ ChampMan, and all the fans on the original series know it, so it's hardly surprising to see 'Championship Manager' stutter.
When will el-reg get rid of this mandatory title nonsense?
Hardly surprising; the joy of the game is the fact you are managing a team, building them up, with the actual matches themself minimally important, hence the semi-rubbish graphics.
I never did see this one working in the long term on the online sphere.
