14 DAY TRIAL // One of the biggest trends of 2008, set to continue this year, was to take real-time strategy titles from the PC and bring them on consoles. We saw titles like Civilization: Revolutions that simplified the classic Civ concepts debut on gaming consoles and saw Electronic Arts announce its plans to release at some point the Ultimate Edition of Red Alert 3 for the PlayStation Portable, which had been in limbo for quite some time.
Still, some industry insiders don't think strategy titles will ever gain enough traction to be real hits on other platforms than the PC. One of those people is Roy Meredith, who is now the general manager of Beautiful Game Studios (quite confident that one), an outfit that is handling development duty on Championship Manager at the moment.
He told Videogamer that "I'd love to release a console version that would work but this is not the game" but it seems that "the experience I've had on that, I think EA had that Lord of the Rings strategy game, I don't like Lord of the Rings as a franchise but the game itself on PC was immense. I thought it was brilliant. They released it on Xbox 360 and it stiffed. I don't think people want a game you've got to think about too much on a console. They canned Command & Conquer on PS3, EA I think spent 5 million on it and just said no thanks, which I think is the right decision."
Basically, console gamers are looking for instant action and adrenalin-pumping gameplay excluding too much thinking, which is involved in strategy gaming, whether we're talking about real time strategies or games that focus on football management. This is why Championship Manager is not set to get a console port anytime in the future.