Sociable Soccer’s Ultimate Team After a couple of successful seasons at the top of the mobile football table, Tower Studios’ Jon Hare (Norwich fan) and Kiss Publishing’s Darryl Still (QPR) are teaming up to bring Sociable Soccer to the PC and console big league. Richie Shoemaker (Pompey) is in the dugout ahead of the inaugural title challenge.
A Jon Hare, Tower Studios
ll the major football leagues are dominated by teams and owners with the most money. Breaking that dominance is not an easy prospect for those looking to share in some of that success, least of all in the one league that exists to license them all – the mighty FIFA franchise. However, there’s a sense that the bigger the dominance, the bigger the opportunity exists for a team to challenge it. If not for the title, then perhaps for a cup or two along the way. Of course, such a feat still requires some serious investment, which is why Tower Studios and the squad at Combo Breaker have teamed up with Kiss Publishing to bring Sociable Soccer – a spiritual successor to 90’s football hit Sensible Soccer – to PC and consoles next year (Q2, 2022). Masterminding the challenge behind the scenes here are legendary designer Jon Hare and the equally veteran Darryl Still.
46 | MCV/DEVELOP November/December 2021
You always intended to bring Sociable Soccer to a wider audience. Why is it now the right time? Jon Hare: From the outset of the development of this game, we have been aiming totally cross platform at the widest possible audience. Given my heritage of taking Sensible Soccer to all of the platforms available at the time – and the more recent ability to develop easily for all platforms with Unity, Unreal and the like – this has always been our target. During the six years that we have been making the game we have allowed the more attractive commercial opportunities available to us to shape our more immediate priorities as to which parts of the crossplatform development to do next. The game was deliberately constructed from the outset to work with controller and touchscreen and to monetise via premium, subscription and free to play models. So this has enabled us to transition our focus between platforms and varying publisher requirements quite easily.
