Football Manager shifts to eco-friendly packaging

Sports Interactive has announced it is going eco-friendly for the upcoming Football Manager 2020, switching the game's physical release into cardboard packaging printed with vegetable-based ink.

Founded by Paul and Oliver Collyer in 1994, London-based Sports Interactive is in charge of the Football Manager and NHL Eastside Hockey Manager franchises, and was the former developer of Championship Manager until its split with Eidos Interactive left the name behind. Now owned by Sega West, the company is looking to reduce its environmental impact - and while a move to download-exclusive distribution would seem the obvious way to do that, it isn't quite ready to ditch physical releases just yet.

In a post on the Football Manager blog, Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson confirmed that Football Manager 2020's physical release will ditch the traditional DVD-style case in favour of a cardboard package made, along with the bundled manual, 100 recycled material printed with an eco-friendly vegetable-based ink. While shrink-wrap will be included, to help reduce the number of discs that disappear from shop shelves sans payment, this will be fully recyclable low-density polyethylene (LDPE) - and the company will even provide a list of services capable of recycling the game disc itself once it's served its purpose.

The company claims that the move will save around 55g of plastic per copy, which is estimated to add up to around 20 tonnes of material across all platforms for the game's sales life cycle.

'But we’re not interested in being the only people doing this. So I’m throwing down the gauntlet here to ALL entertainment companies who use plastic for their Blu Ray, DVD and CD packaging,' Jacobson writes. 'Imagine how much plastic we could save, how much landfill we could avoid and how much less plastic would make it into the oceans if we were all do this?

'“Ah, but is it more expensive?” you ask. Well, the simple answer is yes. Each package costs about 20c more, but that extra cost will be partly offset by cheaper distribution costs and partly offset by cheaper destruction costs. And, as footballer Héctor Bellerín points out in the video we’ve just released, “if there's no Earth, there's no money to spend”.'

To help push other companies into adopting the same approach, Sports Interactive has released details of the board and film used as well as the suppliers - allowing others to quickly shift to the same packaging, should they so choose. The company has also claimed that retailers will need to make no changes at their end, with the packaging being roughly the same size as traditional DVD-style cases but around 2mm shorter, while the reduction in weight should reduce distribution costs.

Full details of the new packaging can be found on the Football Manager website, or in the above video.