The physical copies of this year’s Football Manager game are made almost entirely from recyclable materials, from the case to the shrink-wrap to the ink that’s printed on it. You could even eat the cardboard, if that was something you ever felt the need to do.
As GI.biz report, this year’s game—and every version going forwards in the future—”will come in a cardboard sleeve made from 100% recycled cardboard that will be shrink-wrapped in fully recyclable low-density polyethylene.”
The game’s box and paper manual are printed on water and vegetable-based ink, and the manual itself will be “made from 100% recycled paper”. Miles Jacobson, head of developers Sports Interactive, says this even qualifies the packaging as vegan, and that if you wanted to eat the packaging, you could. Aside from the disc, that is, which is the only thing inside the box that isn’t easy to dispose of correctly, though included in each copy will be instructions on how to mail the DVD into a specialised recycling facility.
You might be wondering why all the fuss over a physical copy of a PC game in 2019, but Football Manager is a series whose success lies in mainstream circles where disc drives are still very much present; last year’s game, for example, sold over 300,000 boxed retail copies.
Jacobson mentions in the video that Sega’s European staff helped out a lot on the project, meaning future games released by the publisher can take advantage of the same prices.
In terms of cost, these are more expensive to produce, at around 20c a copy more than standard packaging, but Jacobson estimates this “will be partly offset by cheaper distribution costs and partly offset by cheaper destruction costs.”