Franchise Hockey Manager 2014 is Now Available!
Our Third Sports Management Game Gives Us the Hat Trick!

It's time for the face-off at center ice, because Franchise Hockey Manager 2014 (FHM) is now available worldwide! Take control of one of more than 300 teams across 19 leagues and guide its destiny!

Download links for the full version:

PC Windows	Mac OS X
Click here to download	Click here to download

After you dig into your first few seasons, feel free to post your thoughts on our FHM forum. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook to stay up to date on all the latest FHM news, as well as general happenings from around the sport.

The Only Hockey Management Game You'll Ever Need

We've spent 14 years working on Out of the Park Baseball, so we know a few things about sports management games, and we've applied all those lessons learned to Franchise Hockey Manager 2014. Take control of one of more than 300 teams across 19 leagues and run every aspect of its operation: set lineups and strategies, draft the next crop of superstars, haggle over trades, negotiate with free agents, navigate the choppy waters of injuries, and prepare your players for the grind of the regular season and the playoffs.

Launch a 2013-14 season and guide your club through unlimited seasons of championship chasing or travel as far back as 1947 and take control of your favorite NHL team. See if you can replicate their success or chart a new course through history. You can even replay the entirety of the WHA's 1971-79 existence. And, of course, you can also create a custom league configured the way you want, with fresh fictional players ready to turn into a new crop of superstars.

You can expect a new version of FHM every September, just in time for the latest NHL season.

While you're waiting for FHM 2014 to download, here's the third and final installment in our Road to Release series:

FHM 2014 - The Road to Release, Part 3: Scouting and Background Leagues

If you've been playing OOTP or other sports management games for a long time, you know how integral scouting is to your team's success. Those player ratings you see aren't an objective assessment of his abilities - they're the result of your scouts' efforts, which are affected by their own skills. Fire your scouts and hire some new ones, and you could see very different ratings for many players.

However, hockey scouting is very different from other major sports, where prospects may develop in obscurity before making a big splash at the professional level - nearly all draft-eligible hockey players with a lot of potential tend to be highly visible from a young age, so it's nearly impossible to find that diamond in the rough.

Because of that, scouting in FHM emphasizes your scouts' ability to assess young players' potential, based on their familiarity with the territory to which you've assigned them. Your scouts also tend to be better at assessing pro or amateur players, so you'll need to assign them to territories based on that too. Your goal is to see if your scouts' ratings run counter to the widely disseminated consensus opinions - if so, you may have a shot at grabbing a young budding superstar who other teams tended to undervalue.

Player Generation and Their Development in Background Leagues

To mimic the way hockey players develop in the real world, we've created a system in which 13-year-old players are created in groups of 50 and assigned to teams that operate in the background. Each player is assigned a random potential level based on his nationality, so a country steeped in the sport will generate a player with NHL-level potential every 10-20 years of gameplay, while not-so-notable nations will produce one of those once every 200 years.

Those background teams represent the lower level leagues where young players hone their skills in real life. If they're good enough, they will, for example, move from a bantam team to a midget one and then on to a major junior club, or, if they're not yet good enough, to a Junior A or B team or a college team. Players also randomly move around the same level, to simulate free agency and trading. As those players develop, their ratings improve and they generate statistics, so they have some kind of history on which to base draft decisions when the time comes.

We've balanced the system so that the game removes players from your game world through retirement and career-ending injuries at about the same rate that new 13-year-olds are created, so you should always have a constant flow of new prospects to keep an eye on as you plan for the future.

Ready to Hit the Ice?

Thanks for reading this newsletter. We'll see you at the rink!

The OOTP Developments Team

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