The Long and Troublesome Journey of PC Fútbol 8: Scam or Mismanagement?

Many may not be familiar with the PC Fútbol series, although it is considered one of the greatest success stories of Spanish video game development. Originally developed by Dinamic Multimedia in 1992, the licence changed hands in the 2000s until 2007, when it was abruptly discontinued. Since then, we've only had one mobile title in 2018 and a lot of uncertainty about who owned the rights to the brand, until last year when an unknown company called Una Partida Más claimed to be developing PC Futbol 2024, which they later renamed to PC Fútbol 8. And this is where the controversy begins.

The game started with a pre-order campaign promising that the title would be released in December 2023, without showing anything at all. Due to the lack of information, lack of content, and the way the project was presented, many branded the whole thing as a well-organised scam. The organisation then decided to return the money from the pre-orders in order to continue working secretly on the game. After missing the 2023 release deadline, the new date was set for 30 April. Just five days before the new deadline, the launch was pushed back to mid-May, and shortly after that to 7 June 2024. By then, the new reservations again requested a refund, but the "studio" did not do so, at least in principle, arguing a lack of liquidity.

As expected, the game was not released on 7 June 2024, and the project managers organised a press conference via streaming, where they supposedly showed the game in motion for the first time. But the build crashed at several points, and the already low confidence was completely dashed.

And so we come to this week, without having seen the game. Two days ago, the official PC Fútbol 8 account on X claimed that they had detected the bug causing the crashes in the game, and that they were finishing testing to release PC Fútbol 8 next week (finally).

At this point, no one has much hope for this anymore. The question arises: are we looking at another case of video game scamming, like with The Day Before, or is this just terrible management by a group of fledgling developers who have failed to surf the industry waves? Maybe we can find out in a few days.